The French term créole is used to designate either a person (in the West Indies specifically a white person of French origin) born in the former colonies, or forms of language (in some islands also known as patois) spoken in Martinique, Guadeloupe with its dependencies, Guyane, Haiti, parts of Louisiana, the Commonwealth countries of Dominica, St Lucia, Grenada, and Trinidad, as well as the Indian Ocean islands of Reunion, Mauritius, Rodrigues, and the Seychelles. It is this latter sense which will be treated here, with special reference to the Caribbean.
French (or ‘French-based’) creoles are contact languages born, in the case of the West Indies, as a result of the meeting of French colonizes and slaves brought from West Africa in the 17th and 18th c. [see Colonization]. Today they are the native language of the majority of the population in the French West Indian départements and in Haiti, and to a lesser extent in Dominica and St Lucia, but survive only marginally in Grenada and Trinidad.
Most of their vocabulary derives from French or Gallo-Romance dialects. Differences between the lexis of modern standard French and the Gallo-Romance lexical items in Creole are explained by the date of the initial contact (e.g. balier, ‘balai’; bwèt, ‘boîte’; espérer, ‘attendre’); by the regional origin (mainly north-western or western France) of the first settlers (e.g. palaviré, ‘slap given with the back of the hand’; marrer, with a general sense of ‘to tie’; vèt, ‘vert’, with a sounded final consonant); by semantic developments which took place once the Creole was established (e.g. driver, ‘to loiter’); and, for their form, by the phonetic structure of Creole, which leads, for instance, to the replacement of the front-rounded vowels (e.g. mi, ‘mûr’; pé, ‘peut’; pè, ‘peur’) and the loss of r at the end of a word or before a consonant (e.g. mi, ‘mûr’; macher, ‘marcher’). Typical of all French creoles is the agglutination of an element probably derived from the French article, e.g. lapot, ‘porte’ (‘the door’ would be lapot la); zé, ‘œuf’ and ‘œufs’; diri, ‘riz’. Non-French items have come mainly from the African languages spoken by the slaves (e.g. terms relating to food, customs, religious beliefs, and the description of people such as béké, a white person born in the West Indies); from the Amerindian languages of the original inhabitants, particularly names of plants and animals; and from other European languages, especially Spanish and English, spoken in the Caribbean.
Creole grammar is very different from that of written French, though less so when compared with the spoken language. The origins of this difference are disputed; it has, for example, been attributed to the influence of the native languages of the African slaves who came into contact with French, to a Portuguese trading pidgin, to the fact that the French input was entirely spoken, and to a bioprogramme which lies at the basis of universal features of language learning. Whereas the morphology is simpler than that of French (there is no grammatical gender; nouns, adjectives, and verbs are not inflected), complex syntactic relationships are expressed by a system of markers, such as the particles placed before the verb to mark tense and aspect. The basic grammatical structure is shared by all the French creoles, though there are major differences between the Caribbean creoles and those of the Indian Ocean, and differences of detail between island and mainland creoles, between the speech of the eastern Caribbean and that of Haiti, and even between the dialects of different eastern Caribbean islands or parts of Haiti.
As a mainly spoken language, Creole does not enjoy the prestige of the standard national languages with which it coexists, but it is essential for intimate conversations, jokes, teasing and swearing, and for many speakers replaces the less formal registers of the standard language. It is the only language in which most Haitians can function with confidence. Literacy classes in Creole and experiments with using it as the language of instruction in schools have a history of several decades in Haiti, and in 1983 it was decided that Creole could be used as a medium for teaching in the French overseas départements in the Caribbean. Various orthographies have been proposed, but there is as yet no universally agreed system.
Creole is the vehicle of a rich oral literature of tales (notably animal stories featuring as their hero Compère Lapin in the Caribbean and Compère Lièvre in the Indian Ocean), songs, proverbs, and riddles. Many of these find close parallels in the oral literature of West Africa, and remain alive even in the countries (Grenada, Trinidad) where French Creole is dying out.
Examples of writing in Creole go back as far as the mid-18th c., when the language was at a very early stage of development, e.g. Duvivier de la Mahautière's Lisette quitté la pleine (Haiti, 1757), and the translation of La Fontaine's fables into Creole was a favourite pastime in the 19th c. in both the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. The use of Creole in written literature has developed most consistently in poetry, e.g. Oswald Durand, Choucoune (1884), Sonny Rupaire, ti cou-baton (1973). In the novel, after Parépou's early attempt to write in Creole (Atipa, 1885), the language appeared mainly in the form of isolated terms or phrases (see Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée and Patrick Chamoiseau's Chronique des sept misères for particularly successful examples), but in recent decades there have also been whole prose works in Creole, starting with Frank Étienne Dézafi (1975). A movement to create serious theatre in Creole began in Haiti in the 1950s with the adaptation of classical Greek plays by Félix Morisseau-Leroy and Frank Fouché; original plays entirely in Creole have followed in both Haiti and the French islands. The interplay of Creole and French for dramatic and stylistic effects is exemplified in the plays of Ina Césaire and in films such as Euzhan Palcy's screen version of Zobel's La Rue Cases-Nègres. Even when not overtly used, Creole and its sonority, rhythms, and imagery underlie much of Caribbean literature in French, since it is the native language of nearly all those writing in French in the region.
[<auth>Gertrud Aub-Buscher]
Bibliography
- A. Valdman, Le Créole: structure, statut et origine (1978)
- R. Chaudenson, Les Créoles français (1979)
- J. Bernabé, Fondal-natal: grammaire dialectale approchée des créoles guadeloupéen et martiniquais (1983)
