Mauritian Creole

Mauritian Creole, French-based vernacular language spoken in Mauritius, a small island in the southwestern Indian Ocean, about 500 miles (800 km) east of Madagascar. The language developed in the 18th century from contact between French colonizers and the people they enslaved, whose primary languages included Malagasy, Wolof, and a number of East African Bantu languages. The contributions of the masses of East Indian contract labourers brought into Mauritius during the second half of the 19th century appear to be limited to lexicon (vocabulary). The structures of Mauritian Creole appear to have been fully in place by the time of the Indian immigration.

Mauritian Creole shares some features with French-based vernaculars that developed under similar contact conditions in the Caribbean and in French Guiana and Louisiana, but it shows more influence from the East African Bantu languages than do its New World counterparts. For example, although the language itself has no definite article, it has a much higher proportion of words in which a French article has fused inseparably to the nominal stem, as in diri ‘rice’ (from the French du riz ‘some rice’); this structure occurs more frequently in Mauritian Creole than in other French-based creoles. Because of the merger of front-rounded and unrounded vowels in Mauritian Creole and other French creoles, the fusion of the article to the nominal stem makes it possible to distinguish between words that would otherwise be homophones. For instance, the Mauritian Creole word for the noun ‘wheat’ is dible (from the French du blé ‘some wheat,’ pronounced /dü ble/, with an unrounded vowel), and that for the adjective ‘blue’ is ble (from the French bleu, pronounced /blö/, with a rounded vowel). Except in their lexical categories and syntactic functions, the words dible and ble would be indistinguishable if the original French article had not been permanently affixed to the noun in the former case.

Mauritian Creole also differs from Atlantic French creoles in the way it marks the nominal plural with ban (from the French bande ‘band, gang, pack’), as in ban loto ‘cars.’ In contrast, Atlantic French creoles typically mark the nominal plural with yo (from the French eux ‘they, them’), as in marmay yo ‘children.’ It is also noteworthy that the plural marker precedes the noun in Mauritian Creole but follows it in Atlantic French creoles.

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Mauritian Creole is the primary vernacular or lingua franca of most Mauritians and is considered the island’s national language. However, Mauritians’ use of the term Creole to denote ethnicity refers only to those of African or multiethnic descent and not to members of other ethnic groups, such as those of European or Asian descent, for whom Mauritian Creole may nonetheless be the primary language.