Creole Languages

When groups of people speaking different languages come together and intermix, a common improvised second language, called a pidgin, occasionally develops. It allows speakers of two or more non-intelligible native languages to communicate with each other. Subsequently, such a language can replace the settlers’ original language and become the first language of their descendants. Such languages are called creoles. The difference between pidgins and creoles is that people grow up speaking creoles as their first language, whereas nobody speaks pidgin as their first language. There is no single accepted theory that explains the genesis of creole languages.

The term creole comes from the French creole, from Spanish criollo ‘person native to a locality’. The word was coined in the 16th century and applied to people born in the colonies, to distinguish them from European-born immigrants. In the Portuguese-speaking world, the term referred specifically to people of mixed European and non-European ancestry.

Since most creole languages developed in the colonies they are typically based on English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, the languages of the superpowers of the time. However, there are also numerous creoles based on other languages such as Arabic, Hindi, and Malay.

Over time, creoles develop expanded vocabularies and more complex grammatical features that were not present in the pidgins from which they evolved. Most creole speakers control a number of levels and can shift up and down. At the highest level, creoles can merge with the standard variety of the language on which they were based. For instance, there is indication that Jamaican Creole has merged with Standard Jamaican English, and that Hawai’ian Creole at its highest level has merged with Hawai’ian English.

Below is an annotated and linked list of the some of the major creole languages of the world.

Eastern
Most English creoles were formed in the British colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. They are spoken on the islands of the Caribbean Sea, in Africa, and on the islands of the Pacific Ocean. The largest ones are listed below.
Jamaican Creole	3,181,171	Jamaica
Bajan	259,000	Barbados
Sea Island Creole (Gullah)	250,000, of which 5,000 to 10,000 are monolingual	Sea Islands and the adjacent coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida.
Bahamas Creole	225,000	Bahamas
Antigua and Barbuda	125,000	Antigua and Barbuda, also spoken in Anguilla, Dominica,Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, United Kingdom
Sranan	120,000 first-language and 300,000 second-language speakers	Suriname
Belize Kriol	95,051	Belize, U.S.
Tobagonian	36,000	Tobago and Trinidad
Saramaccan	26,000	Suriname
African
Krio	473,000 1st language speakers and possibly 4 million 2nd language speakers	Sierra Leone
Nigerian Pidgin	no estimate available	Nigeria
Cameroon Pidgin English	over 2 million 2nd language users, and a growing number of 1st language speakers	Cameroon
Pacific
Hawai’ian Creole	600,000-700,000	U.S.
Tok Pisin	121,000 1st and 4 million 2nd language speakers	Papua New Guinea
Torres Strait Creole	23,400	Torres Strait, Australia
Kriol	10,000	Australia
Bislama	6,200 1st language and 128,000 2nd language speakers	Vanuatu

French creoles are spoken today mainly in the Caribbean, in the U.S., and on several islands in the Indian Ocean.
Caribbean
Haitian Creole	7,389,066	Haiti, U.S.
Guadeloupean Creole	848,000	Guadeloupe, Martinique
Louisiana Creole	60,000-80,000	U.S.
Guianese Creole	50,000	French Guiana
Amapá Creole	25,000	Brazil
Indian Ocean
Morisyen Creole	604,000	Mauritius
Réunion Creole	600,000	Réunion
Seychellois Creole	72,7000	Seychelles

Originally spoken over a wider area, Portuguese-based creoles are presently spoken by over a million people in São Tomé e Principe, Cape Verde Islands, and Guinea-Bissau. Elsewhere in the world, they are almost extinct.
Kabuverdianu	926,078	Cape Verde Islands
Crioulo, Upper Guinea	392,350 1st and over 600,000 2nd language speakers	Guinea-Bissau
Sãotomense	70,000	São Tomé e Principe

Papiamentu	319,000 1st and 20,000 2nd language speakers	Netherland Antilles

Arabic, Sudanese Creole	20,000 1st and 44,000 2nd language users	Sudan
Nubi	14,739	Uganda, Kenya

Naga	30,000	India

Andaman Creole	10,000-31,000	Andaman and Nicobar Islands

Malay-based creoles developed as a result of inter-island trading and interaction when people speaking different languages came together. They were influenced by Dutch(as a result of 3 centuries of colonization), Portuguese, as well as by local languages.
Betawi	2.7 million	Indonesia
Ambonese	245,000	Indonesia
Malay Kupang	200,000	West Timor
Sri Lankan Creole Malay	50,000	Sri Lanka

Tetun-Dili	50,000	East Timor

Sango	404,000 1st language and 1,6 million 2nd language speakers	Central African Republic

Status
Creole people were held in low esteem by European colonizers, and their languages were regarded as unrefined and primitive. Lacking political power, creole languages languished without recognition for many centuries. However, as a result of political and social changes, they have been experiencing a revival since the middle of the 20th century. Many of them have been standardized, and are now being taught in local schools and universities, and studied as foreign languages. They are also being increasingly used in education, government, business, and the media. A number of creoles have achieved the status of official languages:

• Bislama is the official language of Vanuatu.
• Haitian Creole is the official language of Haiti.
• Tok Pisin is one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea.
• Sãotomense is the national language of São Tomé Island.
• Kituba is the national language of Congo.
• Sango is the national language of Central African Republic.
• Seychelles Creole is both a national and an official language alongside English and French in the Republic of Seychelles.

Dialects

Structure

The world’s creoles display many differences in their sound systems, grammar, and vocabulary. At the same time, they share some common features. There is no single accepted theory that explains why creole languages have certain similarities.

Sound system
Creole languages are generally characterized by the following:

• smaller inventories of sounds, especially consonants, than the languages on which they were presumably based.;
• absence of consonant clusters;
• lack of tones.

Grammar
Creole grammars are generally simpler than the grammars of the languages on which they were originally based. Below are some of the features of creole grammars:

• absence of number, gender, and case marking in nouns and adjectives;
• fairly complex systems of personal pronouns;
• invariant verb forms which are commonly either derived from the infinitive or based on the least marked finite verb form;
• absence of copula, e.g., in Hawai’ian Creole, mai sista skini ‘my sister is skinny’, yu da boss ‘you are the boss’;
• loss of determiners or use of demonstrative pronouns, adjectives or adverbs in place of determiners;
• placement of a negative particle before the verb;
• use of adverbs or verbs such as stay, to express tense and modality, e.g., in Hawai’ian Creole, Da cat ste eating da fish ‘The cat is eating the fish’;
• fixed word order with no inversion in questions, e.g., in Hawai’ian Creole, You go holo-holo? ‘Are you going on vacation?’

Vocabulary
Since vocabulary is restricted, words in a creole languages usually have a greater range of meanings than in the language from which the word was borrowed, e.g., in Tok Pisin, stap ‘stop’ means “be located, to remain, to continue’. Some concepts are expressed by phrases rather than by single words, e.g., in Tok Pisin skru bilong arm means ‘ elbow’ (literally ‘screw (joint) of the arm’), or ars ‘bottom’ is extended to mean ‘foundation, basis,’ e.g., ars bilong diwai ‘base of a tree’. Non-English meanings of words often reflect native social structure, as when papa in Tok Pisin means ‘uncle’, since a boy’s maternal uncle rather than his biological father (papa tru) is primarily responsible for his upbringing in Papua New Guinea.

Below are numerals 1-10 in four creoles.

Writing

In the past, orthographies for creole languages were mostly developed by missionaries or Western educational groups who applied the orthographic traditions of their own languages to represent the sounds of the creole languages. These orthographies often embodied the inconsistencies of English, French, Portuguese and Spanish spelling and failed to accurately represent the sound systems of the creole languages. Today, many of the creole languages use revised orthographies that are phonemically based, i.e., writing systems in which there is a one-to-one relationship between written symbols and phonemes in the spoken language.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in five creole languages.

Difficulty