Comparative creole typology and the sources of MauritianCreole features.1

Anthony P Grant and Philip Baker

1. Introduction This paper has three objectives. Firstly it examines

structural data from Mauritian Creole (henceforth MC), tosee how typical they are of creoles in general, Atlanticcreoles in particular. It also seeks to present evidencefor the sources (including borrowing and internaldevelopment) of 28 typically MC features. It lastlyexamines one distinctive feature of MC and of CreoleFrench in general, by looking at the distribution ofsyllabic and consonantal agglutinated nominals in MCcompared with Seselwa and with similar forms in French-lexifier creoles spoken further afield.

2. How typical is MC of ‘Atlantic’ and ‘Indian Ocean’creoles?

Many features employed for typological purposes and forcross-creole and cross-lexifier comparison in previousstudies (culminating in Holm and Patrick 2007) were drawnup by creolists who specialised in examining creoles fromthe Atlantic and Caribbean areas, both from the Caribbeanitself and from adjoining coastal regions of the Americasand of western and southwestern parts of Africa. So itis open to question (and a fit subject for analysis) howrelevant these features may be when one is examining MC,which is used across the other side of Africa, in theIndian Ocean. Earlier forms of MC were the source ofother Isle de France creoles: Seselwa or Seychellois andthe creoles of Rodrigues, Agalega and the ChagosArchipelago

In this regard it is also important to bear in mindthe history of the waves of settlement of Mauritius from1721 onwards (Baker and Corne 1982). We should rememberthat the settlement of Mauritius in 1721 was done upon a

1 We acknowledge the assistance and support of Diana Guillemin,Myriane Jacobière, Tasleem Shakur, Ian Smith and Sunyog Soogumbur inthe production of this paper.

1

tabula rasa, as Mauritius, though inhabited in the late17th century by Dutch colonists and their Indo-Portuguese-speaking servants, was once more uninhabited at the timeof the arrival of the French, so that there was not thesort of ‘substrate’ linguistic presence which (forinstance) colonists invading inhabited islands in theCaribbean had encountered. The first populations ofslaves came from Madagascar but also from West Africa (ashad most slaves who were sent to the Caribbean) and fromIndia (specifically from Bengali and Tamil-speakingareas). The Tamil-speaking areas in southeastern Indiaalso provided some artisans who were not slaves but whoselinguistic needs would have been the same as those oftheir enslaved compatriots. The dominance in Mauritius ofslave populations with their origins in Madagascar andwhat is now Mozambique, and speaking Malagasy and alsoBantu languages such as Makhuwa respectively, is typicalof the late 18th and early 19th centuries, though Malagasyslaves were in Mauritius from the early 1720s. Theimportation of slaves to the Mascarenes from West Africa(specifically from Gorée in Senegal and from Whydah inwhat is now Benin, so that the slaves may have come fromWolof- and Gbe-speaking regions respectively) continuedinto the 1760s. Slaves speaking various Niger-Congolanguages from the Atlantic side of Africa, Bantu andnon-Bantu languages alike, typify the Haitian slavepopulation, for example. This finding is reinforced bythe dozens of words of Gbe origin and smaller numbers ofwords of Kikongo origin which are available in theHaitian Creole lexicon but not in MC. For slaves fromthose parts of western Africa which provided so much ofthe Haitian slave population, such as the Slave Coast,were less typical of the historical composition of theMauritian population, though they are not unknown.

A look at the sources of the MC lexicon isilluminating. Baker (1992: 2) presented a very usefultable of the etymologies of the 18,000 or so MC Creolewords listed in Baker and Hookoomsing (1987). Amongthese, 94 forms were of various tropical origins (Bantu,Malagasy, Indic and Dravidian) but had come into MC aspart of the French ‘vocabulaire des îles’, a historicallydiverse layer of tropical vocabulary (Hindi, Malay,

2

Taíno, Tupí etc) providing French with terminology fornaming phenomena not previously known from more temperateareas. 96 words which were not also part of the generalFrench vocabulary originated in Malagasy and 60 inEastern Bantu languages (especially Makhuwa), while 17 MCwords derived from Wolof and 16 from Mandekan languagessuch as Bambara or more likely Mandinka. We cannot sayhow many words of Indic (especially Bengali) and Tamilorigin in MC entered the language in the 18th century,because our records of MC are unhelpful on this point(the material in MC from the 18th century comes to lessthan a page of text, and in general terms MC textualmaterial becomes increasingly frequent the closer to thepresent day one comes; little can be added to or revisedin regard to the earliest dates of attestation ofparticular features in the table in Baker 1997: 105-106).But we can still make some observations about terms ofclearly West African origin found in the creole, as oneneeds to give an account of how they got into the MClexicon.

Examination of the positive distribution of the Holmand Patrick features across creoles from the Atlantic andelsewhere, and the way in which MC compares with them, isalso rewarding. Holm (2000) omits the sections relatingto the categories of passivisation and complementationfrom his roster of features, but includes the other 18categories in a series of comparative charts containing atotal of 88 (from the original 97) features for AngolarCreole Portuguese, Papiamentu, Haitian, Negerhollands,Jamaican Creole, Tok Pisin and Nubi (Creole Arabic ofSudan and Uganda). Holm (2006) provides similar data forall 97 features for Zamboangueño, Sotavento Cape Verdean,Palenquero Creole Spanish and Korlai Portuguese ofwestern India, and in Holm (2007) data on these featuresare provided for Guinea-Bissau Creole Portuguese too.(The 20 sets of features are numbered in different waysin Holm’s various publications and presentations.) Holmtypifies features in one of four ways: as being presentin a creole (+), absent (0), present but rare (R) or ofuncertain status in the creole because of the lack ofrelevant data (?).

3

It should be pointed out from the start that not allfeatures which have been marked with + in the columns forthe various creoles are to be regarded as beingespecially typical of creoles (with a 0 score beingregarded as typical of a non-creole language structure),though many of them are. A couple show the oppositetendency. For instance, in the fuller list, there is aquestion (11.1) which asks whether the creole in questionuses a passive construction. Here a + response wouldindicate that the creole which did so was less typicallycreole in this regard, as most creoles lack overt passiveconstructions. The same is true for case-marking onpersonal pronouns. Logic further dictates that thoseitems in the seven categories above which are counted aszero in the tallies in the chapters in Holm and Patrick(2007) should actually be regarded as being assessedpositively, because a negative reading for a feature suchas the presence of a passive construction actuallyindicates that the feature in such a creole is expressedmore basilectally. Thus such ‘pseudo-negative’ featuresare marked with + signs in the column for zeroes in thetable below.

The scores for the various creoles are as follows:Creole Positive

creolefeatures (+)

Negativecreolefeatures(-)

Number of R Number of ?

Haitian 78 19 0 0Jamaican 76 17 4 0Ndyuka 71 21 5 0Krio 71 25 1 0Tok Pisin 71 21 5 0MC 69 28 0 0Papiamentu 69 27 1 0Angolar 69 24 4 0Negerhollands

68 23 5 1

Seselwa 67 29 1 0Cape Verdean 66 31 0 0BerbiceDutch

64 26 6 1

Dominican CrFr

64 30 3 0

Palenquero 58 37 2 0Nubi 53 43 1 0

4

Zamboangueño 51 45 1 0KorlaiPortuguese

45.5 49.5 2 0

Nagamese 44 49 4 0Table 1: categorisation of 97 features associated with creoles inHolm and Patrick (forthcoming).

The figures above show that the Holm and Patrickfeatures are not necessarily very ‘atlantocentric’ to theexclusion of their occurrence in creoles not spoken inthe Atlantic area. We may note that MC has a higherpositive score than a number of Atlantic creoles withvarious lexifiers, including Negerhollands (for whichthe positive score may be diluted as the creole isextinct and some of its structural features are notretrievable from the corpus), Sotavento Cape Verdean, notto mention Angolar (a Gulf of Guinea Creole and thus amember of the first group of creoles to be established,back in the late 15th century) and the Kikongo-influencedmaroon Spanish-lexifier creole Palenquero of Colombia.The creole with a similar number of positive features toMC is Papiamentu, a creole with Spanish and Portuguesecomponents and with a tiny African lexical component,which owes much of its social prominence to its role inprevious centuries as a lingua franca among whiteEuropeans of varying ethnolinguistic origins, who oftenhad no other language than Papiamentu in common. Intypological terms MC would not look very much out ofplace if it had been spoken in the Atlantic.

An analysis of the pluses and minuses in the formson the Holm tables for Haitian and MC shows that 61 outof 97 creole features are positively represented in bothlanguages, while 7 are marked as positive in Haitian andnegative in MC, 16 features are marked as positive in MCand negative in Haitian, and 13 features are marked asnegative in both French-lexifier creoles. 5 of the 97features can be marked as being positive for colloquialFrench. Of these features found in French only 5features are shared with MC, 6 with Haitian and 17 withboth (the bulk of these appear in the section on nounsand modifiers, where at least eight features are sharedacross the three languages). The sole feature which

5

Haitian and MC lack but which French has is grammaticalgender agreement in noun groups in dependent phrases.

Some further information which attests to thetypically creole nature of MC can be found in Table 2below. This derives from Baker (2001), a study whichexamined the degree to which 24 structural featurestypical of pidginisation (all of them documented in thearticles in Holm and Patrick forthcoming) were attestedin the records of sixteen creoles of various lexifiersaround the world. The more the number of features whichwere attested in a creole, the likelier it was that ithad its origins in a pidgin differing structurally fromthe creole’s lexifier language because the pidgin did notuse certain morphological and other features that thelexifier used. The features are listed in Appendix A.

MC was one of the creoles included in the study. Ireproduce Baker’s table of the number of pidgin featuresfound in the pidgins and creoles he consulted (which areindicated here with an asterisk) together with comparabledata for the other languages discussed in Holm andPatrick (forthcoming) and also for Papia Kristang ofMalacca, Malaysia (Baxter 1988). MC scores high (as doesSeselwa) in regard to the number of typically pidginfeatures. Its score of 23 contrasts sharply with 14 foranother ‘Indian Ocean’ creole, Korlai Indo-Portuguese,and 15 each for Sri Lanka Malay of Colombo (Adelaar 1991,Slomanson 2003) and Kirinda (Ansaldo 2005) and Sri LankaPortuguese (Smith 1978, 2004, personal communication2007).

Language Number of pidgin featuresattested

Berbice Dutch 12*Réunionnais 12Sotavento Cape Verdean 13*Pitcairnese 13*Korlai Indo-Portuguese 14Palenquero 14Sri Lanka Malay 15Sri Lanka Portuiguese 15*Zamboangueño 15*Hawai’i Creole English 16Angolar 16

6

*Tayo 17*Louisianais 18Nubi 18Negerhollands 19*Guyanais 20*Papiamentu 20*Sãotomense 20Nagamese 20*Caribbean English Creolesincluding Jamaican

23

*Haitian 23*MC 23*Sranan 23Papia Kristang 23Ndyuka 23Krio 23Seselwa 23*Antillean Creole French 24*Tok Pisin 24Average for creoles surveyed 18.8Table 2: Number of pidgin features (out of 24) which are attested inthe creoles listed above.

We can see from material in Tables 1 and 2 that if thereis a geographical (rather than a typological) case forpositing a subset of ‘Atlantic’ creoles and also aPacific creole subset, there is much less of a strongcase for positing a geographically-defined class of‘Indian Ocean creoles’ from which one could pick a set of‘creole’ features against which to test creoles fromother areas. But Hancock (1975) points out a number ofsyntactic similarities between Papia Kristang, Afrikaansand Bazaar Malay (forms of which served as the nucleusfor Sri Lanka Malay), and it is known that Bazaar Malayand Asian Creole Portuguese influenced one another whileAfrikaans underwent influence in the 17th century from aMalayo-Portuguese pidgin or creole.

If we are to pick some creole languages from thearea, we may observe that Papia Kristang, Sri LankaMalay, Korlai Indo-Portuguese, Sri Lanka Portuguese,Mindanao Chabacano Creole Spanish, Afrikaans varieties,Réunionnais, and Isle de France creoles such as MCprobably do not share a sizeable subset of structuralfeatures which would allow one to distinguish them,

7

despite the diversity of their lexifiers, as a classapart and distinct from creoles spoken in the otheroceans (though descriptive materials on some of thesecreoles are rather scanty). The major lexifiers(excepting Malay) are also found as lexifiers in Atlanticcreoles2, but the substrates in the Indian Ocean are(unsurprisingly) different from those generally found inAtlantic creoles. These Indian Ocean substrates include:

Indic languages (Marathi, Gujarati, Sinhala,Bhojpuri, possibly Bengali),

Dravidian languages or at least Tamil (with probablydifferent forms of Tamil influencing MC and SriLanka Malay separately),

Khoe languages (providing influence in Afrikaans), Tagalog, Western Bisayan languages such as

Hiligaynon, Yakan and Sinama (Samalan languages),all providing influences found in MindanaoChabacano,

Hokkien-influenced varieties and maybe othervarieties of Malay (as a source of adstrateinfluence for Papia Kristang and as lexifier to SriLanka Malay),

and Malagasy lects, Makhuwa and other MozambicanBantu languages (found in MC, together with formsfrom Wolof and Mandekan, languages which are known

2 Papiamentu of the Netherlands Antilles forms its possessive phrasesusing the 3rd person singular possessive adjective su, which is likethe practice (‘John his house’ = ‘John’s house’) found in LusoasianCreoles, Afrikaans and Bazaar Malay (Hancock 1975), but it is notused as much in most Atlantic creoles apart from Guyanais and itsderivative Karipúna (see for instance Tobler 1983). The Papiamentulexicon also contains the item bachi ‘jacket’ from Malay baju‘sleeveless shirt’ (itself a loan form Persian). Some Lusoasianinfluence on Papiamentu mediated through the exchange of slavesacross oceans via a worldwide Sephardic Portuguese trade network maybe supposed. I would like to thank Hans den Besten for drawing thismatter to my attention. The use of 3sg possessive pronouns to formpossessive constructions is probably the best bet for a distinctivelyIndian Ocean creole areal structural feature, but it is not exclusiveto the area. Furthermore, forms of Malay pengayu (> peng-kayu,literally ‘INSTRUMENTAL-wood’) ‘paddle’, an item of the vocabulaire desiles which is found in a number of European languages and which passedinto several Caribbean creoles (for instance Haitian pagay fromFrench pagaie), as well as into Garifuna (Arawakan) fagaiu, are alsonoteworthy.

8

to have had speakers in some locales in the greaterCaribbean area too).

Dutch is the chief lexifier of Afrikaans and a ratherminor lexifier for Papia Kristang and for Sri LankaCreole Portuguese. MC vocabulary contains trace lexicalelements of Indo-Portuguese (zugader ‘gambler’) and a muchgreater number of terms from Bhojpuri (and Hindi) andfrom Indian Tamil but as far as we know it containsnothing taken directly from Hokkien, Marathi, Gujarati,Sinhala, Dutch or Malay, though Malay (and Javanese)exerted an important lexical influence upon Malagasy inpre-European times, and some of the MC words of Malagasyorigin may originally come from the Malagasy loan stratumtaken from Malay or Javanese (Adelaar 1989).

Contacts within Mauritius between speakers of MC andany one of Afrikaans, Dutch, Malay of any sort, or anykind of language whose lexicon derives in the main fromPortuguese must have been very infrequent. Most of thesecreoles (Réunionnais apart) are increasingly influencedby English. There is much interplay among pairs of theselanguages in the Indian Ocean but not as much uniquecommon ground, nor is there as much of a network ofcommon typological features, as Atlantic creoles have.3. MC and its source languages: some structuralobservations. 28 salient features of MC have been selected forcomparison with a selection of other languages which mayhave played a part in the development of MC. The choiceof French, as chief lexifier, as a language to besurveyed is quite natural. It is known that the WestAtlantic language Wolof and Mandekan or Mandinglanguages, members of the Mande branch of Niger-Congo,have both provided some lexicon to MC. Makhuwa andMalagasy were the languages which were certainly amongthe most commonly spoken languages used by slaves onMauritius in the decades before the proclamation of theabolition of slavery in 1807 and for some time afterwardstoo, and Makhuwa (known to have been used in Mauritius)is taken here as an example of the Bantu languages whichmust have played a part in shaping MC.

Other languages are of significance. Tamil-speakershave been present on Mauritius (both as slaves and as

9

artisans and craftsmen) almost since the inception of thecurrent settlement of the island in the 1720s, whileIndic languages, especially Bhojpuri and Hindustani, werethe first languages of the bulk of the population formuch of the 19th and 20th century and indeed MauritianBhojpuri, a variety containing many loans from MC, isstill widely spoken by hundreds of thousands of Indo-Mauritians. One shipload of enslaved children reachedMauritius from Bengal in the 1730s and these children may(but need not) have spoken Bengali/Bangla. Although otherlanguages are known to have been spoken by slavepopulations on Mauritius, such as Gbe languages (seeBaker 1991), they left no lexical legacy in MC.

There are certain considerations to be borne in mindwhen examining these data, especially the fact that thelanguages under examination may have undergonesignificant changes since the 18th century, and theconsideration that non-standard forms of the languages inquestion may have been the immediate sources of some ofthe features. This is especially likely to be the casefor features deriving from eastern varieties such asBhojpuri rather than Khari Boli Hindi (the Western Hindivariety which is the basis of Hindustani and of themodern standard form of Hindi), or those taken fromeastern Malagasy lects rather than from standard MerinaMalagasy.

The materials in the table come from a number ofsources. Typological data for MC, French and Hindustaniare from my own knowledge of these languages. Schmidt(2002a, 2002b) provides further Hindi and Urdu data,while my structural observations on Bengali/Bangla (whichbecause of the close similarity of its results to thoseof its sister-language Hindustani does not have a columnto itself in the tables below) are from Dasgupta (2003)and personal communication from Dr Tasleem Shakur.Sources for (Merina) Malagasy information were Rasoloson(1999, 2000). The structural sketches of Wolof bySauvageot (1981) and of Bambara by Tersis (1981) wereconsulted for those languages, while material was alsoavailable for Wolof from Dem (1995 a, b) and for anotherManding language, namely Gambian Mandinka, from Colley(1995 a, b). Fongbe data, representing the Gbe group,

10

come from Lefebvre and Brousseau (2002). Annamalai andSteever (1998), Asher (1985) and Victor (2004) are mysources for Indian Tamil data. Makhuwa data are fromKisseberth (2003) and Maples (1879).

The 28 chosen features and their statuses in variousrelevant languages, including MC, are given in Table 3.

11

MC French Wolof Mandinka FongbeVowel systemin terms ofdistinctiveperipheraloralqualities

5 8,tendingtoward7

7 7 7

Nasalizedvowels?

3 4 0 7 5

Contrastivevowel-length?

No Highlymarginal

Yesbut /ø/contrastswith/o:/;consonantalgeminationoccurs

Yes No

Maximalsyllabiconset

CCC- iffirst Cis /s/,rare

CCC- C- C- CC- if2nd C isliquid

Maximalsyllabic coda

-VC(veryfew –VCCnouns,e.g. laks‘axis’)

-VCC -VCC ifthe twoconso-nantsareidentical

-V -V

Liquids? Usedas onsets?

Yes, /lr/

Yes, /lr/

Yes. /lr/

/l/; /r/only inloans

Yes,but /l/onlyliquid

Post-alveolarfricatives?

No Yes, 2 No No No

/h/? Only innon-Frenchitems

No No InArabicloansonly

No. /γ/and /x/

/c/ /j/ Almostonly innon-French

Only inloans

Yes,both

Yes,both

No

12

itemsLabiodental /f/ /v/

Yes,both

Yes,both

/f/ /f/ Yes,both

Syllabicagglutinationin Frenchitems

Yes No No No Yes

Consonantalagglutinationin Frenchitems

Yes No SomeexamplesinFrenchloans

A fewexamplesinFrenchloans

No

Consonant-initial nounsmarkedlypredominantin corelexis?

Yes No;nounsmaybeginwithvowels

No;nounsmaybeginwithvowels

No;nounsmaybeginwithvowels

No

Diminutiveprefix?

Yes No No No No

Overt nounpluralisation

Freestandingpreposedbann‘group’

Suffixed

Classprefixesare used

Nomarking

Yes

Determinersystem

Definiteness,specificityexpressed by –la

+/-definite, formforsingular nouns

Postnominalclassifiers

Low tonemarksdefinitestatus

Postnominaldeterminer used

Exclusive/inclusive 1pl

No No No No No

2pl=3plpronoun?

Yes No Yes, butonly inobjectposition

No No, 2pl= 1pl

‘My body’ –‘myself’?

Yes No No No No

Featureswhich aremarked in theTMA system

Progressive;anterior;completive;indefini

Completedversuscontinuouspast,present

2 pastsand anon-past,expressed withpreverba

Preverbalparticles forprogressive,continuo

Preverbalparticles foranterior,definite

13

te anddefinitefuture,allexpressed bypreverbalparticles

,future,conditional,expressed bysuffixes

lparticles

us,future,past,habitual,imperfect,perfect,hortative

andindefinitefuture,subjunctive,habitual,imperfective

Number ofcopulas

seexpletive copulain verymodernMC,high-lightereteincreasinglyused

One Zerocopula

One,mainlylocativeandexistential

None

Short versuslong verbssyntacticallydetermined?

Yes No No No No

Reduplicationis a processused here forexpressing ….

Attenuation;expansion;iteration,distributivenumerals

(Littleusedoutsidechildren’sspeechregisters)

Iteration

Deverbativenouns

Deverbaladjectives,deverbativenouns,participials,gerunds

‘With’ –‘and’ inNPs?

Yes,gettingrarer

No Yes No Yes

‘And’ marksIndirectObject inditransitives?

Yes No No No No

Negation ispreverbalparticle?

Yes Vestigial;post-

Postverbalsuffix

Postverbalsuffix

Yes

14

verbalinspokenFrench

Confusionbetween ‘timebefore now’and ‘timeafter now’

Yes No No No No

‘there is’ =‘it has’

Yes = ‘ithasthere’

Yes Yes No

15

MC Hindustani

Tamil Makhuwa Malagasy

Vowel systemasdistinctiveperipheraloralqualities

5 10involving 5qualities(including /a:/versusschwa)

5qualities/i e a ou/

5 4 /u i.ea/;/o/ issecondary andlargelyfoundinloans

Nasalizedvowels?

3 5 longnasal; 5veryrareshortnasal

Yes, butlowfunctional yield

No No

Contrastivevowel-length?

No Yes Yes, pluscontrastiveconsonantalgemination

Yes No

Maximalsyllabiconset

CCC- iffirst Cis /s/,rare

CC- onlyinSanskritandEnglishloans

C- C- CC- inloansfromFrench

Maximalsyllabic coda

-VC(veryfew –VCCnouns,e.g. laks‘axis’)

-VC(exceptfor –VCCinloans)

-VC -V -V

Liquids? Usedas onsets?

Yes, /lr/

Yes, /lr/

Yes, /l Lr R/; /lr/ asonsets inIndic andlaterloans

/l r/but theyare notused asonsets

Yes

Post-alveolar No In No; no No

16

fricatives? Persian,Arabic,Sanskritandotherloans

indeed/c/includesallophonic [s]

/h/? Only innon-Frenchitems

Yes No Yes Yes

/c/ /j/ Only innon-Frenchitems

Yes,both

/c/ Yes, but/c/versus /nj/

No; /tsdz/

Labiodental /f/ /v/?

Yes,both

/f/ onlyinloans; /v/ isbilabial

/f/ onlyin recentloans;/v/ isbilabial

Yes,both

Yes.Both

Syllabicagglutinationin Frenchloans

Yes Irrelevant

Irrelevant

Irrelevant

c. 20Frenchloans

Consonantalagglutinationin Frenchloans

Yes Irrelevant

Irrelevant

Irrelevant

No

Consonant-initial nounsmarkedlypredominantin corelexis?

Yes No;nounsmaybeginwithvowels

No; nounsmay beginwithvowels

No; butnoun-classprefixalsystemused

No

Diminutiveprefix?

Yes No No Diminutive nounclass

No

Overt nounpluralisation

Freestandingpreposedbann‘band,group’.

Suffixes Suffixes Classpre-fixesused.

No

Determinersystem

Definiteness;specificity

None ‘one’marksindefiniteness;

No overtdeterminers

Definitearticle

17

expressed by –la

definitenessunmarked

Exclusive/inclusive 1pl

No No Yes No Yes

2pl=3plpronoun?

Yes No No No No

‘my body’ =‘myself’?

Yes No No No Yes

Featureswhich aremarked in theTMA system

Progressive;anterior;completive;indefinite anddefinitefuture,usingpreverbalparticles

Numeroustensesandperfectiveaspectexpressed withsuffixesandauxiliaries

Tense-based andexpressedbysuffixes

Complexofprefixalformsfornumeroustensesandaspect,onlymoodexpressedsuffixally

Suffixedpresent, past,futuretenses;aspectseparatelymarkedbyparticles inverbgroup.

Number ofcopulas

seexpletive inverymodernMC,high-lightereteincrea-singlyused;elsewhere Ø

One,compulsory

One,mostlyused inlocativeandexistentialcontexts

One,which isequative,existential andlocative

One,compulsory

Short versuslong verbsaresyntacticallydefined

Yes No No No No

Reduplicationis a processused here for

Attenuation;expansio

Echoicreduplication

Mostlyechoicreduplica

(insufficientdata on

Attenuation inthe

18

expressing …. n;iteration,distributivenumerals

used.Withnumeralsit isdistributive

tion,trueredup-licationfor lowerdistri-butivenumerals

this butreduplicationappearsto belittleused)

case ofadjectives

‘With’ =’and’in NPs?

Yes,gettingrarer

No No Yes ‘and’:sy,‘with’ : misy

“And” marksIndirectObject inditransitives

Yes No No Yes No

Negation ispreverbalparticle?

Yes Postverbal

Part ofaux-iliary inverb form

Prefixalandboundpre-verbalform

Yes

Confusion of‘time beforenow’ and‘time afternow’

Yes Samewordis usedfor‘yesterday’ andalso‘tomorrow’.

No No No

‘there is’ =‘it has’

Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Table 3: 28 features of MC with their presence or absencecompared across eight languages which are likely to haveexerted early influence on MC.

19

3.1 Discussion of the features selected. The features which we have selected for examination rangeover various phonological, morphological and syntacticproperties.

The first ten features are phonological. Threerelate to the vowel system: how many vowel qualities arethere, are nasalized vowels separate phonemes from oralvowels in the languages under discussion, and iscontrastive vowel length phonemically distinctive? Inregard to French, the chief lexifier of MC, change hastaken place in all three respects, since the number ofphonemic vowel qualities and the number of nasal vowelshave both decreased since the 18th century, whilecontrastive vowel length carries a minuscule amount offunctional load now: mettre ‘to put’ [mεtR] and maître‘master’ [mε:tR] are one of the few short/long pairs inconservative modern French.

The next three features relate to the shape ofsyllables and especially to the number of consonants withwhich a syllable can begin and the number with which itcan end. In the case of codas, that number in somelanguages may be zero. Some languages permit one or moreof their liquid sounds (laterals and rhotics) to begin aword, others do not, while in further languages thosewords which begin with /l/ or /r/ may only be found inloan strata, and some languages may lack one of theseliquids, while Tamil has both retroflex and dentalversions of /l/ and /r/ as full phonemes, though only thedental phonemes can be used word-initially, and even thennot in indigenous Dravidian items. Consonantal geminationis found phonemically in Wolof and Tamil.

The following four features are concerned withindividual sounds and their presence as phonemes orallophones in the languages being surveyed. Both /š/and /ž/ are found in French but neither is used in MC,nor are they found in many of the languages which shapedMC. /h/ was a phone in earlier forms of modern Frenchand is still retained in some varieties (for example somespoken in Canada), and also occurs in certain forms ofCreole French used in the Caribbean. By the 18th

century /h/ was on the way out in most forms of spokenFrench (though it is preserved in Haitian) and it is not

20

found in forms of French origin in MC except as asubstitute for /s/ in ha ~ sa ‘that’ in the colloquialspeech of Port Louis (Philip Baker, personalcommunication). Many languages which have contributed tothe shaping of MC have one or both of /f v/ but maypronounce them as bilabials rather than aslabiodentals. /c j/ are used here in the sense in whichthese symbols are used in lortograf-linite, that is as post-alveolar affricate phonemes. With the exception of a fewcases of long-standing merger of a dental consonant plusa following palatal glide, /c j/ are used in MC only inloans from Indic, English and other languages. (This isalso true of /h/, with the proviso mentioned above.) Theentry in the table seeks to explore the distribution ofthese sounds.

The remaining features are morphosyntactic innature. Eight of them relate to nominal structures. Threeof these eight relate to the historical agglutination ofthe French definite article (or occasionally theindefinite one) onto noun-stems (which are overwhelminglythose of French origin), which are then metanalysed asconsisting of a single morpheme whose first segmentshappen to be derived from a French article. For instancelatab is the word for a table in MC, and there is no wordfor ‘table’ in MC which simply has the form tab unless oneis referring to multiplication tables. Because theagglutinated form has an extra syllable we call thissyllabic agglutination. Similarly MC ‘ear’ is zorey froman abraded form of French les oreilles but one can say ennzorey ‘an ear’, even though the form from which the MCform derives is a French plural. French partitivearticles can be used to create agglutinated forms frommass or non-count nouns: dife ‘fire’ comes from du feu.Furthermore ‘a plate’ is enn lasyet, where the latter wordderives from French l’assiette. A majority of MC nouns (andindeed nouns in other French-lexifier creoles) which werevowel-initial in French are agglutinated with l-, to alesser extent z-, or occasionally n- and become consonant-initial through this application of consonantalagglutination, though this tends to happen less often inregard to recent loans into Creole from French, but theagglutination of nouns which in French were already

21

consonant-initial and which acquired a new initialsyllable from the French definite article, thoughcommonplace in creoles, is not an automatic process: notall nouns of French origin show syllabic agglutination.

The diminutive MC noun-prefix ti- derives from Frenchpetit but is a separate morpheme, in the same way as manyBantu languages have special diminutive noun classmarkers which can be added to normal stems in order tocreate a sense of diminution. Ti- is a bound morphemewhich cannot occur alone (‘small’ in MC is piti, ‘tiny’ istipti3). The optional noun pluralizing morpheme bann (fromFrench bande ‘group’: bann latab ‘tables’) is alsonoteworthy, and is first recorded in this sense in the1880s. The MC determiner system is unusual as itdistinguishes between definiteness and specificity(Guillemin to appear; note that Syea 2007 takes adifferent view of this matter).

Three features relate to pronouns. Firstly we notethe fact that MC can if needs be distinguish betweeninclusive (‘you and I’: MC nutu) and exclusive (‘s/he andI but not you’: MC nuzot) 1pl pronouns, this beingsomething which is also true of some of the languageswhich have exerted influence on MC, such as Malagasy.Secondly we discuss the consideration that the form zotdoes service as both the 2pl and 3pl personal pronouns.(The feature of personal pronoun merger is also found inHaitian Creole, but there it is 1pl and 2pl which aremerged as nu). The use of an expression meaning ‘(my)body’ as the usual or only means of expressing ‘(my)self’is widespread in creole languages, including MC, and in anumber of other languages throughout the world too.

Three features relate to the MC verbal system,namely the kinds of Tense-Mode-Aspect marking which arefound (and the distinctions which are encoded) in thisand other languages, the number of overt copulas4 (and

3 Baker (1992) sees ti- as having evolved in MC into a parallel to thewell-established Bantu diminutive noun-class prefixes.4 One may stress the term overt here; in most instances (for instancein equational sentences or in constructions which involve theexpression of location) MC uses zero where English or French wouldrequire the use of a copula. The increasing marking of certaincopulative functions in MC texts (especially more artificial texts,such as journalistic translations from French) is something which has

22

their overall meanings) which are available in MC andother languages, and the use of one of two differentforms of the verb in different contexts for dozens of MCverbs of French origin. Long forms of the verb are usedin most contexts but short forms are used in certainsyntactically-defined circumstances, for instance in averb group before a direct object (Syea 1992).

The remaining features are less easy to categorise.Reduplication, especially of adjectives and verbs, iswidely used in MC (Baker 2003) and it serves a number ofpurposes: it can be attenuative (ruzruz ‘reddish’),distributive (kat-kat ‘in fours’), and intensive (marsemarse‘to walk and walk back and forth’, as distinct frommarsmarse ‘to stroll’). The use of the proposition armeaning ‘with’ to link two or more noun groups whereFrench would use et ‘and’ is (decreasingly) found in MC,as is the construction using ar to indicate the indirectobject of a ditransitive verb (see Kriegel and Michaelis,this volume). Verbal negation using pa is preverbal in MCbut not so in colloquial French, where pas follows thefirst part of the verb group, nor is preverbal negationused in some of the other languages which have influencedMC. The senses of MC depi ‘since’ and ziska ‘until’, bothof which can have spatial as well as temporal senses, areoften confused in speech, and this feature may have itsroots in Hindi or another Indic language in which theperiods of time before and after an event are sometimeslabelled with the same word, so that in Hindi and Urdu kalmay refer to ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’. Finally, MC, likemany other languages, uses the word literally meaning‘(it) has’, in MC ena, to express the idea of ‘there is’(cf. Véronique and Fon Sing, this volume).

3.2 The 28 features in MC and their possible origins. The structural features which MC possesses can beattributed to several sources, including some cases ofinternal development. The MC segmental phonologicalsystem is something of a compromise package in which theunmarked sounds which were frequent in a majority of thelanguages which had been involved in the early days of MC

increased in prominence in the course of the 20th century.

23

and which are likely to have been readily pronounceableby people who were engaged in learning French words andcreating a language based on them are found in thecreole. An exception to the principle that MC wordscontaining /h c j/ in MC are not of French origin is theterm cõbo ‘hold it!’ which derives from French tiens bon!

Two features, the use of ban for pluralisation andthe employment of long and short forms of verbs indifferent contexts, are probably developments within MCwhich cannot be attributed to other languages which haveinfluenced MC (although some other Creole Frenchlanguages also have long and short forms of verbs: seethe account in Neumann 1985 for Breaux BridgeLouisianais, and also Lane 1935). However, these formsare tied in with argument structure in the languages inquestion; they usually contrast simple versus derivedforms which indicate some change in diathesis, somethingwhich the long-short verb distinction in MC does not do.Yet the way in which MC has metanalysed the long andshort forms of many French verbs and has furnished thedistinction between them with a new structural rationaleis something unique to Isle de France creoles and it hasno parallel in French or in many forms of CaribbeanCreole French.

The other feature is a little different, because itseems to be MC-internal rather than being acquired fromanother language, but it is not exclusive to MC thoughsince it typifies all forms of Creole French. This is theuse of article agglutination leading to an overwhelmingmajority of consonant-initial nouns.5 There is ratherlittle evidence on the whole in any of the languageswhich may have influenced MC that vowel-initial nounstems are dispreferred against consonant-initial ones,and although most noun-class prefixes in Makhuwa beginwith consonants this is not wholly the case, so thatthere are vowel-initial nouns in Makhuwa, though nominalstems themselves are consonant-initial.

5 But nouns in French are usually preceded by some kind of specifieror determiner in any case, which affects the shape of the noun inquestion if naïve resyllabification is imposed onto the phonologicalform of a French noun phrase.

24

The history of the development of the MC TMA systemis fairly well understood (Baker 1997 providesinformation on the first occurrences of particles ancombinations of TMA particles); it is potentially almostas rich as the systems found in Bantu languages (thoughthe use of more than two TMA markers in one verb group israre), but it uses fewer components in order to createits effects and it makes ready use of the combination oftwo TMA elements in one verb group, though this is doneaccording to strict element order. But the systems inTamil and Malagasy, and in Wolof, use only one TMA markerper verb group (using prefixes in Malagasy, suffixes inTamil and free-standing particles in Wolof) and express asmall range of tenses, principally making a past versusnon-past distinction or a past versus present versusfuture distinction. Incidentally, contact-induced changein the formation of TMA markers has occurred elsewhereamong the languages sampled here: Malagasy future tenseforms in hu- would appear to derive from Swahiliinfinitives in ku-, this being the relic of a futuretense construction deriving from a Swahili volitiveconstruction involving the Swahili verb –taka ‘to want’and a following infinitive (Adelaar 2007).

Only six of the 28 features listed below can be saidto be shared by MC and modern colloquial French. Theseare as follows: the possession of the same maximalsyllabic onsets and codas, the possession of /f, v/, theabsence of /h/ in non-loans, the presence of liquidonsets, and (with some latitude) the use of aconstruction involving ‘it has’ to express ‘there is’.6

The same number of shared features is true of MC andWolof, with 5 shared features for MC and both Bambara andMandinka, while MC and Makhuwa also share 6 features. MCand Tamil share 5 features, MC and Hindustani share 4features (including the distinctive ones involving time-confusion and the distributive sense of reduplicated6 On the other hand, the phonological shapes of French forms arepreserved more faithfully in varieties of Creole French than thephonological shapes of English forms are in a number of creoles suchas those of Surinam, especially in Saramaccan. Forms with epentheticvowels breaking up complex consonantal onsets, such as MC kulu ‘nail’from French clou /klu/, are very much the exception rather than therule in MC and in Creole French in general.

25

numerals, features which are presumably of Indic originin MC), while MC and Bengali, a language which may havebeen the language of one shipment of slave childrenduring the first decade of settlement of Mauritius, canhardly be said to share any of the features below, apartfrom the presence in both languages of liquid consonantsand liquid onsets and the use of reduplication ofcardinal numerals in order to express distributivenumerals. The use of ‘and’/’with’ plus an object in orderto express the indirect object with ditransitives isfound both in Bantu languages and Bhojpuri (Kriegel andMichaelis, this volume) but it is not found in some otherHindustani varieties. For instance this feature is absentfrom Urdu.

12 features out of 28 are shared between MC andMalagasy, but several of these shared features (as in thesets above) are negative in nature and are thus weakerevidence for joint developments within MC; for instanceneither MC nor Malagasy has post-alveolar affricates,which makes it a negative if shared feature. Fongbe andMC share 9 features, three of which are negative innature (that is, both Fongbe and MC lack these features)and six of which are positive.7

What strikes one overall on looking at this table isthe number of shared features which are common to MC andone or more languages, but which are also widespread in alarge number of the world’s languages and which do notmark out much of a distinctive profile for MC typology.

One language which is not listed in the tables belowbut which makes for a useful control language for thisstudy is Haitian Creole, here being taken as beingstructurally representative and typical of CaribbeanCreole French varieties. We know that, French aside,the major languages which were in a position to influenceHaitian were the West African language Fongbe and theBantu language Kikongo, because of the large numbers ofL1 speakers of these languages in Haiti in the late 17th

and 18th centuries, and further evidence of this is

7 It is interesting that Fongbe is the language is the language inthe sample in which the use of partial or full reduplication is mostcentral to both the language’s inflectional and derivationalmorphology, rather than it being primarily iconic in function.

26

provided by the legacy of loans from these languages inthe Haitian lexicon. Just like MC, Haitian wasinfluenced and shaped by certain West African languages,but influence was provided by different ones from thoselanguages which contributed to MC, and of course Haitianwas uninfluenced by Makhuwa, Malagasy and by anylanguages of India. It is therefore unsurprising thenthat Haitian and MC agree in some of the features belowbut differ in several others.

More specifically, in terms of the differences,Haitian has /h š ž c j/ as fully-fledged phonemes inwords of French origin, with /h/ occurring as the outcomeof h aspiré, as would have been found in early 18th centuryFrench, and it uses seven oral vowels (making adistinction between open and closed mid-vowels) ratherthan making do with the five which MC has. (The use ofseven vowels is in large part necessitated by the factthat Haitian, unlike MC, has changed postvocalic andpreconsonantal /r/ to zero.) In Haitian the 3pl pronoun,which is distinct from the 2pl pronoun, is used to formnoun plurals, and there is no inclusive-exclusivedistinction expressed in the form of the 1pl pronoun.The system of TMA marking differs between Haitian and MC,since Haitian uses only one future marker rather than thetwo forms with definite and indefinite sensesrespectively (pu and va) which MC has. Haitian also lacksthe confusion between forms originally meaning ‘until’and ‘since’ which is found in MC. But the similaritiesbetween Haitian and MC outweigh the differences, asHaitian and MC have 17 of the 28 features below incommon, notably including all the features which MC alsoshares with French, and a similar score would have beenobtained here had we used St Lucian rather than Haitianas the point of comparison with MC. Particularlyinteresting are the features shared by Haitian and MCwhich do not have counterparts in French, such as the useof preverbal pa as a negator rather than a postverbalparticle as pas generally is in French (where it occursafter the first verb in a simple or complex verb group).

But the fact that MC and another language share afeature or a set of features is not in itself sufficientevidence to show that the feature(s) in question came

27

into MC from that particular language. The fact that afeature may occur in a number of participatory languagescould well reinforce the presence of that feature in acreole. For instance /f/ occurs as a phoneme in French,Malagasy, Makhuwa, Fongbe, Wolof and Maniekan languagessuch as Mandinka and Bambara, and although it is found inHindi and Bengali and even more so in Tamil but only inloans into these languages (and especially in moresocially prestigious registers than those that would havebeen available to the majority of speakers of theselanguages who ended up in Mauritius) it is still widelyenough represented to be a likely carry-over into MC, andthis is indeed the case. But we cannot just say baldlythat MC acquired the sound /f/ from Bambara or Malagasyor whatever (and really, few people would wish to). If,however, a crosslinguistically rare feature is attestedin MC and in one or two other languages but is not foundin French, then the case for it being an adoption fromthese languages is somewhat stronger.

Thus Baker (2003) demonstrates that the attenuativeuse of reduplication in MC, such as the post-nominaladjective zolizoli ‘fairly pretty’ (whereas pre-nominalzolizoli is intensifying ‘really pretty’), is a carry-overfrom Malagasy, while the use of reduplication to indicatedistributive numerals such as trwatrwa ‘three apiece’ asagainst trwa ‘three’ originated in Indic languages (seeCorne 1983), and we may compare the Hindi equivalent tiin-tiin (but the practice also occurs in Tamil as a means offorming lower distributive numerals from cardinalnumerals) and it was carried over into MC by speakers ofthese Indic languages, probably in the latter half of the19th century.

4. The distribution of syllabic and closed-classagglutinated nominals.The focus of this section is more specific, and drawsattention to one feature of the MC lexicon whichcharacterises it against its chief lexifier French.Agglutinated nominals have been introduced and mentionedabove in section 3. The more historically distinctivetype known as syllabic agglutinated nominals is

28

especially frequent in Isle de France creoles such as MC,which also has numerous examples of consonantalagglutinated nominals, especially those deriving formsingular nouns whose pronunciation in French begins witha vowel, and which are therefore agglutinated with l-. Animportant paper on this topic, Baker (1984), discussesthe presence of these in all forms of Creole French andthe especial prevalence of these in Isle de Francecreoles. He shows that agglutinated nominals in generalare especially prominent and numerous (and that they arealso no less basic within the vocabulary) in thosecreoles which are spoken by populations many of whoseancestors used Bantu languages, in each of which a smallnumber of noun-initial (C)V- prefixes are of very highoccurrence.8

In Grant (1995a) the first author listed all theexamples of syllabic agglutinated nominals and ofagglutinated nominals beginning with n- and z- which werefound in the lexicographical literature at that time(agglutinated nominals beginning with l- plus a vowel weresimply too numerous to keep track of, but those beginningwith n- and z- do not seem to be adding to their numberand may be described as a closed class of words), andindicated the Creole French varieties in which they wereattested. In all in this sample, which was intended atthe time to be as complete as possible, there were 925nouns in at least one Creole French variety which wereagglutinated with la-, 143 with le-, 18 with les followed bya vowel, 78 with one of the partitive articles du/del’/des, 200 which began with z- as a relic of a pluralarticle and 30 with article-initial n-. Of these 277 la-forms, 57 le- forms, 24 n- forms, 80 z- forms, 35 d- formsand 6 lez- forms were found in one or another Caribbeancreole (a non-genetic term used which includes thosecreoles spoken in French Guyana and Louisiana, inaddition to Haitian and the Antillean varieties) but werenot attested in any Isle de France creole. Meanwhile some195 further syllabic agglutinated forms were attested in

8 This predilection for article agglutination is the case also withPrincipense Creole Portuguese, where the language which exerted themost influence was not Bantu in nature but Bini/Edo (see Ivens Ferraz1979).

29

earlier sources for MC but were not attested in sourceson the modern form of the language.

Since then a number of dictionaries of variouscreoles have appeared and the number of attestedagglutinated nominals for each creole so documented hasincreased, though not significantly; we have amalgamatedinformation on the sources for certain creoles andpresent the results below. Agglutinated nominals whichare agglutinated solely with l- have been excluded astheir numbers are so considerable, and since it is notcertain that this process is not still productive in somecreoles. Also excluded from the table are the couple ofscore agglutinated nominal forms which were noted for theCreole French variety Tayo of St-Louis, New Caledonia)because we have too few data for this language to feelthat the results are representative of this aspect ofTayo.

Haitian St Lucian Guyanais MC SeselwaSyllabicagglutinated nominalsLa- 154) 168 101 529 (195

archaic)565

Le-/lez-etc

154) 9 2 72 52

di- 6 6 10 36 35TOTAL 160 183 113 637 652Consonantalagglutinated nominals n- 1 2 2 4 2z- 56 63 56 124 (45

archaic)85

Agglutinatednominalsasproportion ofnominalsinSwadesh

27/70 33/70 31/70 58/70 58/70

30

207-wordlist Vowel-initialwords as% ofentriesindictionary

14.5 11 9 9.5 13

Table 4: Agglutinated nominals: statistics for five creoles.

The table above includes some statistics on agglutinatednominals from Haitian (for which the data from Grant1995b have been amplified by those in Targète and Urciolo1993, which was unavailable to the first author in 1995),and also from St Lucian (Mondesir 1992, Crosbie et al2001), Guyanais (Barthelemi 1995, also formerlyunavailable to the authors), MC (Baker and Hookoomsing1987) and Seselwa (St-Jorre and Lionnet, ed. Bollée1999). It is worth mentioning that the vast majority ofrepresentatives of all these types of agglutinatednominals, in all varieties of Creole French, are nouns(or occasionally pronouns) of French origin; items ofnon-French origin here are few. For each language I havealso included the percentage of words in a standarddictionary which are vowel-initial.

Several observations are available from scrutiny ofthis table. The first is obvious but needs to bereiterated. It is that the density of lexical coveragefrom one creole to another varies wildly, so that inregard to the presence or otherwise of a particularagglutinated form in a thinly-documented creole, absenceof evidence is not evidence of absence. Fuller sourcestend to document greater numbers of agglutinatednominals, including ones which have been recorded inother creoles. Secondly the Isle de France creolescontain a far greater number of agglutinated nominals ofmost kinds than creoles spoken elsewhere do. MC containsfewer agglutinated nominals than Seselwa does but thetotal of MC forms which are syllabically agglutinatedwith la- is still over 500. We should also remember thatthere is little documentary linguistic evidence for

31

Seselwa until after the Second World War, though thematerial composed by Rodolphine Young (Young, edited byBollée and Lionnet 1983), dates from the first decades ofthe 20th century.

Finally, the proportion of agglutinated nominalswhich are not attested in any Isle de France creole(these being the creoles for which we have probably thefullest dictionaries of any forms of Creole French interms of the number of words listed) constitutes a verysizeable share of such nominals in most Caribbean creoleFrench varieties. This is true of them both individuallyand as a (regionally and non-cladistically defined)group. Some 195 syllabic agglutinated nominals in MC areeither attested in earlier sources but are now obsoleteor else are nonce-forms created on the basis of existingFrench forms by Rev. Samuel Anderson in his MCtranslation of the Gospel of St Matthew from French(Anderson 1885) as a means of adapting the French labelsfor unfamiliar referents into MC, and these nonce-formsare attested nowhere else in the MC literature. Similarly45 consonantal agglutinated nominal forms beginning withz- are recorded for earlier MC sources but are not used inmodern-day MC. (It should be noted that a number ofagglutinated nominals which begin with diz- or dez-, orwith liz- or lez- in MC and Isle de France creolesgenerally, begin with z- in other creole Frenchvarieties, where the prefixes which typify those nouns inMC are rare or not found.)

What makes this set of statistics all the moreinteresting is that there are very few nominals in CreoleFrench varieties occurring on the Swadesh lists (cf. thelists in Grant 1995b) which are recorded as beingagglutinated in a Caribbean Creole variety but not in oneof the Isle de France creoles. The divergence between thevarious French-lexifier creoles in respect to the actualnouns which are agglutinated in some creoles but not allbecomes more clearcut when less commonly used nouns areexamined. Given that the number of place-names which arerecorded as agglutinated nominals for Caribbean creolesand which are not found in Isle de France creoles (agenre of names from individual islands which would beexclusive to particular Caribbean creoles) is negligible,

32

we can at the moment only assume that the relatively highproportion of syllabic agglutinated nominals which aredocumented in one or more Caribbean creoles but which arenot recorded for Isle de France creoles might decreasesomewhat if we were to have available to us someinformation on the Isle de France creole equivalents ofevery such Caribbean creole noun which occurs indictionaries of Haitian, St Lucian etc.9

Given the situation of lexical documentation as itcurrently is, we can also see that the proportionespecially of syllabic agglutinated nominals in Caribbeancreoles which are unknown in (or which are ratherunrecorded for) Isle de France creoles is veryconsiderable, even of we allow for the fact that some ofthem are attested only in our records of one such creole.Nonetheless, although three of the 70 nouns on theHaitian Creole version of the Swadesh 207-item list arevowel-initial, none of them begin with a vowel on the MCversion, on the St Lucian translation of the list or on aversion for Martiniquais available on Wikipedia, a sourcewhich has been checked against notes on Martiniquaiswhich AG gathered in 1992-1993 from Mlle MyrianeJacobière. This finding compares with the presence of 6vowel-initial nouns on the Tamil version, 4 vowel-initialnouns in the Swadesh list terms in the sources for Wolof,7 such nouns for Hindustani (therefore 10%), 11 nouns onthe Merina Malagasy version and 17 on the French version,but 23 on the Fongbe version out of 69 separate nouns.None of the Swadesh list nouns recorded in the PeaceCorps dictionary for Gambian Mandinka (Colley 1995) beganwith a vowel; in this language most vowel-initial nounsare loans from Arabic or European languages, in this casePortuguese, French and English in that historical order.Relevant nouns in Makhuwa are consonant-initial too as tostems, but so are most of the class-prefixes with which

9 One might add that there does not seem to be any meaningful degreeof difference or proportion of syllabic agglutinated nominals betweencreoles which are spoken in an environment where French either hassocial prestige (for instance Mauritius) or is the official language(such as Guadeloupe), and those (such as Dominica and St Lucia) whereFrench no longer has such status. Allowing for differentdictionaries listing different words, the proportion of agglutinatednominals is similar in all cases.

33

they occur. Yet other Niger-Congo languages make adifferent impression: a cursory examination of relevantSwadesh list nouns in Yoruba shows that the vast majorityof them are also vowel-initial (these vowels being therelics of a now obsolete noun-class system of Niger-Congoorigin).10

It should be noted that vowel-initial content wordsof any class, including verbs, are infrequent in theearlier and less gallicised strata of MC vocabulary (thisis less true of function words) and some vowel-initialFrench forms undergo aphesis in MC (to take a singleinstance, the long-short MC verb pair tann/tande ‘to hear’derives from French entendre). In an examination of over1300 items on the MC translation of the IntercontinentalDictionary Series wordlist in 1993, furnished to thefirst author by Mr Sunyog Soogumbur, only found 8 vowel-initial content words are to be found, and these fewtended to be recent borrowings from French (such as akize‘defendant’ from French accusé). This fact gains insignificance when we see that the proportion of vowel-initial words as a proportion of the whole vocabulary insource languages and in other languages when expressed asa percentage in a sample of relevant languages that mayhave exerted an influence on MC (with hithertounmentioned lexical sources listed) is as follows. MCshows 9.5%, compared with French 21.2 (Robert 2007),Malagasy (Richardson 1967) 14.8, Hindustani (Shahanin.d.) 12.3, Tamil 22.2, Yoruba (Anonymous 1913) 48, Fon(Höftmann with Ahohounkpanzon 2002) 23.6, GambianMandinka 9.5, Wolof (Fal, Santos and Doneux 1990) 4.1,Makhuwa 4.5. We may compare these with the percentagescores for vowel-initial words in sizeable lexicalresources for Eastern Ijo (Okrika variety; Blench andSika ms. n.d.) 41, Igbo (Echeruo 1998) 42, Akan (Fante;Russell 1910) 42, Bini/Edo (Melzian 1937) 54.5, as wellas in the aforementioned lexical sources for thefollowing French-lexifier creoles: Haitian 14.5, StLucian 15.5, Guyanais 11, and Seselwa 13. 10 Most of the frequently occurring nouns in Yoruba are vowel-initial,though Yoruba also has many consonant-initial nouns. All nouns inYoruba are at least two syllables in length. All verbs in Yoruba areconsonant-initial but may be monosyllabic. Worsdas which are neitherverbal nor nominal may be consonant-initial or vowel-initial.

34

As a type, the n- initial forms are especiallytypical of Louisianais varieties but no similar regionalobservations can be made about the relative regionaldistribution of the other forms, which are found in allCreole French areas. Louisianais data have been excludedfrom this table because it is clear from an analysis ofdata on this language that the morphological stability,lexical distribution and behaviour of agglutinatednominals (especially those of syllabic agglutinatednominals) in both the Pointe Coupée and Tèche varietiesof Louisianais, though similar between these varieties,differs wildly from the ways in which these behave in allother varieties of Creole French. This instability andvariability of shape among individual agglutinatednominals in Louisianais may have much to do with theavailability of access to, and some bilingualism in,varieties of non-creolised (Cajun and more metropolitan)French in the vicinity of the areas where Louisianais isused.

Syllabic agglutinated nominals especially illustratean unusual and subtle case of what Grant (2002) hascalled transfer of pattern (as opposed to transfer of fabric, whichis more straightforward borrowing involving the borrowingof structural or lexical morphemes). The vast majority ofsyllabic agglutinated nominals in MC (and agglutinatednominals in MC as a whole) derive from French, with justa few coming from other languages. And yet the reasonthat MC contains so many syllabic agglutinated nominalsis because of the carrying over of ideas about the natureand pattern of the structure of nouns by speakers ofBantu languages who were accustomed to operating withnominal systems which involved the use of identifiablenoun-class prefixes. These were moreover nominal systemsin which loans from other languages had also to beaccommodated and had to be provided with a suitableprefix for the singular and another for the plural form.This is not the only pattern to be transferred into MCform other languages (for instance, as we have seen, thevarious uses of reduplication reflect the perpetuation ofMalagasy and/or Indic patterns while employing them with

35

words that are predominantly of French origin) but it isone of the most striking instances in the language.11

5. ConclusionsThese studies show that some of the assumptions about thesources of influence of several features in MC are not assolid as they might seem.12 Many features whichdistinguish MC from French (such as the syntactically-redefined differentiation between long and short forms ofverbs, the use of bann from French bande to denotepluralisation with count-nouns, and the prevalence ofconsonant-initial nouns) are simply language-internaldevelopments within MC and they cannot be meaningfullydirectly attributed to influence from other languages,though unpicking the history of syllabic agglutinatednominals in MC shows the patterns of influence from otherlanguages upon MC may sometimes manifest themselves inunusual ways. Other features may be present in MC whilethey are lacking in French, but they are widespread inmany other languages throughout the world. The use of‘and’/’with’ to express the indirect object inditransitive constructions is a fine example of this;Kriegel and Michaelis (this volume) show that this usageis supported by similar constructions in Eastern Bantulanguages, including Makhuwa, but it is also supported bythe fact that MC ar ‘with’ (which also has the form av),though it derives from French avec, is phonologically veryclose to Bhojpuri and Hindustani aur ‘and’, which is usedto coordinate both verb phrases and noun phrases. Someother features in Table 3 typify MC’s nature as a creole(the use of a small set of preverbal particles for TMAmarking is an example of these features).

11 It is hoped that AG will be able to return to this subject ingreater detail, incorporating material from the more recent lexicalliterature for a variety of Creole French languages, on a lateroccasion.12 Lexicon alone tells us little: according to Baker and Hookoomsing(1987) c. 16,500 items in the MC lexicon come from French, 333 fromIndic, 102 from Dravidian languages, 96 from Malagasy and 60 fromIndic languages, but 554 come from English, whose structural impacton MC has been negligible.

36

An examination of 28 features of MC with theirexponents of the same features in several other languagesshows that MC cleaves most closely to Haitian Creole,another creole language. This is not too surprising,since evidence which we presented in section 2 had shownus that typologically MC would not be out of place amongother creoles of varying lexical sources which are spokenon either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile therehave been minimal opportunities for MC to have beeninfluenced by creole languages of the Indian Ocean (apartmaybe from very slight later influence from Réunionnais)or by many languages which have shaped themsignificantly. Typologically MC has as much or more incommon with Atlantic creoles (and indeed with Tok Pisin)as it has with most “Indian Ocean” ones. This raises thequestion of the validity of an Atlantic creole type beingjustified on structural (rather than on the lessmeaningful geographical) grounds. The similaritiesbetween (let us say) Tok Pisin and MC are far moreexplicable in terms of their origins within a matrix ofrestructuring than because many of the speakers whohelped form these languages had as native languagesTolai-Patpatar on the one hand and Malagasy lects on theother, both of which are Austronesian languages. All theevidence suggests that typological similarities whichexist between them derive from the fact that bothlanguages have developed from pidgins or from what PhilipBaker has termed Media for Interethnic Communication (Baker2000) and have expanded and (like creoles with otherchief lexifiers) have developed their structuresaccording to their own lines and not those of their majorlexifiers. MC has been influenced structurally by (or ithas transferred patterns from) Eastern Bantu languages,Indic languages and Malagasy, and maybe it has also beenshaped by West African languages, but the dominant factorin the shaping of MC has been its 18th century origin in avariety of language in which much of the lexicon ofFrench (but little of French’s structure) was present.

The relative richness of documentation of MC,especially from the late 19th century onwards, and ourunderstanding of the migratory patterns which haveexpanded and affected the Mauritian population, may

37

enable us to understand the sources and development ofmany features of MC grammar which can be seen and whichcan be shown to have appeared in the language only aftera particular period. But we must not lose sight of thefact that not all features in creoles can or indeed mustbe explained away as substrate or adstrate influence uponthe creole from other languages (not least in the case oflanguages such as MC, where the present population is acontinuation of a founder population and where there wereno indigenous ‘substrate’ languages on the island tobegin with). Meanwhile some MC structural features mayhave multiple potential origins with connections indiverse languages, and (as in the case of the prevalenceof agglutinated nominals in MC) a series of substrate andother factors may sometimes combine to produce an outcomeof an MC feature of a rather unusual type.

REFERENCESAdelaar, K A 1991 Some notes on the origin of Sri LankaMalay. Papers in Austronesian linguistics No.1 (= Pacific Linguistics A-81),edited by Hein Steinhauer, 1-22. Canberra: PacificLinguistics.Adelaar, K A 1989 Malay influences on Malagasy:linguistic and culture-historical. inferences. OceanicLinguistics 28(1): 1–46.Adelaar, K A 2007 Bantu influences in the AustronesianFar West. Paper presented at Third AustronesianLanguages and Linguistics Conference, School of Orientaland African Studies, 21-22 September 2007. Anderson, Rev S 1885 L’Evangil selon St Matthié dan langaz créolMaurice. London: British and Foreign Bible Society. Annamalai, E. and S B. Steever. 1998. Modern Tamil. InSteever S B (ed.), The Dravidian languages, 100-128. London:Routledge.Anonymous. 1913. A dictionary of the Yoruba language. Ibadan:Oxford University Press.Ansaldo, U 2005 ms. Typological admixture in Sri LankaMalay: the case of Kirinda Java. Unpublished manuscript,Universiteit van Amsterdam.Asher, R E 1985 Tamil. London: Croom Helm.

38

Baker P 1984 Agglutinated French articles in CreoleFrench: their evolutionary significance. Te Reo 27: 89-129.Baker P 1990 Off target? Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages5: 107-119.Baker P 1992 Le créole mauricien: conséquence heureused'un problème de communication dans une sociétéplurielle? VIIe colloque internationale des etudes créoles, Flic-en-Flac, Maurítius, 30/9 to 5/10/1992. Baker, P 1997 Directionality in pidginization andcreolization. In: Spears, A K and Winford, D (eds.), Thestructure and status of pidgins and creoles: including selected papers fromthe Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. Amsterdam andPhiladelphia: John BenjaminsBaker, P 2000 Theories of creolization and the nature anddegree of restructuring. In: Neumann-Holzschuh, Ingridand Schneider, Edgar W., (eds.) Degrees of restructuring in Creolelanguages, 41-63. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Baker, P 2001 No creolisation without priorpidginisation? Te Reo 44: 31-50Baker, P 2003 Reduplication in Mauritian Creole withnotes on reduplication in Reunion Creole. In Kouwenberg,S (ed.) Twice as meaningful: reduplication in pidgins, creoles and othercontact languages, 211-217. London: Battlebridge.Baker, P and Corne, J-C 1982 Isle de France Creole: origins andaffinities. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Baker P and V Y Hookoomsing 1987. Dictionnaire du créolemauricien - Dictionary of Mauritian Creole – diskyoner kreol morisyeñ.Paris: Harmattan.Barthelemi G 1995 Dictionnaire créole guyanais-français.Matoury: Ibis Rouge.Baxter A R 1988. A grammar of Kristang (Malacca Creole Portuguese).Pacific Linguistics B-95. Canberra: Australian NationalUniversity. Cardona G R and D Jain (eds). 2003 The Indo-Aryan Languages.London: Routledge/Curzon.Clements J C 1996. The genesis of a language: the formation anddevelopment of Korlai Portuguese. Amsterdam and Philadelphia:John Benjamins.Colley, E 1995a Mandinka grammar manual. Washington: PeaceCorps.

39

Colley E 1995b Mandinka dictionary. Washington: Peace Corps.Corne, J-C 1983 Substratal Reflections: The CompletiveAspect and the Distributive Numerals in Isle de FranceCreole. Te Reo 26: 65-80.Crosbie, P, D Frank, E Leon and D Samuel 2001. KwéyòlDictionary: Castries: Summer Institute of Linguistics/StLucia Ministry of Education.Dasgupta, P 2003. Bengali. In Cardona G R and D Jain (eds.), 351-390. Dem, S 1995a Wolof grammar manual. Washington: Peace Corps.Dem, S. 1995b Wollof [sic]-English dictionary. Washington: PeaceCorps. Donaldson, B C 1993. A grammar of Afrikaans. Berlin and NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter.Echeruo, M J C 1998. Igbo-English dictionary: a comprehensivedictionary of the Igbo language, with an English-Igbo index. New Haven:Yale University Press. Fal, A, R Santos and J-L Doneux. 1990. Dictionnaire wolof-français suivi d’un index français-wolof. Paris: Karthala.Grant, A P 1995a. Agglutinated nominals in Creole French: synchronicand diachronic aspects. Unpublished PhD dissertation,University of Bradford. Grant, A P 1995b Article agglutination in Creole French:a wider perspective' in P. Baker (ed.) From contact to creoleand beyond, 149-176. London: University of WestminsterPress.Grant, A P 2002. ‘Fabric, Pattern, Shift and Diffusion:What Change in Oregon Penutian Languages Can TellHistorical Linguists.’ Proceedings of the Meeting of the Hokan-Penutian Workshop, June 17-18, 2000, U. of California at Berkeley. Report 11,Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, 33-56, edited byLaura Buszard-Welcher. Department of Linguistics,University of California at Berkeley. Guillemin, D 2007 Definiteness and Specificity inMauritian Creole: A syntactic and semantic overview.This volume. Hall, R A Jr 1953 Haitian Creole: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary.American Anthropologist 55 (2), part 2. Menasha: Wisconsin:American Anthropological Association.

40

Hancock I F 1975. ‘Malacca Creole Portuguese: Asian,African or European?’ Anthropological Linguistics 17: 211-236. Höftmann, H (with the help of M Ahohounkpanzon) 2002.Dictionnaire fon-français. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.Holm, J A 2007 Creole typology and substrate typology.Paper presented at the Symposium on Language Contact andthe Dynamics of Language Theory, 10-13 May 2007, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Holm, J A and P L Patrick 2007 Comparative Creole Syntax.London: Battlebridge. Ivens Ferraz, L. 1979 The creole of São Tomé. Johannesburg:Witwatersrand University Press.Kisseberth, C 2003 Makhuwa. The Bantu languages, edited by DNurse and G Philippson, 546-565. London:Routledge/Curzon.Kriegel, S, and S Michaelis. This volume. Conjunctionand ditransitives: Some functional domains covered byavec, et, and ensemble. Lane, G S. 1935. Notes on Louisiana-French II: TheNegro-French dialect. Language 11: 5-16.Lefebvre, C and A-M Brousseau. 2002. A grammar of Fongbe.Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Maples, C 1879 Collections for a handbook of the Makua language.London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Melzian H 1937. A concise dictionary of the Bini language of southernNigeria. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Mondesir, J (ed.). 1992 Dictionary of St Lucian Creole. TheHague: Mouton.Neumann, I 1985. Le créole de Breaux Bridge, Louisiane. Etudemorphsyntaxique, texts, vocabulaire. Hamburg: Buske. (KreolischeBibliothek 7.)Perrot, J (ed.) 1981 Les langues dans le monde ancient etmoderne, vol I. Paris: Editions du Centre National derecherché scientifique. Rasoloson, J N 1999 Lehrbuch der madagassischen Sprache.Hamburg: Buske. Rasoloson, J N. 2000 Sprachführer Madagassisch. Hamburg: Helmut Buske.Richardson, J 1967. A new Malagasy-English dictionary. Farnborough: Gregg.Robert, P (ed) 2007. Le nouveau Petit Robert: dictionnairealphabetique et analogique de la langue française. London: Collins.

41

Russell, J D 1910. English-Fanti, Fanti-English dictionary.London: Methodist Printing House.St-Jorre, D de, and G Lionnet, edited by A Bollée. 1999.Diksyonner kreol-franse. Bamberg and Mahe: the authors.Sauvageot S. 1981. Le wolof. In Perrot J (ed), 33-53.Schmidt, R L 2003a. Hindi. In Cardona G R and D Jain (eds), 250-285. Schmidt, R L. 2003b. Urdu. In Cardona G R and D Jain (eds), 286-350.Shahani, A T n.d. (c. 1940). The Pocket Hindustani-EnglishDictionary. Karachi: Educational Publishing. Slomanson, P 2003 The Sri Lankan Malay verb. Paperpresented at the Seventh International Symposium onMalay/Indonesian Linguistics, 27-29 June 2003, RadboudUniversiteit Nijmegen. Smith, I R 1978. Convergence in South Asia: a creole example. Lingua 48: 193-222.Smith, I R 2004 Sri Lanka Portuguese. Encyclopedia oflinguistics, edited by Philipp Strazny, 1033-1036. Oxford:Fitzroy Dearborn.Syea, A 1992 The short and long form of verbs inMauritian Creole: Functionalism versus formalism.Theoretical Linguistics 18: 61–97 Syea A. 2007 XXXX This volumeTargète, J and R G Urciolo 1993. Haitian Creole-English dictionary.Wheaton, Maryland: Dunwoody Press.Tersis, N 1981. Le bambara. In Perrot (ed), 75-83. Tobler, S J 1983. The grammar of Karipúna creole. HighWycombe: Summer Institute of Linguistics.Véronique, D and G Fon Sing 2007. XXXXX This volume.Victor, C J 2004. Tamil-English dictionary and phrasebook, romanized. New York: Hippocrene.Young, R, edited by A Bollée and G Lionnet 1983, Fables de La Fontaine traduites en créole seychellois. Hamburg: Buske. (Kreolische Bibliothek 1).

URLs: Wikipedia Martiniquais Swadesh list: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_Swadesh_du_cr%C3%A9ole_martiniquais

42

Blench R M and L Sika. n.d. Okrika dictionary. Available at:http://www.rogerblench.info/Language%20data/NigerCongo/Ijoid/KIRIKE%20dictionary.pdf.

APPENDIX A. The pidgin features examined in Baker (2001:38-41), renumbered consecutively.

1. Gender: nouns are undivided into masculine andfeminine or broadly comparable categories.

2. Adjectives invariant for gender.3. Verbs invariant for gender.4. Definite articles inherently marked in the source

language for gender no longer serve as articles.5. No gender distinction in pronouns.6. Major word classes are unmarked for number (which

can only be determined by context or use ofquantifiers).

7. Pronouns which can be either singular or plural inthe source language are exclusively singular in thepidgin.

8. Tense, modality and aspect are expressed byindependent (‘free’) morphemes.

9. Major word classes lack case inflection.10. Where subject and object distinctions are

represented in pronouns in the source language, onlythe form used in pointing to the person or personsis found in the pidgin.

11. Zero copula in declarative equative sentences.12. Zero copula in declarative locative sentences.13. The definite article in the source language is

replaced by the demonstrative in the latter.14. If the source language distinguishes between an

indefinite article and the numeral ‘one’, the latteris adopted as the indefinite article in the pidgin.

15. If the usual adjectival quantifier in thesource language does not mean ‘a large quantity’then it is replaced by a term meaning the latter.

16. Negator can only occur predicate-initially.17. Monomorphemic interrogatives are replaced by

bimorphemic forms with literal meanings as follows:“who” = “what/which person/body”?

43

18. “What” = “what/which thing”.19. “Where” = “which/what side/place/part”.20. “When” = “which/what hour/time”.21. “how” = “which/what manner/way”.22. “why” = “what make/cause”.23. Absence of the most basic locative preposition

in the source language as an independent morpheme.24. Absence of the most basic genitive preposition

in the source language as an independent morpheme.

44