Mauritian Creole
Mauritian Creole or Morisien or formerly Morisyen (Morisyen: kreol morisien [kʁeol moʁisjɛ̃, -moʁiʃɛ̃]) is a French-based creole language spoken in Mauritius. In addition to the French base of the language, there are also a number of words from English and from the many African and Asian languages that have been spoken on the island.
Mauritian Creole is the lingua franca and de facto language of Mauritius, formerly a British colony, which has kept both English and French as its core languages, even though English is used mostly for administration and educational purposes and French for media and as a second language for speaking.
Mauritians tend to speak Mauritian Creole at home and French in the workplace. French and English are spoken in schools. Though most Mauritians are of a mixed race. Mauritian Creole has gradually replaced the ancestral French & other languages, as the mother tongue. Over generations, Mauritians of French, African, Indian European and Chinese descents created the current creole language with Mauritius being the meeting place of peoples from different continents who together founded a nation with its own culture and history. Today, around 1.3 million people speak the language.
Mauritian Creole is a French-based creole language, closely related to the Seychellois, Rodriguan and Chagossian Creoles. Its relationship to other French-based creole languages is controversial. Robert Chaudenson (2001) and Henri Wittmann (1972, 1987, etc.) have argued that Mauritian Creole is closely related to Réunion Creole, but Philip Baker and Chris Corne (1982) have argued that Réunionnais influence on Mauritian was minimal and that the two languages are barely more similar to each other than they are to other French-based creoles.
Although the Portuguese were the first Europeans to visit Mauritius, they did not settle there. Rather, the small Portuguese element in the vocabulary of Mauritian derives from the Portuguese element in European maritime jargon (such as the Mediterranean Lingua Franca) or from enslaved Africans or Asians who came from areas in which Portuguese was used as a trade language (i.e. Angola and Mozambique). Similarly, while the Dutch had a colony on Mauritius between 1638 and 1710, all the Dutch settlers evacuated the island to Réunion, leaving behind only a few runaway slaves who would have no discernible impact on Mauritian. The French then claimed Mauritius and first settled it between 1715 and 1721.
As they had done on Réunion and in the West Indies, the French created on Mauritius a plantation economy, based on slave labour. Slaves became a majority of the population of Mauritius by 1730 and were 85% of the population by 1777. They came from West Africa, Southeast Africa and Madagascar.[2]
