Decolonizing Creole on the Mauritius islands: Creative practices in Mauritian Creole

Abstract

Many Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands have a common history of French and British colonization, where a Creole language developed from the contact of different colonial and African/ Indian languages. In the process, African languages died, making place for a language which retained close lexical links to the colonizer’s tongue. This paper presents the case of Mauritian Creole, a language that emerged out of a colonial context and which is now the mother tongue of 70% of Mauritians, across different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. It pinpoints the residual colonial ideologies in the language and looks at some creative practices, focusing on its oral and scribal aspects, to formulate a ‘decolonial aesthetics’ (Mignolo, 2009). In stressing the séga angazé (protest songs) and poetry in Mauritian Creole in the history of resistance to colonization, it argues that the language is, potentially, a carrier of decolonial knowledges.

A Phonetic Comparative Study of Mauritian Creole Kreol and Turkish - Twin Orthography Discussed

“…Creolists do not agree about the definition of the terms pidgin and creole, nor about the status of a number of languages that have been claimed to be pidgins or creoles (Muysken & Smith 1995). It is believed that pidgins and creoles only recently started to attract the attention of researchers (Wardhaugh & Fuller 2021) and in the case of Mauritius, Mauritian Creole is believed to have been formed from a few languages, with French being the dominant one (Adone 1994;Pyndiah 2016). For the purpose of this study Mauritian Creole is regarded as a creole.…”

Decolonising methodologies: Emergent learning in island research

“…Some notable examples explore decolonisation via language. Pyndiah (2016) has referred to the use of the Mauritian Creole language as a colonising and a decolonising force with a focus on creative practices, and especially poetry. Creole emerged as a language because of colonisation but has also been used to resist it.…”