A
creole language, or simply a
creole, is a stable
language that originates seemingly as a
nativized pidgin.
[1] This understanding of creole genesis culminated in
Hall's[2] notion of the pidgin-creole life cycle. While it is arguable that creoles share more grammatical similarities with each other than with the languages they phylogenetically derive from,
[3] no theory for explaining creole phenomena has been universally accepted. The relationship between pidgins and creoles and their similarities means that the distinction is not clear-cut and the variety of phenomena that arise to create pidgins and creoles are not understood very well.
[4] Likewise, efforts to articulate grammatical features (or sets of features) that are exclusive to creoles have been unsuccessful thus far.
[5]The term creole comes from French créole, from Spanish criollo, and from Portuguese crioulo, stemming from the verb criar ('to breed') from the Portuguese, or creare from Latin ('to produce, create').[6] The term was coined in the sixteenth century during the great expansion in European maritime power and trade and the establishment of European colonies in the Americas, Africa, and along the coast of South and Southeast Asia up to the Philippines, China, India, and in Oceania.[7][8]
The term "Creole" was originally applied to people born in the colonies to distinguish them from the upper-class European-born immigrants. Originally, therefore, "Creole language" meant the speech of those Creole peoples.
As a consequence of colonial European trade patterns, many creole languages are found in the equatorial belt around the world and in areas with access to the oceans, including the Caribbean as well as the north and east coasts of South America, western Africa and in the Indian Ocean. Atlantic Creole languages are based on European languages with substrate elements from Africa, Indian Ocean Creoles languages are based on European languages with substrate elements from Malagasy, whereas creoles such as Sango are African-based with African substrate elements from other African languages. There is a heated dispute over the extent to which substrate features are significant in the genesis or the description of creole languages.[9]
