Kreol Seselwa (Seychellois Creole) is the mother tongue of approximately ninety percent of the Seychelles population and the most widely spoken French-based Creole language in the world outside of Haiti.
The language emerged in the late eighteenth century when the French colonial plantation economy brought enslaved workers from Madagascar and the East African coast and the Indian subcontinent to the uninhabited Seychelles islands and the communication between the French colonial administrators and the workers from multiple linguistic backgrounds required the development of the Creole — the simplified and restructured version of the dominant colonial language that incorporates the vocabulary and the grammatical patterns of the subordinate languages into the new language that the multilingual community creates as the practical communication tool of the colonial encounter.
The Kreol Seselwa that the Seychelles market and the street and the family conversation produces is the French of the colonial period restructured by the Malagasy and the Bantu grammatical patterns and enriched with the vocabulary that the Malagasy workers and the Indian traders and the Chinese merchants contributed to the common language of the island over the two centuries of the mixed-population settlement. The French word with the Malagasy pronunciation.
The French grammatical structure with the Bantu tonal pattern. The Indian loanword for the spice that the Indian cook brought to the island kitchen. The Chinese word for the counting system that the Chinese trader used in the market. The Kreol is the Indian Ocean world’s history in linguistic form, the distillation of every population movement and cultural encounter that the trade route deposited on the islands over two centuries.
Learning Three Words
The Naora member who spends three days in the Seychelles and learns three words of Kreol before going ashore has the specific advantage that three words of the local language always provides: the signal to the Seychellois person that the visitor has made the minimal effort of the cultural respect that the local language represents. Bonzour, good morning. Mersi, thank you. Komman ou rele, what is your name.
Three words, three encounters, three conversations that would not have happened in the English of the tourist transaction. The Kreol is not difficult to pronounce. It is the French that the body can produce before the mind has learned the French. The market stallholder who hears the Kreol from the offshore member smiles in the specific way of the person who has been understood in their own language by the visitor who was not required to make the effort and who made it anyway. Three words. The conversation begins.
