From French to Kreol Morisien: The Sound and Word Correspondences
If you know French, most Mauritian Creole vocabulary is within reach, but not by guessing word for word. A few regular correspondences do most of the work, and one of them reshaped the nouns so thoroughly that the French word is hiding inside a longer one.
This page sets out the patterns. It assumes some French and no Kreol.
The two sound changes that matter most
French ch corresponds to Kreol s.
- cheval becomes seval
- chanter becomes sante
- le chien becomes lisien
- le chou becomes lisou
French j, and soft g, correspond to Kreol z.
- jour becomes zour
- joli becomes zoli
- manger becomes manze
- l'argent becomes larzan
- jeudi becomes Zedi, and janvier becomes Zanvie
These two alone will unlock a large number of words. They also have a useful side effect: because French ch and j left no trace in the inherited vocabulary, the letters ch, sh and j were free to be assigned to other sounds in the standard spelling, which is why ch in Kreol Morisien is the sound in English church rather than the sound in French chat. There is more on that on the alphabet page.
Other regular changes
- French oi becomes wa or we. le roi becomes lerwa, la boîte becomes labwet, boire becomes bwar, pouvoir becomes pouvwar.
- Final consonant clusters lose their last member. livre becomes liv, quatre becomes kat.
- French spelling conventions give way to phonemic ones. hier becomes yer, bateau becomes bato, huit becomes wit, famille becomes fami.
- Infinitive endings collapse. écrire becomes ekrir, marcher becomes marse, which is also the noun marché.
The article puzzle
Now the interesting part, and the reason word-for-word guessing fails.
During the formation of the language, French articles and partitives were reanalysed as part of the noun itself. La case did not become kaz with an article in front of it. It became lakaz, one word, with the la now inside it. The same happened with le, les, l', du, de l', des, une and even ma.
Linguists call this article agglutination, or article incorporation. The consequence for a learner is that the incorporated piece is no longer a determiner and cannot be removed. Lakaz takes its own determiner on top: lakaz-la is "the house", and bann lakaz is "the houses".
From la
| Kreol | English | French source |
|---|---|---|
| lakaz | house | la case |
| lakot | coast | la côte |
| lapo | skin | la peau |
| lamor | death | la mort |
| laplim | pen | la plume |
| laboutik | shop | la boutique |
| lavil | town | la ville |
From le and li
| Kreol | English | French source |
|---|---|---|
| leker | heart | le cœur |
| ledo | back | le dos |
| ledwa | finger | le doigt |
| lera | rat, mouse | le rat |
| lerwa | king | le roi |
| lesiel | sky | le ciel |
| loulou | wolf | le loup |
| lisien | dog | le chien |
| lisou | cabbage | le chou |
| likou | neck | le cou |
| lipie | foot | le pied |
| lili | bed | le lit |
From l'
| Kreol | English | French source |
|---|---|---|
| lamour | love | l'amour |
| loraz | thunder | l'orage |
| lete | summer | l'été |
| lekritir | writing | l'écriture |
| lide | idea | l'idée |
From du and de l'
These are mostly food and substances, which makes sense: the partitive is exactly what you would use talking about them.
| Kreol | English | French source |
|---|---|---|
| dipin | bread | du pain |
| dile | milk | du lait |
| diber | butter | du beurre |
| disel | salt | du sel |
| dimiel | honey | du miel |
| diri | rice | du riz |
| dilo, delo | water | de l'eau |
| dilwil, delwil | oil | de l'huile |
From les and des
The plural articles left a z, which is often the giveaway.
| Kreol | English | French source |
|---|---|---|
| zwazo | bird | les oiseaux |
| zom | man | les hommes |
| zanimo | animal | les animaux |
| zanana | pineapple | les ananas |
| zalimet | match | les allumettes |
| zistwar | story | les histoires |
| zesklav | slave | les esclaves |
| lezel | wing | les ailes |
| lizie | eye | les yeux |
| dizef | egg | des œufs |
Notice that several of these are now singular. Zwazo is one bird, from a French plural.
From une and ma
| Kreol | English | French source |
|---|---|---|
| nam | soul | une âme |
| nide | idea | une idée |
| maser | nun | ma sœur |
| marner | mother superior | ma mère |
| mate | aunt | ma tante |
The ma group is a nice piece of social history. These are words a child would have heard in exactly one form, from one kind of speaker, and the possessive came along with them. Note also that "idea" exists twice over, as nide from une idée and lide from l'idée.
Two things that show the pattern is fossilised
Doublets. A number of words exist in both forms, with and without the incorporated article: lafreyer and freyer, lakolin and kolin, larekolt and rekolt, lerer and erer, liniform and iniform, zarm and arm. If the incorporation were still a live process you would not expect the bare forms to survive.
It spread to words with no French source at all. Once the shape was established, it was extended to borrowings from elsewhere: lapang, burnt rice, from Malagasy ampango; lafous, a tree species, from Malagasy hafotsa; and laskoul, from English school, which in Mauritius means the Royal College specifically. A French article attached to a word from Madagascar is about as clear a sign as you could want that the pattern had become part of what a noun looks like.
Worth a caution here, because this is where the pattern is easy to over-read. Words like matak and makoutou, from Bantu sources, look as though they carry an incorporated ma, but the ma- is a noun class prefix that was already present in the source word. They are not examples of French article agglutination at all.
Grammatical words with the same history
The process was not limited to nouns.
- zot, meaning "they", "them" and "you" plural, comes from les autres.
- A set of adverbs come from du phrases: dimwa from du mois, dinor from du nord, disid from du sud, diswar from du soir, ditou from du tout.
How to guess, if you know French
- Undo the sound changes: read s as possibly French ch, z as possibly French j or soft g, wa as oi.
- Look for an article at the front. l-, la-, le-, li-, di-, del-, dil-, z-, lez-, dez-, n-, ma-. Strip it and see whether a French word appears.
- Remember it may have been plural in French and singular in Kreol.
- Do not expect the grammar to help. The vocabulary is French; the structure is not. That page is here.
Where to go next
- Is Mauritian Creole French?, and what a French speaker can and cannot follow
- The alphabet and spelling system
- Kreol: Pronunciation
- All the Morisyen guides
Sources
- Rachel Eva Strandquist, Article Incorporation in Mauritian Creole, MA thesis, University of Victoria, 2005. Free PDF. The source for the doublets, for the borrowed-word examples and for most of the wordlists here. Forms have been respelled into the standard orthography where the thesis uses an older convention, and a few common words in the tables are not in the thesis.
- Philip Baker, "Agglutinated French articles in Creole French: their evolutionary significance", Te Reo 27, 1984.
- Philip Baker and Sibylle Kriegel, "Mauritian Creole", Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, survey 55.
- Lortograf Kreol Morisien, Akademi Kreol Morisien, Ministry of Education, 2011. Free PDF. The source for the standard spellings.
Last checked September 2026.