The Mauritian Creole Alphabet and Spelling System

If you have looked for Mauritian Creole online, you will have seen the same word spelled three or four different ways. Bann, bane, banne, ban. Pou and pu. Morisien and Morisyen. It is easy to conclude that the language has no spelling rules.

It has. A standardised orthography, Lortograf Kreol Morisien, was published in April 2011 by the Akademi Kreol Morisien under the Ministry of Education, and it is the spelling used in Mauritian schools and in the national examinations. Very little of it has been explained in English anywhere, which is what this page is for.

What the language is called

This is worth settling first, because the name is itself a spelling question.

  • Kreol Morisien is the endonym in the Akademi's own spelling, and the name used by the Ministry, the school syllabus and the national examination.
  • Mauritian Creole is the standard English name in scholarship.
  • Morisyen is the reference name in ISO 639-3 (code mfe), in Glottolog and in the Library of Congress authority file. It is also the spelling used in the older scholarly tradition associated with Philip Baker and with Ledikasyon pu Travayer.
  • Kreol on its own is what most Mauritians say in ordinary speech.

So Morisien and Morisyen are not a typo in either direction. They are two orthographic systems. The Akademi writes Morisien because of a rule about i and y set out below; the ISO registry and the older literature write Morisyen. Both are correct inside their own system, and you will meet both.

One further complication. Since 2019 the regulating body has been the Akademi Kreol Repiblik Moris, whose remit covers Kreol Morisien and Kreol Rodrige together, and which published an updated Rapor Lortograf Kreol Repiblik Moris in May 2024. The Ministry describes that report as consolidating the fundamentals rather than changing them, and its text does not appear to be public. The rules below are therefore given from the 2011 document, which is the one that states them and which anyone can download.

The principle behind the system

The 2011 report is explicit about what it was optimising for. Its stated primary criterion is sound to letter correspondence: "Kriter prinsipal ki finn domin bann swa se kriter korespondans fonik-grafik." Secondary criteria are ease of reading, closeness to writing systems people already know, usefulness in teaching, and public acceptance.

What this rules out is French etymological spelling. Silent letters go. Doubled consonants that do no phonetic work go. If a letter is there, it is doing something.

Vowels

Letter Sound Examples
a /a/ alert, balon, beta
e /e/ ekrir, dite, marse
i /i/ itil, plim, mari
o /o/ oter, zoli, loto
ou /u/ koulou, louke, mou, likou
u the vowel of English loanwords only brushing, flush, burger, duster

The ou and u rule, which is the one people get wrong

In the standard, /u/ is written ou. A bare u is reserved for English loanwords. So the words for "for", "we" and "all" are pou, nou and tou, not pu, nu and tu.

This is the single most visible difference between the standard and the older system used by Ledikasyon pu Travayer, whose own name contains pu. If you are reading material that writes pu, nu, tu, zur, you are reading a different and perfectly coherent orthography, not a misspelling. The 2011 report notes that ou had already become the general usage in the press, in advertising and in educational institutions since 2004.

Nasal vowels, and the trick with doubled n

Three nasal vowels are written as vowel plus n.

Letters Sound Examples
an nasal a anz, larzan, lavantir
on nasal o onz, konter, dekon
in nasal e, as in French pain dipin, fin, lapin, marin

Which raises an obvious problem. If an is a nasal vowel, how do you write a genuine sequence of an oral vowel followed by /n/?

You double the n. This is the part almost nobody explains, and it accounts for most of the doubled letters you see in Kreol Morisien.

Letters Sound Examples
ann /an/ bann, vann, rann, ravann
onn /ɔn/ bonn, ponn, lasonn, laronn
inn /in/ kouzinn, lizinn, minn, masinn, tantinn
ounn /un/ klounn, dimounn, vounn
enn /ɛn/ larenn, marenn, penn, morisienn, afrikenn

So the nn in bann, dimounn and kouzinn is not a long or doubled consonant. It is there to stop you reading the preceding vowel as nasal. The report calls this the n/nn formula, and it is how the orthography distinguishes oral from nasal vowels. There is no general rule doubling consonants in this system, which is why bane and banne, both common in real use, are not the standard form and bann is.

When you write en rather than in

in is the general spelling. en appears in three situations:

  • In ien sequences: ansien, lisien, dibien, sagosien.
  • Before a final ng: leng, bileng, zepeng. This avoids a collision with the English -ing ending.
  • In masculine and feminine pairs: afriken and afrikenn, ameriken and amerikenn.

Consonants, and the ch that is not ch

The consonant inventory is b, ch, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, z, plus the digraphs sh, gn and ng.

If you come to the language from French, one group of these will mislead you.

Letters Sound Examples Note
ch /tʃ/, as in English church chak, chacha, koucha Not the French ch
sh /ʃ/, as in English shop shoping, kash, ofshor Used for English-origin words
j /dʒ/, as in English judge baj, baja, jous English and Indian-language loans
s /s/ always sat, lasal, fos Never /z/
z /z/ zako, baz, biznes

The reason is that neither of the French sounds written ch and j survived into the inherited vocabulary. French ch corresponds to Kreol s, and French j and soft g correspond to Kreol z:

  • cheval becomes seval, chanter becomes sante, le chien becomes lisien
  • jour becomes zour, joli becomes zoli, manger becomes manze

Because those slots were left empty, ch, sh and j could be assigned to sounds that arrived later with English and with the Indian languages. This is a tidy piece of design, and it is the single most useful thing to know before you try to read the language aloud.

Letters that are dropped or restricted

  • c is not an independent letter. It survives only inside the digraph ch, and in acronyms, so that CD, VCD and CV stay distinct from sede.
  • q is not in the inventory at all. French qui is ki.
  • h is in the inventory, but for loanwords: Holi, haj, halim.
  • x is kept, for /gz/ in exit, lexame, exazere, and for /ks/ in taxi, fax, tex.

i, y and w

The rule is about position within the syllable. i is used in the middle of a syllable: lion, nasion, bien, ansien. y is used only at the beginning or the end of a syllable: yer, vwayel, karay. w gives /w/: wit, labwet, lerwa.

This is the rule that produces Morisien rather than Morisyen, and lizie rather than lizye.

There are no accents

None. No acute, no grave, no circumflex, no diaeresis. The sound /e/ is written plain e, so ekrir, dite, marse, and there is no é anywhere in the system.

The committee did consider marking long vowels in English loanwords, either by doubling the vowel or with a colon, and rejected both. Instead such words keep their English spelling and are set in italics or quotation marks: deal, case. That retained foreign spelling is the only real exception to writing the language phonemically.

Days and months

Days. Lindi, Mardi, Merkredi, Zedi, Vandredi, Samdi, Dimans.

Months. Zanvie, Fevriye, Mars, Avril, Me, Zien, Zilie, Out, Septam, Oktob, Novam, Desam. The report gives Zin as a sanctioned alternative to Zien for June, and that is the one place in the list where it allows a choice.

Hyphens

Three rules worth knowing.

  • Compounds take a hyphen: bien-et, lamour-prop, aryer-granper, akt-dese.
  • The prefixes ti-, gro- and gran- take one: ti-fami, gro-pwa, gran-nasion.
  • A noun takes a hyphen before the determiner la: tifi-la, garson-la, papa-la, latab-la. The hyphen is dropped only when other words come between the noun and la, as in sa garson intelizan la.

That last rule is easy to miss and often ignored in informal writing, but it is prescribed, and the reference grammar follows it.

Why you see other spellings

Because there have been a great many, and several are still in use. The 2011 report lists its own predecessors, which is a useful map of what you are likely to run into:

  • Baissac, 1880. A French etymological description, and the origin of many of the French-looking spellings still used informally.
  • Virahsawmy, from 1967. Successive systems of his own, including forms such as Morisiê, avâ, lôtâ.
  • Baker, 1972. Used h to mark nasalisation.
  • Ledikasyon pu Travayer, 1977, the grafi n/nn. The ancestor of the bann and bonn convention that the standard kept. It writes u for /u/ and y where the standard writes i, giving pu, gayn, byin. Still actively published in, and still widely used.
  • Baker and Hookoomsing, 1987, the Lortograf-Linite. Marked nasalisation with a dot above the consonants n and m, as in baṅ, laṁpul, boṅ, noṁ.
  • Grafi Legliz, 1998. A more French-looking system used in church publications, writing moi and leroi where a phonemic system writes mwa and lerwa.
  • Grafi Larmoni, 2004. The harmonisation proposal, led by Vinesh Hookoomsing, that fed most directly into the 2011 standard. Several of the standard's choices are explicitly aligned to it.

Alongside those there is ordinary informal writing, which is where most of the variation actually lives. A study by Aaliya Rajah-Carrim of a Mauritian online forum thread, 25 postings and about 1,879 words collected before the standard existed, gives a sense of how much:

Standard form Forms found in that data
pou pu in 83% of instances, pou in 17%
pe p in 92%, pe in 8%
bann bane 38%, bann 29%, ban 17%, banne 17%
ki ki 98%, qui 2%
zot zot 85%, zotte 15%

That is one small sample from one thread, and it predates the standard, so it is not a measure of current practice. It does show that bane was the commonest form for the plural marker at the time, and pu more common than pou. Writing bann and pou is a real choice, not pedantry about a rule everybody already followed.

One genuinely interesting thing about the 2011 standard

It moved the written language closer to French than the older phonemic systems had, not further away. Writing ou rather than u, and ien rather than yen, makes a Kreol text look more like a French one.

Tejshree Auckle has analysed this as deliberate, describing the reduction in visible distance from French as a form of prestige planning intended to improve the language's public standing. Whatever one makes of that, it explains a choice that otherwise looks odd in a system whose stated aim is phonemic spelling.

Which one should you use

If you are learning the language, or teaching it, or writing anything a Mauritian child might read: the standard. It is what schools use and what the examinations require.

If you are reading, expect anything. Someone writing pu or moi is following a tradition, not making a mistake, and a spell-checker released in 2023 was built to accept both the government orthography and the Ledikasyon pu Travayer one precisely because both are alive.

Where to go next

Sources

  • Lortograf Kreol Morisien, Akademi Kreol Morisien, Ministry of Education and Human Resources, April 2011. Free PDF from the Ministry. The source for every rule on this page, and for all but a handful of the example words, which are rule-conformant additions of my own.
  • Gramer Kreol Morisien, Volim I, Police-Michel, Carpooran and Florigny, Akademi Kreol Morisien, February 2012.
  • Arnaud Carpooran, Diksioner Morisien, 3rd edition, Éditions Le Printemps, 2019.
  • Aaliya Rajah-Carrim, "Use and Standardisation of Mauritian Creole in Electronically Mediated Communication", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14(3), 2009, 484 to 508. Available here.
  • Tejshree Auckle, "Orthography, ideology and the codification of Mauritian Creole: The implications of decreasing linguistic Abstand", Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 39(2), 2024.

Last checked September 2026. The rules here are from the 2011 report. An updated report covering Kreol Morisien and Kreol Rodrige was published by the Akademi Kreol Repiblik Moris in May 2024; its text is not publicly available, and the Ministry describes it as consolidating rather than changing the fundamentals.