The History and Formation of Mauritian Creole

Mauritian Creole, or Kreol Morisien, has an unusually well-dated history for a creole language. The island was uninhabited when the French arrived, so there is no pre-existing substrate to argue about and the clock starts at a known moment. There are also more than sixty texts in the language from the 1730s to the 1930s, which is a good deal more early attestation than most creoles have.

What is still argued about is how it formed, and in particular its relationship to the creole of Réunion. That debate is set out at the end.

Before the French

The Dutch held Mauritius from 1598 to 1710, with two attempts at settlement, from 1638 to 1658 and from 1664 to 1710. Neither took. They abandoned the island in 1709, and it was uninhabited when the French East India Company occupied it in December 1721.

This matters linguistically. There is no Dutch substrate in Kreol Morisien and no indigenous population whose language could have contributed. Whatever the language became, it became it after 1721.

The founding population, 1721 to 1730

The first settlers did not come directly from France. They came from Réunion, then called Isle Bourbon, which had been settled earlier and already had a creole-speaking population. That single fact is the origin of the central dispute about the language, and it is often left out.

The European population did not last. By the end of 1725 hardly any of the original Europeans remained, and by 1730 non-Europeans already outnumbered Europeans by a considerable margin. A creole language forms in the conditions that produces: a small, unstable dominant group and a rapidly growing enslaved population from many language backgrounds.

Slavery, and where the enslaved population came from

The sources are datable and they changed over time, which is why undifferentiated talk of "African languages" is not much use.

• From 1735, for about thirty years, Madagascar was the main source. So the earliest substantial non-European input is Malagasy.
• Bantu speakers began arriving in 1736, and East African Bantu speakers were the vast majority by the middle of the century.

Slavery was abolished in 1835.

The British period and indenture

Britain captured Mauritius in 1810 and its possession was confirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1814. French remained the language of the planter class, and English was added at the top of the system rather than replacing French.

After abolition came indenture, and its scale is the single most important demographic fact about modern Mauritius. Around 365,000 indentured labourers arrived from India in the thirty-five years after 1835, with a smaller Chinese immigration alongside. This is why Bhojpuri is still a home language in Mauritius, and why Indic languages are the second largest identified source in the Kreol lexicon after English.

What the lexicon actually owes to each source

Rather than a vague blend, there is a count. Baker and Hookoomsing's dictionary records entries for some 15,000 individual words, of which about 1,535 are of apparent non-French derivation. So roughly 90% of the recorded lexicon is French-derived, and the non-French tenth breaks down as follows:

Two things follow. First, English contributes more items than any other non-French source, which surprises people who expect the African contribution to be larger. Second, a substrate contribution of sixty to a hundred words in a fifteen-thousand-word lexicon is real but small, so claims that African languages shaped the syntax are a separate argument that the lexical figures do not settle either way. That argument is live, not concluded.

Where the substrate is often invoked is in the sound system. Mauritian Creole has five oral vowels where French has at least seven, the French front rounded vowels were unrounded, and the language denasalised vowels that French had nasalised. The phonology page goes through these.

What the French contributed beyond words

The most visible structural inheritance is not a rule but an accident of word formation. French articles and partitives were absorbed into the nouns themselves, so la case became lakaz and de l'eau became dilo, with the article now inside the word and no longer removable. Hundreds of nouns have this shape. There is a page on it, with the wordlists.

What French did not pass on is its grammar. There is no gender, no agreement on verbs, no inflectional tense, and the definite determiner follows the noun rather than preceding it. The syntax page sets that out.

Standardisation

The language was written long before it was standardised, and inconsistently. Charles Baissac's Étude sur le patois créole mauricien of 1880 used French etymological spelling, which is the ancestor of much informal writing today. A series of competing systems followed through the twentieth century, including Philip Baker's of 1972, Ledikasyon pu Travayer's grafi n/nn of 1977, Baker and Hookoomsing's of 1987 and the church system of 1998.

A standard arrived in 2011: Lortograf Kreol Morisien, published by the Akademi Kreol Morisien under the Ministry of Education. It received official approval and was introduced into primary schools in January 2012. A reference grammar followed in 2012, and the regulating body became the Akademi Kreol Repiblik Moris in 2019, covering Kreol Morisien and Kreol Rodrige together. An updated orthography report appeared in May 2024.

The alphabet page explains the system and the predecessors it replaced.

Where the language stands now

Mauritius designates no official language for the state. English is the language of administration and is named in the Constitution as the official language of the National Assembly, where a member may address the chair in French. French is widely used in the media and in business. Kreol Morisien is the language most people actually speak, and none of the three is constitutionally designated as the country's official language.

In the 2000 census, 81% of the population reported Kreol Morisien as a home language, alone or in combination with another, against 18% for Bhojpuri and 6% for French. It has been an optional school subject since 2012 and is now examinable up to Higher School Certificate.

The genesis debate

Here is the argument the rest of the page has been building towards, and it is worth knowing that it is unresolved.

Because Mauritius was settled from Réunion, one long-standing view holds that Réunion Creole fed into the formation of Mauritian, making the two closely related descendants of a single Indian Ocean development. Philip Baker and Chris Corne argued against this in Isle de France Creole: Affinities and Origins, holding that Réunionnais influence on Mauritian was minimal and that the two formed largely independently. On their account Mauritian Creole is the ancestor of the Seychelles variety and belongs with it, rather than with Réunion.

The wider question behind it is the one creolistics argues about generally: how much of a creole's structure comes from the lexifier, how much from the substrate languages, and how much from the process of creolisation itself. Accounts that present Mauritian Creole as having simply "emerged as a lingua franca out of necessity" are describing the social conditions, not settling the linguistic question.

Where to go next

• The alphabet and spelling system, and the systems that preceded the 2011 standard
• The sounds of Mauritian Creole
• The syntax of Mauritian Creole
• From French to Kreol Morisien, including the article agglutination
• Mauritian, Haitian, Seychellois and Réunion Creole
• An annotated bibliography of Mauritian Creole linguistics
• All the Morisien guides

Sources

• Philip Baker and Sibylle Kriegel, "Mauritian Creole", Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, survey 55. The source for the settlement chronology, the slave-origin dates, the indenture figure, the lexical breakdown, the attestation record and the census figures. Free to read.
• Philip Baker and Chris Corne, Isle de France Creole: Affinities and Origins, Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1982. The source for the position on Réunion.
• Philip Baker and Vinesh Y. Hookoomsing, Diksyoner kreol morisyen, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1987. The dictionary behind the lexical counts.
• Philip Baker, Kreol: A Description of Mauritian Creole, London: C. Hurst and Co., 1972. vii, 221 pp.
• Peter Stein, Connaissance et emploi des langues à l'Île Maurice, Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1982. A large sociolinguistic survey of who uses which language in Mauritius.
• Charles Baissac, Étude sur le patois créole mauricien, Nancy: Imprimerie Berger-Levrault, 1880, and Le Folk-lore de l'Île-Maurice, Paris: Maisonneuve et Ch. Leclerc, 1888. Note that the 1888 volume is often miscited to Maisonneuve et Larose, which is the 1967 reprint's imprint.
• Philip Baker and Guillaume Fon Sing (eds), The Making of Mauritian Creole: analyses diachroniques à partir des textes anciens, London: Battlebridge, 2007. Westminster Creolistics Series 9. The standard collection on the early textual record.
• Mark Möst, Grammatik des Kreolischen von Mauritius, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014. 266 pp. The most recent full reference grammar of the language.
• Lortograf Kreol Morisien, Akademi Kreol Morisien, Ministry of Education, 2011. Free PDF.
• History of Mauritius, Encyclopaedia Britannica, for the Dutch period and the British capture.

Full verified bibliographic details for the works cited here, and for the wider literature, are on the annotated bibliography page.

Rebuilt September 2026.