Le français en espace créolophone – Guadeloupe et Seychelles

Abstract

Abstract Both in Guadeloupe and in the Seychelles a French-based Creole coexists with French. In addition to this shared main ecological parameter, the two areas diverge in several other points of their contact ecology: First, due to the different timing of French colonization, the French variety exported to Guadeloupe in the 17th century differed from the variety exported to the Seychelles a century later. Second, while the Seychelles were a British colony from 1814 to independence in 1976, Guadeloupe always remained French and is still a French overseas department. Therefore, the contact ecology in Guadeloupe may be characterized as a reciprocally dominant monocontact situation (see Gadet/Ludwig/ Pfänder 2009), while the situation in the Seychelles is one of polycontact (Seychelles’ Creole-English-French), with Seychelles’ Creole and English being dominant in their influence on French (while the reverse is not the case). Using data from several corpora of spoken and written French in the Seychelles and Guadeloupe, this paper shows instances of code copying (e.g. Johanson 2002, Kriegel/Ludwig/Henri 2009) from the two Creole languages (and English) on the morphosyntactical level.