Dear Taran,
I'm not sure what help you want, and you left it awfully late in the
weekend to ask, and I am NOT bored :-) but ...

Creole is a phenomenon, not a language, and it exists all over the world.
It is the linguistic equivalent of mestiz@, and happens where two (or more)
languages bump into each other.
The French lexicon creoles spoken in St Lucia, Haiti, Dominica, Martinique,
Guadeloupe, French Guyana, and in places in Guyana, Trinidad and Louisiana
are of particular interest because mutually intelligible versions exist
also in Reunion, Mauritius and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. One
theory is that it was the language of the sugar traders, and possibly
started off somewhere like Madeira and spread both east and west, but there
are many theories.

I am trying to de-Hurricane Ivan my house - Margarita if you thought it
couldn't get any worse you were wrong - so please ask me a focussed
question and I'll try to give you, or point you to, an answer :-)

Meanwhile this is a good source - it's out of print but the St Augustine
library should have it
  Caribbean & African languages: Social history, language, literature, and
education
by Morgan Dalphinis

As well as the dictionary Gregor may have shown you ($10 EC), there is this one
Dictionary of St. Lucian Creole : Kweyol-English/English-Kweyol (Trends in
Linguistics. Documentation, No 7)
Lawrence Carrington(Editor) / Hardcover / Published 1992 Mouton de Gruyter
$210.70 US - the University should have this one too.

Have fun
Deirdre
Nearby lun 13 sep 2004 09:04:34 AST