Depth of creoleness

A. Some creoles are further from the language that provided their words than others. For example, although all of this Sranan sentence’s words are from English, it is obviously quite a different language in all ways:

A    hondiman    dati   ben   bai   wan oso   gi   en   mati.

the hunter-man  that  PAST buy   a    house give his mate

“That hunter bought a house for his friend.”

The sounds pattern in sequences of consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel, as in Japanese. Thus, that is dati, mate becomes mati. This is based on how sounds work in the African language Fongbe, as is the way the verbs are strung together and the placement of dati after hondiman instead of before.

B. But other creoles are closer to the language they are based on. In Mauritian Creole, they were going is the exotic-looking:

Mauritian Creole:

zot     ti pe          ale

they   PAST “-ing” go

“They were going.”

Regional French:

eux-autres étaient après aller

But actually, this is largely a phonetic rendition of the sentence in the regional French the slaves were exposed to, eux-autres étaient après aller, “they were after going.” Pronounced casually and rapidly, this sentence is quite like the Mauritian one. Mauritian is somewhat less creolized than Sranan.