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Article published In: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 35:1 (2020) ► pp.62–87

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Adopt and adapt written Kreol

The development of a register within the Sunni Muslim community in Mauritius

 | University of Mauritius
Published online: 13 May 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00048.owo
Abstract
Focusing on madrassah
Islamiyat
textbooks written in Kreol by two local textbook writers for use in Sunni madrassahs in Mauritius, the present study shows how the writers have adopted Kreol, enriching and adapting it with loanwords from Arabic, to communicate religious information to the children attending the madrassah. The corpus for this study being a sample of locally produced Islamiyat textbooks, document analysis constituted the primary method of data collection and analysis. Interviews with the textbook writers were carried out in order to obtain insiders’ insights into the strategies they used to convey Islamic ideas in Kreol, a language not lexically equipped for this. The analysis reveals that the textbook writers used ‘loanwords by necessity’ – cultural borrowings (Haspelmath, Martin. 2009. Lexical borrowing: Concepts and issues. In Haspelmath, Martin, and Uri Tadmor (Eds.) Loanwords in the world’s languages: A comparative handbook, 35–54. Walter de Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) that were adapted through transliteration (Hassan, Sameh. 2016. Islamic religious terms in English–translation vs. transliteration in Ezzeddin Ibrahim and Denys Johnson-Davies’ translation of An-Nawawī’s Forty Ḥadīths. Translation & Interpreting 8(1).117–132.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) – for proper names and honorifics, as well as for people, objects, practices and beliefs. A search in the Diksioner Morisien (. 2011. 2nd Ed. Diksioner Morisien. Mauritius: Editions Le Printemps.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) reveals that a majority of these loanwords do not currently appear in the Dictionary, suggesting the emergence of a new register. I thus argue that at the grassroots level, the Sunni Muslim community is in the process of developing a new religious register of Kreol, which is currently being used and which is also being transmitted to younger generations through the madrassahs. This reflects the Mauritian Sunni Muslims’ strong sense of attachment to Kreol, a language that tends to be associated with the Creole community in Mauritius.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Language and religion: A macro-perspective
    • 2.1Languages and religions in Mauritius
    • 2.2Languages and Muslims in Mauritius
  • 3.Language and religion: A micro-perspective, in search of conceptual tools
  • 4.Research design and methodology
    • 4.1Data analysis procedures
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1Naming practices and honorifics
    • 5.2People, objects, practices and beliefs
    • 5.3Diksioner Morisien (Carpooran 2011)
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Textbook writers as social actors
    • 6.2Boundaries as products of social action
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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