Semi-creoles

A. Some creoles are poised directly between a European language and true creoleness, neither exactly dialects of the European language nor languages like Tok Pisin. These have been called semi-creoles.

B. On the island of Réunion off the east African coast, in the 1700s, Malagasy people were brought as slaves to work small coffee plantations. They lived side by side with their white owners and spoke with whites as much as among themselves. In this kind of situation, what emerges is less a creole than a kind of abbreviated French—a more extreme version of what happened to English after the Viking invasions.

Réunionnais semi-creole French:

Alor mon  papa   la      tuzur   di   amwen, en  zur  kan    li   lete zenzan…

then my    father PAST always say to-me   one day when he was bachelor

“Well, my father always said to me, one day when he was a bachelor…”

C. Réunionnais has no gender markers regularly, and no plural suffix and usually uses particles before the verb for tense, like typical creoles. But it is recognizable as “French” nevertheless in a way that Sranan and Tok Pisin are not recognizable as English.