An English-based creole language (often shortened to English creole) is a creole language for which English was the lexifier, meaning that at the time of its formation the vocabulary of English served as the basis for the majority of the creole's lexicon.[1] Most English creoles were formed in British colonies, following the great expansion of British naval military power and trade in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The main categories of English-based creoles are Atlantic (the Americas and Africa) and Pacific (Asia and Oceania).
Over 76.5 million people globally are estimated to speak an English-based creole. Sierra Leone, Malaysia, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, and Singapore have the largest concentrations of creole speakers.
Origin
It is disputed to what extent the various English-based creoles of the world share a common origin. The monogenesis hypothesis[2][3] posits that a single language, commonly called proto–Pidgin English, spoken along the West African coast in the early sixteenth century, was ancestral to most or all of the Atlantic creoles (the English creoles of both West Africa and the Americas).
^According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Black Seminoles have also been known as Seminole Maroons or Seminole Freedmen and were a group of free blacks and runaway slaves who joined with a group of Native Americans in Florida after the Spanish abolished slavery there in 1793.[13]
^Although Hawaii is part of the United States, Hawaiian Pidgin is mostly considered as a Pacific creole language rather than Atlantic, this is further mentioned in John Holm's "An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles". Therefore, it does not have to follow its political boundaries on being a U.S. state.[14]
References
^Velupillai, Viveka (2015). Pidgins, Creoles and Mixed Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 519. ISBN978-90-272-5272-2.
^Hancock, I. F. (1969). "A provisional comparison of the English-based Atlantic creoles". African Language Review. 8: 7–72.
^Gilman, Charles (1978). "A Comparison of Jamaican Creole and Cameroon Pidgin English". English Studies. 59: 57–65. doi:10.1080/00138387808597871.
^Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2022). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (25th ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
^Velupillai, Viveka (2013), "Hawai'i Creole structure dataset", Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, retrieved 2021-08-20
