creole language

Any pidgin language that has ceased to be simply a trade jargon in ports and markets and has become the mother tongue of a particular community, such as the French dialects of the New Orleans area. Many creoles have developed into distinct languages with literatures of their own; for example, Jamaican Creole, Haitian Creole, Krio in Sierra Leone, and Tok Pisin, now the official language of Papua New Guinea.

The name creole derives through French from Spanish and Portuguese, in which it originally referred both to children of European background born in tropical colonies and to house slaves on colonial plantations. The implication is that such groups picked up the pidgin forms of colonists' languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English) as they were used in and around the Caribbean, in parts of Africa, and in island communities in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. According to circumstance, in such places as Jamaica, Haiti, Mauritius, and West Africa, there may be a ‘creole continuum’ of usage between the strongest forms of a creole and the standard version of the language with which the creole is associated.