creole (redirected from Creole (disambiguation))

creole (crē`ōl), Span. criollo (crēōl`yō) [probably from crío=child], term originally applied in West Indies to the native-born descendants of the Spanish conquerors. The term has since been applied to certain descendants in the West Indies and the American continents of French, Portuguese, and Spanish settlers. The creoles were distinguished from the natives, the blacks, and from people born in Europe. A sharp distinction of interest always lay between the creoles, whose chief devotion was to the colony, and the foreign-born officials, whose devotion was to the mother country. Never precise, the term acquired various meanings in different countries. It has biological and cultural connotations. The term was early adopted in the United States in Louisiana, where it is still used to distinguish the descendants of the original French settlers from the Cajuns, who are at least partially descended from the Acadian exiles. The word is also commonly applied to things native to the New World, such as creole cuisine and creole horses. The term is also used in places distant from the Americas, such as the island of Mauritius, but there it has lost much of its original meaning. The picturesque life of the Louisiana creoles has been ably depicted in the works of Lafcadio Hearn, George Washington Cable, and Grace King.

Bibliography

See F. J. Woods, Marginality and Identity (1972).

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creole

Any pidgin language that has become established as the native language of a speech community. A creole usually arises when speakers of one language become economically or politically dominant over speakers of another. A simplified or modified form of the dominant group's language (pidgin), used for communication between the two groups, may eventually become the native language of the less powerful community. Examples include Sea Island Creole (formerly Gullah, derived from English), spoken in South Carolina's Sea Islands; Haitian Creole (derived from French); and Papiamento (derived from Spanish and Portuguese), spoken in Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire.

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Creole

In the 16th–18th centuries, a person born in Spanish America of Spanish parents, as distinguished from one born in Spain but residing in America. Under Spanish colonial rule, Creoles suffered from discrimination; it was consequently Creoles who led the 19th-century revolutions against Spain and became the new ruling class. Today Creole has widely varying meanings. In Louisiana it can mean either French-speaking white descendants of early French and Spanish settlers, or people of mixed descent who speak a form of French and Spanish. In Latin America the term may denote a local-born person of pure Spanish extraction or a member of the urban Europeanized classes as opposed to rural Indians. In the West Indies it refers to all people, regardless of ancestry, who are part of the Caribbean culture. See also Creole language.