French Guianese Creole

Abstract

This article hypothesizes that French Guianese Creole (fgc) had a markedly different formative period compared to other French lexifier creoles, a linguistically diverse slave population with a strong Bantu component and, in the French Caribbean, much lower or no Arawak and Portuguese linguistic influence.The historical and linguistic description of the early years of fgc shows, though, that the founder population of fgc was dominated numerically and socially by speakers of Gbe languages, and had almost no speakers of Bantu languages. Furthermore, speakers of Arawak pidgin and Portuguese were both present when the colony began in Cayenne.