To historians, the term Creole is a controversial and mystifying segment of African America. Yet Creoles are commonly known as people of mixed French, African, Spanish, and Native American ancestry, many of who reside in or have familial ties to Louisiana.
Historians have defined Creole as meaning anything from an ethnic group consisting of individuals with European and African, Caribbean or Hispanic descent to individuals born in New Orleans with French or Spanish ancestry.
As to the difference in the cuisines, Creole can be defined as “city cooking” with influences from Spain, Africa, Germany, Italy and the West Indies combined with native ingredients. Cajun cooking is more of a home cooked style that is rich with the ingredients at hand in the new world the Acadians settled into.
Today, common understanding holds that Cajuns are white and Creoles are Black or mixed race; Creoles are from New Orleans, while Cajuns populate the rural parts of South Louisiana. In fact, the two cultures are far more related—historically, geographically, and genealogically—than most people realize.
Here, Creole is used to describe descendants of French or Spanish colonists with a mixed racial heritage—French or Spanish mixed with African American or Native American. The area was first settled by French colonists.
As mentioned, many whites in antebellum Louisiana also referred to themselves as Creoles. Among whites, the term generally referred to persons of upper-class French or Spanish ancestry, and even German ancestry (though all eventually spoke French as their primarily language).
Louisiana Creole, French-based vernacular language that developed on the sugarcane plantations of what are now southwestern Louisiana (U.S.) and the Mississippi delta when those areas were French colonies.
Since most creole languages developed in the colonies they are typically based on English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, the languages of the superpowers of the time. However, there are also numerous creoles based on other languages such as Arabic, Hindi, and Malay.
Today, about 1 million people can claim Acadian ancestry. Acadian Usher Syndrome is a product of this inbred community. The disease, which causes severe deafness at birth and progressive blindness, is linked to a special chromosome and is primarily segregated in southwest Louisiana among the Acadian population.
Yes, New Orleans is a French place. Some locals may call it Creole, but you won't hear them call it Cajun. While there are some Cajun influences in New Orleans, the bulk of Louisiana's Cajun culture is found in the southwest corner of the state.
Creole, Spanish Criollo, French Créole, originally, any person of European (mostly French or Spanish) or African descent born in the West Indies or parts of French or Spanish America (and thus naturalized in those regions rather than in the parents' home country).
The distinct languages and cultures impacting Louisiana Creole give it a special sound. It's not a direct dialect of French, like Cajun. Louisiana Creole is French-based language with many African influences and elements. It's a language that looks very interesting.
Country | Guyana |
---|---|
Region | South America |
Official language | no |
Distribution | 96.4 % |
Total | 758,000 |
No, Swahili is not a creole language. Swahili is a Bantu language that includes many terms that are from Arabic.
This is why some people say modern English is a creole. It is a descendant of Anglo-Saxon, but it also has substantial influence in core vocabulary and some grammar from older versions of Danish and Norse, and it has received a large part of its current vocabulary from French.
Originally Answered: Is Modern Hebrew a creole language? Yes, it can be considered a kind of creole, since it grew (at least in part) out of a kind of pidgin Hebrew that was the lingua franca used by the various Jewish communities in Jerusalem in the 19th century to communicate with one another.
In short: No, Yiddish is not a creole. A creole is a stable language developed from the mixing of parent languages. A creole develops if (and, AFAIK, only if) its speakers were children who grew up speaking what used to be a pidgin as their first language.
Afrikaans is a creole language that evolved during the 19th century under colonialism in southern Africa. This simplified, creolised language had its roots mainly in Dutch, mixed with seafarer variants of Malay, Portuguese, Indonesian and the indigenous Khoekhoe and San languages.
The Gullah language is the only distinctly African American creole language in the United States. It has indirectly influenced the vocabulary of the American South and has contributed to traditional Southern speech patterns.