H"Mauritian Ocean and Seychelles Creole are together classified as Isle de France Creole (Baker and Corne 1982). Isle de France Creole originated in Mauritius in the eighteenth century, when Mauritius was known as Isle de France and the Seychelles were administered as a dependency of Mauritius" (Baker, personal communication, 1985). "Isle de France Creole is a French-based creole with at least 85 percent of the vocabularies of both of these languages of French origin and the remainder from various African, Asian and European Sources" (Philip Baker, personal communication, 1986).
Baker (personal communication, 1985) reports that Mauritian Creole is spoken as a first or second language by all the citizens of Mauritius and its dependencies, who number a little more than one million (based on the 1963 census). Likewise, Seychelles Creole is the first or second language of its roughly 65,000 citizens. Grimes (1996) reports a 1987 estimate of 554,500 speakers of Reunion Creole.
This is the principal language of these islands.
At least four different phonemically based orthographies have been devised for Mauritian Creole (Virahsawmay 1967, Baker 1972, Ledikasyon pu Travayer ca. 1977, and Baker and Hookoomsing 1983, devised for both Reunion and Seychelles), but none of these as yet have achieved official recognition. In the Seychelles, the D'Offay and Lionnet (1981) orthography has achieved official status, but this orthography is not suitable for writing Mauritian Creole. Only Baker and Hookoomsing's lortograph-linite is specifically designed for both Mauritian and Seychelles Creole.
So long as the D'Offay and Lionnet orthography has official status in the Seychelles, separate learning materials will be required. However, even if a harmonized orthography, such as the lortograf-linite, were adopted, a combined set of learning materials would have to take into consideration the phonological and lexical differences described above.
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