Kweyol language

Kwéyòl or Saint Lucian French Creole (kwéyòl) is a variant of Antillean Creole spoken in the eastern Caribbean, particularly in the islands of Dominica and Saint Lucia and in the Lesser Antilles.

The name is a variation of the French word creole (créole). In general terms, the language mixes the lexicon of the French language with the syntax of African languages and only recently began to be written. In the last 10 years some spelling workshops have been given and currently a multidisciplinary group made up of experts from the University of the West Indies, the University of the Antilles in Guyana, the Creole-speaking Space Study and Research Group (in French, Groupe d'étude et de Recherche en Espace Créolophone, GEREC) and some other local movements have given themselves the task of developing an entire writing system ad hoc.

According to some authors (Parkvall, 1997) in 1995 some 123,000 people spoke it on the island of Saint Lucia, and internationally the number rose to about 985,000. Between the Kweyol spoken in Saint Lucia and the one spoken in Dominica there is from 97 to 99% similarity, while only 10% of the population of Saint Lucia understands mainland French. In Saint Lucia, political speeches are often in Kweyol, and there are also newspapers, radio programs, and television stations that use the language. The language classification according to SIL International is dom and acf and the ISO 639-2 code for it is cpf.

Ethnologue registers speakers in Panama due to immigration.

Examples

Examples of the similarity between Kweyol and French: