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rfmcdonaldGervais J Henrie's article "Seychelles Creole seeks a place in the Internet" describes the continued normalization of Seychellois Creole in its homeland.
The Seychelles (Wikipedia, CIA World Factbook, Lonely Planet, Library of Congress Country Study) are a small Indian Ocean archipelago home to less than a hundred thousand people that, after first French then British colonial rule, became an independent state within the Commonwealth in 1976. In the generation after independence, despite a left-wing coup the country managed to develop a strong tourism-based economy and a vibrant civil society. One element of the Seychellois national project was the rehabilitation of the local creole language as a national language. In 1995, one journalist exploring the efforts of James Sabadin to translate the Bible into Seychellois touch upon the historically low status of the language.
The left-wing governments desire to democratize society has since led to the flourishing of the vernacular language as a language of cultural expression and mass media, but it still faces significant issues.
If Seychellois Creole, for whatever reason, isn't able to become a language associated with wider mobility--with the economy, say, or the Internet--then its future will indeed be limited. The strong backing given by the Seychelles' government may make Seychellois Creole among the least likely of all the various French-derived creole languages to disappear, but that doesn't necessarily say much.
The 20th edition of Festival Kreol ended this week in Seychelles with a strong warning from linguists that "if we want our language to survive we have to ensure its rightful place in the cyberspace." As in other Creole speaking nations, French and English are the most established languages for Seychellois using the Internet.
During the weeklong cultural event depicting the islands' heritage and tradition, academics from the Creole speaking nations met for a three-day linguistic conference under the theme "the future of Creole is in its functionality." At present it is evident that Creole has little use on the web.
"To ensure its propagation, a cyber-community for it will have to emerge gradually, whereby a group of people communicate in Creole using communication and information technologies," says the Chief Technology Officer from Reliant Unified Solution, Ronny Adonis.
Seychellois Creole has already got a standardised spelling system. Now what is needed, is to develop it further towards the Internet. "One way around this is to encourage a web culture amongst local businesses, whereby locally built web sites use Creole as a working language alongside French and English," remarks Jaya Nair from Space '95.
One of the key arguments hindering the spread of Creole in the Information Society is the adoption of technological jargons that have not been developed here. "We should support actions aimed at teaching Creole, in order to consolidate, or even to increase, the number of the people able to use it to communicate through ICTs," suggests George Thande from the local daily newspaper, 'The Seychelles Nation'.
The director of the Creole Institute, Penda Choppy says at the same time we need assistance at the international level to solve many technical problems such as the creation of software that will allow the browser to translate and read the content of any pages written in most underprivileged languages for example Creole.
The institute has indicated plans to create language courses in Creole by applying modern technologies such as multimedia support, CD-ROMs, books, the Web, etc. in support of systematic, targeted instruction in the language and its spelling.
"Once it has been educated, this community of Creole speakers will easily be able to use Creole to communicate on Internet, and it will be gradually transformed into a cyber community," suggests Mrs Choppy. "The aim must be to make any language a working language for it to stay alive," she added.
The Seychelles (Wikipedia, CIA World Factbook, Lonely Planet, Library of Congress Country Study) are a small Indian Ocean archipelago home to less than a hundred thousand people that, after first French then British colonial rule, became an independent state within the Commonwealth in 1976. In the generation after independence, despite a left-wing coup the country managed to develop a strong tourism-based economy and a vibrant civil society. One element of the Seychellois national project was the rehabilitation of the local creole language as a national language. In 1995, one journalist exploring the efforts of James Sabadin to translate the Bible into Seychellois touch upon the historically low status of the language.
"When I was a schoolboy, creole was the forbidden," recalls Mr. Sabadin, 54, a teacher and linguistics scholar, who like many Seychellois was forced in pre-independent schools to wear a placard around his neck that read "I will not speak creole."
"Although they spoke it at home, every parent's wish was for their child to learn English and French," he says. "The church did not help matters. It was thought you couldn't talk to God in creole."
The left-wing governments desire to democratize society has since led to the flourishing of the vernacular language as a language of cultural expression and mass media, but it still faces significant issues.
Though much has been done, especially in terms of policy-making and the setting up of language institutions for the general development of Creole, the situation in the Seychelles is not ideal as we cannot yet claim that we have overcome the hardest obstacle. The colonial hangover makes it hard for Creoles to accept their own language as one equal to other languages. Because Seychellois Creole has been given much political backing, you will find a very high percentage of people who acknowledge it as their mother-tongue, but they will subconsciously associate development with French and English. For example, there is a growing tendency to use the latter languages in public functions. Creole is ignored because the person believes he is already fluent in it. This might be true in the everyday use of the language, but is often less so in the formal Creole. People who can actually write and speak standardized Creole are very few. An explanation may be that people believe that English and French will take them, while Creole will not take them beyond the boundaries of the Indian Ocean.
If Seychellois Creole, for whatever reason, isn't able to become a language associated with wider mobility--with the economy, say, or the Internet--then its future will indeed be limited. The strong backing given by the Seychelles' government may make Seychellois Creole among the least likely of all the various French-derived creole languages to disappear, but that doesn't necessarily say much.
