Alleesaib and Lefort’s edited volume constitutes a useful contribution to the scholarship on French-based Indian Ocean Creoles – a field which, as the editors themselves note, suffers from a francophone bias, with many articles on the structural specificities of Mauritian Creole (MC) and Reunion Creole (RC) being published in French rather than in English. Another key weakness of existing scholarship is its propensity to subsume both MC and RC under the label ‘Bourbonnais’ or ‘Mascarene’ Creoles, glossing over the differences between the two. However, the assumption that a shared lexifier language and geographical proximity would have resulted in a degree of linguistic rapprochement between both creoles is, as the editors point out, an erroneous one.
Indeed, as Alleesaib and Lefort remind readers in their introductory chapter to the volume, both islands not only had distinct settlement histories, they were also home to an enslaved population originating from different parts of the African continent. Keeping these differences in mind, this volume sets forth to challenge the notion of the ‘Mascarene’ Creoles as a monolith by shedding light on “various aspects of the sociolinguistic landscape, Creole language genesis, Creole language typology and education policy on Mauritius and Reunion Island” (p. 2).
Comprising ten chapters, this edited volume is divided into two sections, with the first one focusing on the grammatical specificities of MC and RC while the second explores their sociolinguistic characteristics. The opening chapter of the first section – the only one devoted to RC – is by Ulrike Albers who examines the prenominal forms la, lo, le and de which are absent in both MC and other French-based Indian Ocean Creoles. Drawing on a small corpus of oral data as well as grammaticality judgments, he departs from earlier studies which have considered these as being analogous to the French markers la, le, les and des in their ability to encode gender, number and definiteness. Instead, as Albers convincingly argues, while le and de can be considered as code switches from French, this is not the case for lo which can function as both a determiner and an allomorph of some monosyllabic nouns.
The following four chapters address various structural properties of MC. Although the authors rely on a mix of introspective data or small oral corpora to support their analyses, interestingly, one common thread running through all the chapters is the attention they pay to subject-less and pseudo passive constructions. While Diana Guillemin studies the pronoun li as well as the demonstratives sa and se and shows how they contribute to the formation of topic-prominent structures, Emilia Melara looks at the root modals kapav and bizin and asserts that they function as raising verbs which are bi-clausal, allow expletive subjects and can take on both a wide and a narrow scope over quantified subjects. Muhsina Alleesaib explores the internal structure of restrictive relative clauses, paying particular attention to the pronoun ki. She contends that ki serves a dual purpose as both a complementizer and a relative pronoun, appearing in cases of long-distance relativization and in constructions displaying potential syntactic ambiguity. In a chapter which stands out from the rest, Anand Syea puts forward a compelling argument for the possible influence of Indo-Aryan languages, more specifically Bhojpuri, on MC. Looking at a range of syntactic phenomena such as NP so NP genitives and subject-less finite clauses with topic object among others, he meticulously documents the emergence of these constructions in MC and painstakingly correlates them with developments taking place at the socio-political level.
The second half of this volume starts with Anu Bissoonauth, Henri Jeanjean and Michael Matthias’s study exploring teachers’ attitudes towards MC, both as a subject and as a potential medium of instruction. Noting the ambivalent and in many cases, fairly negative attitudes of teachers and possibly in a bid to address this situation, the authors go on to recommend – a tad optimistically – both enhanced teacher training in MC and the introduction of MC as a subject at primary and secondary school levels. Shameem Oozeerally tackles the lexicographical expansion of MC and investigates whether users favour borrowings from French or English or their MC equivalents. Using the Transcontextual Vehicularity (TcV) framework and taking Mathematics and Astronomy as case studies, he considers the implications of these choices, particularly for the education sector. Hannah Davidson’s chapter centres on the Mauritian linguistic landscape and emphasizes the still limited presence of MC in commercial signage. Although MC serves to symbolically index authenticity in tourist hotspots like Flic-en-Flac, in Port Louis, the capital, and Ebene, a thriving business hub, English continues to be the preferred code. This reflects the broader sociolinguistic situation in Mauritius where written MC is yet to achieve widespread popularity.
The last two chapters of this volume, though offering interesting insights, are slightly more limited in scope. Despite ambitiously setting out to present an overview of the economic, anthropological, sociocultural and sociolinguistic situation in Reunion, the chapter by Mylène Lebon-Eyquiem actually underscores the growing prevalence of code switching between RC and French, both in conversational encounters and commercial signage. In contrast, the final chapter of this volume by Guilhem Florigny and Rachel Sapermal, is not directly related to either MC or RC. Consisting of two tangentially connected halves, the first one challenges Baggioni and de Robillard’s (Reference Baggioni and Robillard1990) typology of Mauritian French varieties and argues for the conception of the ‘gens de couleur’ as a category of speakers distinct from that of the ‘Afro-Creoles’. The second half, meanwhile, reports upon acoustic data collected among sixty Hindu, Muslim and Creole students from the University of Mauritius and concludes that a large proportion of vowels in Mauritian French are produced in a more open and central position than those in Standard French.
Overall, most of the chapters in this volume offer valuable perspectives into the structural and sociolinguistic specificities of both RC and MC. RC, however, receives relatively limited attention, with only two chapters dedicated to it. In addition, there are a few factual inconsistencies that need to be highlighted. English, for instance, is presented as both the de jure (Bissoonauth et al.) and the de facto official language of Mauritius (Davidson). The literature, for its part, appears to agree with the latter assessment (cf. Carpooran, Reference Carpooran2003). Along similar lines, Florigny and Sapermal (p. 282) cite Carpooran (Reference Carpooran2004, Reference Carpooran2010) and state that “[s]ince 2019, Mauritian Creole is considered by the Mauritian State as the national language […].” Although Carpooran might, in 2004 and 2010, have anticipated an imminent constitutional change elevating MC to the status of national language, this is still not the case. These issues merit closer consideration and slightly offset the book’s multitude of strengths.
