Creol has been influnced by number of countries and people. During the course of time many kinds of creol developed and a couple of them have been described in this section .

French creole

The term French Creole can refer to

Portuguese Creole

Origins

Portugal in the period of discoveries and colonization created a linguistic contact with native languages and people of the discovered lands and pidgins were formed. Until the 18th century, these Portuguese pidgins were used as a lingua franca in Asia and Africa. These creoles are spoken, mostly, by inter-racial communities (Portuguese people with natives).

Later, the Portuguese pidgins were expanded grammatically and lexically, as they became creole languages. Today, these languages are known as "Portuguese creoles". The Portuguese creoles or Portuguese-based creoles are the ones that have almost all lexical content bases on Portuguese, while grammatically they are very different.

According to the monogenetic theory of pidgins advanced by Hugo Schuchardt, many creoles have structural similarities because most of the pidgins and creoles of European base in the world derived from a version of the Mediterranean lingua franca relexified by the Portuguese. This "broken Portuguese" would be used by European sailors whenever they met new peoples. Items like the preposition na (meaning "in" and/or "on"; from identical Portuguese word for "in the", feminine singular; contraction of "em a") would be marks of this common origin. The monogenetic theory does not explain how the syntactic structure of many creoles could arise from a language that does not possess such a structure.

Origin of the name

The Portuguese word for "creole" is crioulo, which derives from criar (to raise/bring up) and a suffix -oulo of debated origin. Since most of the African creole speakers had a Portuguese father and an African mother, they were raised (criados) by their African mother, not as slaves, and were servants in the house of their fathers. Thus the creole was left free to develop into a stable language. While the Africans were often deported to the Americas, the mixed raced were not. The African slaves were prohibited from speaking their own languages, which their masters did not understand. Instead, they were also instructed to speak a Portuguese pidgin.

In Portugal and the African Portuguese language countries, the word crioulo is often a synonym of "Cape Verdean Creole". The word crioulo for the language is only used for the Guinean Portuguese creoles.[citation needed] In these countries, it does not have the negative connotation it has in Brazil.

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