Encoding path in Mauritian Creole and Bhojpuri - Laboratoire de ...

Sibylle Kriegel, Ralph Ludwig & Fabiola HenriEncoding path in Mauritian Creole and Bhojpuri official year of the abolition of slavery. 5 Toussaint (1974) writes that the effect ofthis movement was a definitive Indianization of Mauritius. He underlines that upuntil the end of Indian immigration in 1909, the island received almost 450,000indentured labourers, the majority of whom did not return to India. These indenturedlabourers were mostly Bhojpuri speakers (Neerputh 1986: 9ff; see alsoMesthrie 1991: 26), which explains the importance of this language in Mauritius.However, it should be emphasized that there was a considerable populationof speakers of other languages from South Asia, including Dravidian languageslike Tamil and Telugu, languages which a minority of today’s speakers still declareas being their “language usually spoken at home”, 6 sometimes alongside Bhojpuri(see the Population Census of the Republic of Mauritius 2000). 7As far as the relationship between Indian Bhojpuri and the variety spoken inMauritius is concerned, Baker & Ramnah (1988) carry out a detailed comparisonbetween modern Mauritian Bhojpuri and texts of twelve different geographicalvarieties of Indian Bhojpuri published by Grierson (1903), concluding that the“standard Magahi” variety comes closest to Mauritian Bhojpuri overall but thatit is apparent that Mauritian Bhojpuri does not derive from this alone but is a“blend” of several varieties of Indian Bhojpuri.Domingue (1981) lists grammatical features where simplification is evident,namely the system of honorifics (see below) and the notion of gender. The femininemarker on the verb only continues to exist in the second person singularpast tense of certain archaic registers of Mauritian Bhojpuri. Moreover, accordingto Domingue (1981: 7) Mauritian Bhojpuri has lost the optional adjective agreementwhich exists in Indian Bhojpuri. Domingue claims, moreover, that these processesof simplification are not a result of contact with Creole, but “they appearto be due to the “move” itself, to the geographical and historical distances whichhave severed the links between the transplanted variety and its origins” (1981: 52).Baker & Ramnah (1985: 230) conclude that “Mauritian Bhojpuri is not a radicallyrestructured form of Indian Bhojpuri and has certainly not undergone anythingcomparable to the process of creolization.” 8 It seems that Mauritian Bhojpuri, tospeak in terms of markedness theory, is affected by certain processes of markednessreduction.Let us consider an example on the morphological level: the system of personalpronouns in Indian and Mauritian Bhojpuri (as part of the system of honorifics).The simplification processes become evident if one compares both varieties ofBhojpuri:(1) System of personal pronounsIndian Bhojpuri 9 Mauritian Bhojpuri 10 Mauritian Creole1 ham ham mo2 formal: a:p tou ouinformal: tu:tofamiliar: tæ3 formal: wan ou liinformal: u:1 hamman (ke) hamni nu2 formal: a:p lo:g tou zotinformal: tuhan (ke)3 formal: u: lo:g holog zotinformal: onn h an (ke)When compared to Indian Bhojpuri, Mauritian Bhojpuri is characterized by asystem in which forms of the 2nd person and the 3rd person singular and pluralare reduced. We will return to this point in §2.3.2. Mauritian Bhojpuri is also distinguishedfrom Indian Bhojpuri by various phonetic and morphophonologicalprocesses/modifications. For details concerning the immigration of populations from the Indian sub-continent toMauritius in the 18th century (thus before the arrival of indentured labourers), see Vaughan(2005). Although Tamil, Telugu and various other languages of India are returned as “languageusually spoken in the home” in the Mauritian censuses, this does not necessarily mean that thereare any homes in which these are “usually spoken” (Philip Baker, personal communication). According to Atchia-Emmerich (2005), nowadays Bhojpuri is spoken by the majority ofIndians in Mauritius, even those who in the census indicate that they have kept their ancestrallanguages, like the Tamils, the Marathis and the Telugus. See also Mesthrie (1991: 93ff) who speaks of simplification in the transplanted varieties.Like Baker & Ramnah (1985) for Mauritian Bhojpuri, he underlines that the structural simplificationprocesses in the South African variety are not evidence of pidginization and creolization(1991: 104). See Shukla (1981: 76). Where several forms are noted, the first one indicates the formalform, the second the informal and the third, familiar. The information in this column was compiled using data from our own studies, wherewe transcribed Mauritian Bhojpuri using the writing conventions proposed by Hookoomsing(2004). It corresponds largely to Neerputh’s (1986: 27) table, apart from some divergences in thespelling.2nd proofs