An Indian Ocean Creole island? Language and the politics of hybridity in Mauritius

For decades researchers have been intrigued about the historical connections and parallels between the Caribbean and Indian Ocean worlds, in particular between the French Antilles and the Mascarenes. Linking the Caribbean with the Indian Ocean, a shared history of French colonial rule and settlement, slavery, plantation capitalism, together with the prevalent use of French-lexifier Creole languages, has caused some to view certain Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands as the remnants of a formerly shared world. But while the centrality of creolization as a scholarly concept and a historical process is largely uncontested in the study of the Caribbean, its position in the Mascarenes is more ambiguous, and perhaps nowhere as much as in Mauritius