THE KWÉYÒL LANGUAGE
St. Lucian Creole (Kwéyòl) is a variety of Caribbean French-lexicon Creole. It is spoken by a significant majority of the population of the state of St. Lucia in the Windward group of the Lesser Antilles. Speakers of the language refer to it as “patois”. St. Lucian is mutually intelligible with the parallel varieties spoken in the three neighbouring islands, Martinique, Dominica and Guadeloupe as well as in Guyane on the South American mainland and Haiti in the Greater Antilles. Like the other similar Atlantic Creoles, it is the outcome of contact between speakers of French and speakers of a number of West African languages in the environment of the plantation society of the Caribbean colonies of Europe.
The vocabulary of St. Lucian is mainly French in origin and there are systematic phonetic correspondences between French words and St. Lucian words, although in many cases the meanings have undergone significant shift. A smaller proportion of the lexical inventory is of West African origin and a few items can be attributed to pre-Columbian languages of the Lesser Antilles.
The grammar of the language cannot be assigned to a specific source with the same degree of confidence as the vocabulary. There are several explanatory theories but it is a fair summary to say that the grammar of St. Lucian has been generated by a combination of the following processes: the retention of grammatical patterns and processes of the West African languages spoken by Africans in the plantation setting, the reinterpretation of the grammar of French by these Africans, and universal forces of language creation, change and shift. The relative contributions of these processes are being explored by several scholars.
Dr. Lawrence Carrington Trends in Linguistics – Dictionary of St. Lucian Creole – Jones E. Mondesir. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. 1992