Limonese Creole
| Limonese | |
|---|---|
| Limón Creole English | |
| Mekatelyu | |
| Native to | Costa Rica |
|
Native speakers
|
(55,000 cited 1986) |
|
English creole
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | limo1249 |
Limonese Creole (also called Limón Creole English or Mekatelyu) is a dialect of Jamaican Creole spoken in Limón Province on the Caribbean Sea coast of Costa Rica. Limón Coastal Creole is similar to varieties such as Colón Creole, Mískito Coastal Creole, Belizian Kriol, and San Andrés and Providencia Creole. The number of speakers of is below 100,000. Limón Coastal Creole does not have the status of an official language. It is very similar to Jamaican Creole and has borrowed many words from English.
Jamaican Creole was introduced to Limón by Jamaican migrant workers who arrived to work on the construction of the Atlantic railway, the banana plantations and on the Pacific railway.
The name Mekatelyu is a transliteration of the phrase "make I tell you", or in standard English "let me tell you". Linguists of the Universidad Nacional (of Costa Rica) consider it as not English. On the other hand, linguists of the Universidad de Costa Rica do not consider it to be English.
When European countries went to Africa to take people for slavery, they sent Africans from different countries who had no language in common to work on plantations in the Caribbean Islands. Those Africans had to develop a way to speak to communicate between them. If their slavedriver spoke English, they started to learn it. By the pass of time, those enslaved people created an English that was only understandable between them (a kind of pidgin) and then, they taught that way to speak to their children (a creole language).
Those speakers of creole English had a lot of contact with Scottish, Irish and English people, so they had to learn to speak an English that was more understandable to different nationalities (a "neutral" or standard English). Therefore, they created many ways to speak English, from the "most creole" to the "most standard" varying gradually according to the context.
Other situation happened to Africans who were slaved by frenchs. They developed a French creole, but they had little or no contact with French speakers. So, their French creole became an independent language from French.
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Wikipedia