Fuzzy boundaries between Creole and French in the Mauritian Linguistic Landscape

Abstract Drawing from linguistic landscape data collected in the public space of multilingual Mauritius, this paper discusses the manifestation of linguistic hybridization in its written form. Theoretically, we draw mainly on the concept of interlect coined by Prudent (1981) to describe the linguistic practices in creole speaking islands. We show the embeddedness of French and Creole, two of the most spoken languages in the country, and English, the official language, in these signs and argue that boundaries between these languages are difficult to define and fuzzy. The case is particularly frequent that Creole structures are ‘masked’ by a French orthography. Although this fuzziness can be observed at all the levels of the language structure, we here focus mainly on the orthographical and the morphological levels.