Cree Algonquian creole [‘European born in the West Indies,’ from Span. criollo ‘native’]

Creoles are former pidgins whose functional and grammatical limitations and simplification have been eliminated and which now function as full-fledged, standardized native languages. Creoles originated primarily in regions of colonialization where the indigenous people were either enslaved or otherwise made to be highly dependent upon their white masters. The social pressures of assimilation lead originally from bilingualism (indigenous language and pidginized European language) to pidgin monolingualism and eventually to a complete loss of the original native language replaced by the creole. Creoles are characterized by a considerably expanded and altered grammar and vocabulary. According to Bickerton (1981, 1984), this can be traced to the innate linguistic capacities of humans that impose grammatical structure upon the relatively unstructured pidgins. This would explain why creoles have a generally similar grammatical structure, an observation made as early as 1850 by H. Schuchardt. The classification of a creole is based upon its main source of vocabulary, viz. French Creole (Louisiana, French Guyana, Haiti, Mauritius), English Creole (Hawaii), Dutch Creole (Georgetown).