Creole
Consonants
ü In Creole English the th
in the words thief and teeth would be pronounced like a t;
ü Loss of s at the beginning of words like
strong, string, and split.
Morphology (word-endings)
ü Creole English shows much less
dependence on morphology. Many of the grammatical inflections which
characterize standard English are either not part of Creole English or are
inconsistently used. Double marking for comparative and
superlative are both natural in Creole English.
Big (more) bigger (most) biggest / tall (more) taller (most) tallest
ü Unlike standard English, the Creole
does not mark the plural in the noun phrase unless the context of the utterance
is not clear, in which case it uses the third person before or after the noun
e.g. di dog dem/dem dog.
ü Creole, like standard English uses
juxtaposition, but unlike standard English uses it generally. Creole English
does not depend on morphology for indicating possession, but solely on
juxtaposition of nouns. The Creole also hardly (if at all) makes use the
apostrophe to show possession e.g trunk of tree/tree’s trunk/ tree trunk
ü Juxtaposition is also used to
indicate gender and possession e.g. man book, girls school, girl child, bull
cow, woman doctor, man tree.
Absence of Verbs/Shorter Sentences
ü The Creole uses shorter sentences and
tends to omit verbs e.g. The cat is fat =Di cat fat
ü Creole English has a much smaller
vocabulary than the standard because it is characteristic of fewer societies.
ü The Creole makes great use of pronoun
me instead of subject pronoun I e.g Me (instead of I) feel sleepy.
ü Some Rastafarians, on the other hand,
make excessive use of I e.g. Give I (instead of me) di bread.
Negation
ü The Creole allows double and triple
negation e.g Me nah no noting (instead of anything)
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