French in Mauritius

Abstract This chapter analyses a short informal conversation between two female students, both born and raised in Quatre-Bornes, a small town at the centre of the island. They are both bilingual and switch regularly between Creole and French. The main speaker (AD) relates a recent trip to Singapore and Malaysia with her family in an extremely fast-speech rate, devoid however of an undue number of elisions or assimilations. The excerpt includes a wide variety of linguistic traits typical of Mauritius French, most of which can be attributed to Creole influence: absence of determiners, absence of prepositions à and de, a specific use of the preposition à. The phonological system of the speaker is characterized by the presence of four nasal vowels, the weakening of the rhotic in coda position, and the systematic simplification of obstruent + liquid clusters.