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For decades, the pidgin-creole life cycle hypothesis was considered the standard account for the development of both pidgins and creoles. Key aspects of this account include the belief that pidgins emerge from communicative necessity in multilingual environments, while creoles are the outcomes of the stabilization of pidgins, especially via nativization. This account has been critiqued from various directions, with French-based Creoles often serving as the crux of the debate. For these languages, a major point of contention has been the similarity between the languages of the Americas and the Indian Ocean despite the apparent absence of a stable precursor pidgin. For example, McWhorter (2000) defends the life cycle model by hypothesizing that French- based Creoles ultimately descend from an unattested 17th century slave castle pidgin. In contrast, Mufwene (2020) maintains that pidgins mostly formed after the development of creoles during the during a colonial transitional period in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Despite these canonical debates regarding French-based Creoles, French-based pidgins remain underexplored. While Skirgård (2013) has compiled and analyzed a corpus of Français Tirailleur, a variety closely associated with West African soldiers, there is still debate about whether it represents a “real” contact variety from the late 19th and early 20th centuries Parkvall (2018) or a stereotypical projection of otherness (Vigouroux (2017). In contrast, there is more consensus that Tây Bồi, or Vietnamese Pidgin French, developed in French Indochina during roughly the same time period and fell out of use when the French military presence ended. Although Français Tirailleur and Tây Bồi share many features, they are often assumed to be mostly independent developments, and to our knowledge, no extensive comparison has been conducted. In this work, we first review descriptions of Tây Bồi and Français Tirailleur to highlight their close structural affinity, Then, we introduce textual data showing that they were largely consolidated by 1890. Finally, we revisit some contemporary accounts of language education in French colonies. Taken together, these documents suggest that, far from being spontaneous solutions to communicative barriers, Français Tirailleur and Tây Bồi were heavily shaped by top- down instruction of ostensibly simplified French. Rather than disproving the existence of pidginized varieties, the codevelopment of regionalized Frenches in West Africa and Southeast Asia underscores the contradictions and instability of thecolonial-era two-track approach to language education.

Automatic language identification is frequently framed as a multi-class classification problem. However, when creating digital corpora for less commonly written languages, it may be more appropriate to consider it a data mining problem. For these varieties, one knows ahead of time that the vast majority of documents are of little interest. By minimizing resources spent on classifying such documents, we can create corpora covering previously overlooked languages faster than existing pipelines. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the targeted mining perspective, we introduce a new pipeline that can filter a single snapshot in two hours. We also provide web corpora for several French-based Creoles.

Efforts towards better machine translation (MT) for Creole languages have historically been isolated, due to Creole languages' geographic and linguistic diversity. However, most speakers of Creole languages stand to benefit from improved MT for low-resource languages. To galvanize collaboration for Creole MT across the NLP community, we introduce the First Shared Task for Creole Language Machine Translation at WMT25. This Shared Task consists of two systems tracks and one data track, for which we received submissions from five participating teams. Participants experimented with a wide variety of systems and development techniques. Our evaluation campaign gave rise to improvements in MT performance in several languages, and particularly large improvements in new testing genres, though some participants found that reusing subsets of pretraining data for specialized post-training did not yield significant improvements. Our campaign also yielded new test sets for Mauritian Creole and a vast expansion of public training data for two Creole languages of Latin America.

Automatic language identification is frequently framed as a multi-class classification problem. However, when creating digital corpora for less commonly written languages, it may be more appropriate to consider it a data mining problem. For these varieties, one knows ahead of time that the vast majority of documents are of little interest. By minimizing resources spent on classifying such documents, we can create corpora much faster and with better coverage than using established pipelines. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the language mining perspective, we introduce a new pipeline and corpora for several French-based Creoles.

Word classes are linguistic categories serving as basis in the description of the vocabulary and grammar of natural languages. While important publications are regularly devoted to their definition, identification, and classification, in the field of Romance linguistics we lack a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the current research. This Manual offers an updated and detailed discussion of all relevant aspects related to word classes in the Romance languages. In the first part, word classes are discussed from both a theoretical and historical point of view. The second part of the volume takes as its point of departure single word classes, described transversally in all the main Romance languages, while the third observes the relevant word classes from the point of view of specific Romance(-based) varieties. The fourth part explores Romance word classes at the interface of grammar and other fields of research. The Manual is intended as a reference work for all scholars and students interested in the description of both the standard, major Romance languages and the smaller, lesser described Romance(-based) varieties.

Whether or not several Creole languages which developed during the early modern period can be considered genetic descendants of European languages has been the subject of intense debate. This is in large part due to the absence of evidence of intermediate forms. This work introduces a new open corpus, the Moly\'e corpus, which combines stereotypical representations of three kinds of language variation in Europe with early attestations of French-based Creole languages across a period of 400 years. It is intended to facilitate future research on the continuity between contact situations in Europe and Creolophone (former) colonies.

A majority of language technologies are tailored for a small number of high-resource languages, while relatively many low-resource languages are neglected. One such group, Creole languages, have long been marginalized in academic study, though their speakers could benefit from machine translation (MT). These languages are predominantly used in much of Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. We present the largest cumulative dataset to date for Creole language MT, including 14.5M unique Creole sentences with parallel translations -- 11.6M of which we release publicly, and the largest bitexts gathered to date for 41 languages -- the first ever for 21. In addition, we provide MT models supporting all 41 Creole languages in 172 translation directions. Given our diverse dataset, we produce a model for Creole language MT exposed to more genre diversity than ever before, which outperforms a genre-specific Creole MT model on its own benchmark for 26 of 34 translation directions.

This paper presents a first attempt to apply Universal Dependencies (De Marneffe et al., 2021) to train a parser for Mauritian Creole (MC), a French-based Creole language spoken on the island of Mauritius. This paper demonstrates the construction of a 161-sentence (1007-token) treebank for MC and evaluates the performance of a part-of-speech tagger and Universal Dependencies parser trained on this data. The sentences were collected from publicly available grammar books (Syea, 2013) and online resources (Baker and Kriegel, 2013), as well as from government-produced school textbooks (Antonio-Françoise et al., 2021; Natchoo et al., 2017). The parser, trained with UDPipe 2 (Straka, 2018), reached F1 scores of UPOS=86.2, UAS=80.8 and LAS=69.8. This fares favorably when compared to models of similar size for other under-resourced Indigenous and Creole languages. We then address some of the challenges faced when applying UD to Creole languages in general and to Mauritian Creole in particular. The main challenge was the handling of spelling variation in the input. Other issues include the tagging of modal verbs, middle voice sentences, and parts of the tense-aspect-mood system (such as the particle fek).

La Guyane est la seule région au monde où se côtoient des langues créoles à base française1 et des langues créoles à base anglaise. Parmi les créoles à base lexicale française présents en Guyane, on compte le créole guyanais, divers créoles des petites Antilles (guadeloupéen, martiniquais, sainte-lucien), et le créole haïtien. Parmi les créoles à base lexicale anglaise, on trouve l’aluku, le ndyuka et le pamaka (appelés aussi nenge(e)), le saamaka (créole anglo-portugais), le sranan tongo (la langue véhiculaire du Suriname voisin) ainsi que le créole anglais du Guyana ou Guyanese Creole. Bien que les légères différences structurelles qui existent au sein des créoles d’une même base lexicale soient souvent brandies par les locuteurs pour marquer leur appartenance à un groupe (aluku, ndyuka, etc.), ou leur origine régionale (martiniquais, guyanais, etc.), l’intercompréhension en Guyane est presque totale au sein des locuteurs de créoles français, ainsi qu’au sein de ceux de créoles anglais (à l’exception peut-être du saamaka, dont la mixité anglo-portugaise limite l’intercompréhension avec les autres créoles anglais). Depuis une trentaine d’années, les études sur les langues créoles font reculer les préjugés qui les réduisent au rang de langues simples, sans grammaire, avec peu de vocabulaire, même si ces idées persistent encore, parfois même au sein des populations créolophones. Aujourd’hui, on considère que ces langues sont un formidable « laboratoire » d’analyse de la facult