Antillean Creole

Antillean Creole is a French-based creole language spoken primarily in the Lesser Antilles, with native speakers across Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago, and roughly 13 million native speakers as of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It emerged on plantations in the French Antilles when French settlers simplified their speech to communicate with enslaved Africans from West Africa and with indigenous Caribbean peoples, gradually developing into a distinct language rather than a French dialect. While most of its vocabulary derives from French, its grammar incorporates elements of West African and Carib indigenous languages, producing a system fundamentally different from standard French.