Creole peoples

[1][2] Creole peoples represent a diverse array of ethnicities, each possessing a distinct cultural identity that has been shaped over time.

[2] In specific historical contexts, particularly during the European colonial era, the term Creole applies to ethnicities formed through large-scale population movements.

[3][4][5] This process of cultural amalgamation, termed creolization, is characterized by rapid social change that ultimately leads to the formation of a distinct Creole identity.

[6][7] The English word creole derives from the French créole, which in turn came from Portuguese crioulo, a diminutive of cria meaning a person raised in one's house.

Creole is also known by cognates in other languages, such as crioulo, criollo, creolo, kriolu, criol, kreyol, kreol, kriol, krio, and kriyoyo.

[4][13] In Africa, the term Creole refers to any ethnic group formed during the European colonial era, with some mix of African and non-African racial or cultural heritage.

As a result of these contacts, five major Creole types emerged in Africa: Portuguese, African American, Dutch, French and British.

On Réunion, the term Creole applies to all people born on the island,[16] while in South Africa, the blending of East African and Southeast Asian slaves with Dutch settlers, later produced a creolized population.

Perhaps due to the range of divergent descriptions and lack of a coherent definition, Norwegian anthropologist T. H. Eriksen concludes: “A Creole society, in my understanding, is based wholly or partly on the mass displacement of people who were, often involuntarily, uprooted from their original home, shedding the main features of their social and political organisations on the way, brought into sustained contact with people from other linguistic and cultural areas and obliged to develop, in creative and improvisational ways, new social and cultural forms in the new land, drawing simultaneously on traditions from their respective places of origin and on impulses resulting from the encounter.”[4] The following ethnic groups have been historically characterized as "Creole" peoples: Alaskan Creole, sometimes colloquially spelled "Kriol" in English (from Russian креол), are a unique people who first came about through the intermingling of Sibero-Russian promyshlenniki men with Aleut and Eskimo women in the late 18th century and assumed a prominent position in the economy of Russian America and the North Pacific Rim.

Some writers from other parts of the country have mistakenly assumed the term to refer only to people of mixed racial descent, but this is not the traditional Louisiana usage.

This caused many white Creoles to eventually abandon the label out of fear that the term would lead mainstream Americans to believe them to be of racially mixed descent (and thus endanger their livelihoods or social standing).

[8][9][10] Contemporary usage has again broadened the meaning of Louisiana Creoles to describe a broad cultural group of people of all races who share a colonial Louisianian background.

Some assert that "Creole" refers to aristocratic urbanites whereas "Cajuns" are agrarian members of the francophone working class, but this is another relatively recent distinction.

Traditional creole is spoken among those families determined to keep the language alive or in regions below New Orleans around St. James and St. John Parishes where German immigrants originally settled (also known as 'the German Coast', or La Côte des Allemands) and cultivated the land, keeping the ill-equipped French Colonists from starvation during the Colonial Period and adopting commonly spoken French and creole (arriving with the exiles) as a language of trade.

The "fiery Latin temperament" described by early scholars on New Orleans culture made sweeping generalizations to accommodate Creoles of Spanish heritage as well as the original French.

Both mixed race and European Creole groups share many traditions and language, but their socio-economic roots differed in the original period of Louisiana history.

People all across the Louisiana territory, including the pays des Illinois, identified as Creoles, as evidenced by the continued existence of the term Créole in the critically endangered Missouri French.

[32] Unlike the Americas, the term coloured is preferred in Southern Africa to refer to mixed people of African and European descent.

In Sierra Leone, the mingling of newly freed Africans and mixed heritage Nova Scotians and Jamaican Maroons from the Western hemisphere and Liberated Africans - such as the Akan, Igbo people, and Yoruba people - over several generations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries led to the eventual creation of the aristocratic ethnic group now known as the Creoles.

Thoroughly westernized in their manners and bourgeois in their methods, the Creoles established a comfortable dominance in the country through a combination of British colonial favouritism and political and economic activity.

The extension of these Sierra Leoneans' business and religious activities to neighbouring Nigeria in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - where many of them had ancestral ties - subsequently caused the creation of an offshoot in that country, the Saros.

[15] The Crioulos of mixed Portuguese and African descent eventually gave rise to several major ethnic groups in Africa, especially in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea (especially Annobón Province), Ziguinchor (Casamance), Angola, Mozambique.

In the latter period of settlement of Latin America called La Colonia, the Bourbon Spanish Crown preferred Spanish-born Peninsulares (literally "born in the Iberian Peninsula") over Criollos for the top military, administrative, and religious offices due to the former mismanagement of the colonies on a previous Habsburg era.

[35] In Argentina, in an ambiguous ethnoracial way, criollo currently is used for people whose ancestors were already present in the territory in the colonial period, regardless their ethnicity.

In many parts of the Southern Caribbean, the term Creole people is used to refer to the mixed-race descendants of Europeans and Africans born in the islands.

They eventually formed a common culture based on their experience of living together in countries colonized by the French, Spanish, Dutch, and British.

As workers from Asia entered the Caribbean, Creole people of colour intermarried with Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Javanese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Hmongs.