In addition, the enslaved people and indentured servants from cultures in Africa and Asia left a diverse legacy of language in the country.

Mauritian Creole is the lingua franca of the Republic of Mauritius, which gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1968.

English is spoken primarily for administration and educational purposes and French is used by the media and as a second language.

However, Philip Baker and Chris Corne have argued that Réunionnais influence on Mauritian was minimal and that the two languages are no more similar to each other than they are to other French-based creoles.

Only a small portion of Mauritian vocabulary derives from the Portuguese element in European maritime jargon (e.g., the Mediterranean Lingua Franca) or from enslaved Africans or Asians who came from areas in which Portuguese was used as a trade language (e.g., Angola and Mozambique).

The French ultimately claimed Mauritius and first settled it from 1715 to 1721, building a plantation economy based on slave labour.

People from West and Southeast Africa Madagascar came to form 85% of the population by 1777, which led to linguistic fragmentation.

Eventually, this evolved into a creole language, with the complexity and completeness required for young children to use it as their mother tongue.

Mauritian Creole had already been firmly entrenched and continued to be the language used after British occupation began.

Though Indians soon became the majority population on the island, their own linguistic fragmentation, as well as their alienation from the English- and French-speaking plantation owners, led them to take up Mauritian Creole as their lingua franca.

The native English and French population have long enjoyed greater social status, in addition to dominating government, business, education, and the media; however, Mauritian Creole's popularity in most informal domains has persisted, with around 85% of the population speaking this language.

[3] The language has several published dictionaries, both monolingual and bilingual, written by authors such as Philip Baker (1987) and Arnaud Carpooran (2005, 2009, 2011).

The Mauritian government began supporting an orthographic reform in 2011, with a system that generally follows French but eliminates silent letters and reduces the number of different ways in which the same sound can be written.

Some words have changed their meanings: Mauritian gagn ("to get, obtain") is derived from French gagner ("to win, earn").

[8] The word ziromon meaning pumpkin is from Portuguese jerimum, originally from Tupi jirumun.

Pas laisse nous tomme dans tentation, Mais tire-nous depuis le-mal.

Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation, Mais délivre-nous du mal.