It is a sub-variety ofAntillean Creole, which is spoken in other islands of theLesser Antilles and is very closely related to the varieties spoken inMartinique,Guadeloupe,Saint Lucia,Grenada and parts ofTrinidad and Tobago. The intelligibility rate with speakers of other varieties of Antillean Creole is almost 100%. Its syntactic, grammatical and lexical features are virtually identical to those of Martinican Creole, though, like its Saint Lucian counterpart, it includes more English loanwords than the Martinican variety. People who speakHaitian Creole can also understand Dominican Creole French; although there are a number of distinctive features they are mutually intelligible.
Like the otherFrench-based creole languages in the Caribbean, Dominican French Creole is primarily French-derived vocabulary, with African and Carib influences to its syntax.[4] In addition, many expressions reflect the presence of anEnglish influence in the language in not just loan words, but in some of the pragmatic markers present.[5]
In 1635, the French seized Guadeloupe and Martinique and began establishing sugar colonies. Until 1690 Dominica had not been successfully colonized. By 1690, lumberjacks (English and French) arrived in Dominica for its forest resources. Subsequently, French from Martinique and Guadeloupe and their slaves settled in Dominica, establishing small farms producing coffee, cotton, wood, and tobacco. Dominican Creole developed among the slaves, originally as a mixture of the Creoles from Guadeloupe and Martinique, further enriched with Amerindian and English words. Even after becoming an English colony, the underdevelopment of the road system on the island hindered for a long time the spread of English, the official language of the country, to isolated villages, where Creole remained the only spoken language.[6]
Definite articles comes after the noun in Creole, unlike in French where they always precede the noun. "La" follows nouns that end with a consonant or "y". When a noun ends with a vowel, it is followed by "a" only.
^Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.)."Circum-Caribbean French".Glottolog. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
Dominica