A creole was a language of slaves, a corrupted European language spoken by Africans. Though being “une funeste habitude” [Bertrand – Bocandé, M. 1849. “De la langue créole de la Guinée portugaise”, Bulletin de la Societé de Géographie de Paris, 12, p. 75] when spoken by blacks, it carried a nice local flavour when spoken by withes. In other words, there existed a clear notion of differentiation in the types of creole spoken. There levels were commonly distinguished: (1) A slightly modified European model with a “local” intonation pattern and new words added to it. (2) A form used by withes to speak to their social inferiors, in which verbal inflection had disappeared and syntax had been slightly simplified. This was also the level at which some blacks could talk with their masters. (3) A “creolo rachado” (the Cape Verdian expression), i.e., the form that Africans would use when speaking to each other. Thus, the nineteenth-century European intellectuals possessed a notion of creole and also realized, quite rightly, that there existed a gradation of speech varieties between a creole and its base language. However, their view of this gradation was erroneous: they considered it a linguistic one, based on degrees of corruption of the model language, rather than a social one, expressing social stratification. Nineteenth-century historical linguistics and dialectology focussed on separate lexical items and at best on morphology, neglecting syntactic structure.
- Meijer-Muysken (1977), a pag.22-23