I visited two bookstores in Saint-Denis. I stopped into Gérard first. They had a wide selection of books for tourists yet were disappointedly lacking in the area of language, especially since I was looking for books about kréol rénioné. I didn’t buy anything there. I was however more impressed with Autrement since it was much larger than Gérard and even had an academic collection devoted to rénioné language acquisition.
Whenever I am in bookstores in other countries I also like looking in the travel sections because I can often find guides for places that one would never find in Canadian bookstores. I was surprised to find only one guide for Mayotte, in French of course, in one of these stores yet was surprised to see none at all for Comoros. However, when I browsed the airport bookstore prior to our flight to Mauritius I found many more guides to Mayotte, yet again, not a thing for Comoros. Why would that be?
I bought four books in Réunion:
Dictionnaire kréol rénioné français is a unidirectional dictionary supplemented with photograph illustrations. This dictionary appeared to try to standardize the spelling of the créole réunionnais. I noticed that no words began with H, Q or X and barely a handful with U or W. Every single C word started with CH- and gave a cross-reference to a corresponding word that began with S. Thus for chomiz we are referred to somiz, the definition for which is chemise. I wonder if at one time the Réunionnais pronounced this word with the initial Š. Likewise, all the J words gave cross-references to corresponding Z words, thus for a word such as janvié the referral is to zanvié which means janvier. The U vowel is rarely used, so for jupon one is referred to zipon. I can imagine that at one time jupon was the preferred spelling as a direct borrowing from standard French, yet as a creole it would have been written phonetically, hence zipon. The letter K is well represented as an initial letter, as it supplants all the C- and Q-initial words, thus for kat the definition is quatre. Kréol rénioné words already seen in my blog posts were in the dictionary, such as péi and pinpin. The Madagascar cardinal, also known in English as the red fody, is kardinal. For péi the entry reads “N. Pays. _ Adj. Local ; du pays [= de La Réunion]. La mizik péi. La musique locale.”
Mon imagier trilingue / Français Anglais Créole réunionnais is a large format illustrated guide to rénioné, with an emphasis on words specific to Réunion. The illustrations are in French alphabetical order. There are separate sections for fruits, fish, farm and domestic animals, wild animals, vegetables and birds, the latter of which includes cardinal / red fody / kardinal; paille-en-queue / red-billed tropicbird / payanké; and papangue / Réunion harrier / papang. The cover renders the translations in a hard-to-read cursive yet the text inside is in standard print lowercase, with the French word in red, followed by the English in blue and the rénioné in black. Descriptive sentences in all three languages used each word to show proper context.
Créole et français à La Réunion : réflexions sociolinguistiques, épistémologiques et politiques by Fabrice Georger was published in 2023 and covers the history of both French and kréol rénioné in a shared space; linguistic aspects of kréol; the use of language among the Réunionnais and their speaking audience; kréol in the school; establishing a kréol writing system.
My collection of translations of Le Petit Prince now includes Lo Pti Prins, in kréol rénioné.