Aperçu sur les langues créoles dans l’Histoire générale des voyages de l’abbé Prévost

Abstract

The Histoire générale des voyages, published in 1746-59, but whose sources on the subject are earlier, offers only a quick overview of the langues créoles, an expression whose first attested occurrence is from 1688. Knowing that the first Creole dictionary, dealing with Negerhollands, due to the Moravian brother Oldendorp, appeared in 1767-68 and that the founding work of the French-Creole vocabulary is the Manuel des Habitants de Saint-Domingue by S. J. Ducœurjoly in 1802, one could not expect to find the rudiments of it in the Prévost collection. This remains nonetheless enlightening for us, on the one hand, by the method of ‘reduction’, which consists in incorporating into the report of a traveller on the region visited the remarks of previous travellers by comparing the sources, on the other hand, by the ethnic mix that it highlights and the links that it establishes between languages and societies. The passage from the travelogue to the collection thus makes it possible to constitute, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, an encyclopedic and reasoned knowledge.

Keywords

• West Indies
• Creole language
• Enlightenment
• abbé Prévost
• travels