Creole needs to be developed further towards the Internet.

The 20th edition of Festival Kreol ended last week in Seychelles. In conclusion, linguists offered a strong warning that if the Creole language is to survive, then its rightful place in cyberspace has to be ensured.

During the weeklong cultural event depicting the islands’ heritage and tradition, academics from the Creole-speaking nations met for a three-day linguistic conference under the theme, “the future of Creole is in its functionality.”

At present, it’s evident that Creole is used minimally on the web.

“To ensure its propagation, a Cyber community for it will have to emerge gradually, whereby a group of people communicate in Creole using communication and information technologies, ” said the Chief Technology Officer from Reliant Unified Solution, Ronny Adonis.

Creole has already got a standardized spelling system. Now what’s needed is to develop it further towards the Internet.

"One way around this is to encourage a web culture amongst local businesses, whereby locally built web sites use Creole as a working language alongside French and English,” remarked Jaya Nair from Space '95.

One of the key arguments hindering the spread of Creole in the Information Society is the adoption of words for technology that have not been developed in Seychelles.

“We should support actions aimed at teaching Creole, in order to consolidate, or even to increase, the number of the people able to use it to communicate through ICTs,” suggested George Thande from the local daily newspaper, The Seychelles Nation.

The director of the Creole Institute, Penda Choppy, said we needed assistance at international level. This would help to solve many technical problems, such as the creation of software that would allow the browser to translate and read the content of any pages written in most underprivileged languages, for example Creole.

The institute has indicated that it has plans to create language courses in Creole. This will be done by applying modern technologies such as multimedia support, CD-ROMs, books, the Web, etc. in support of systematic targeted instruction in the language and its spelling.

“Once it has been educated, this community of Creole speakers will easily be able to use Creole to communicate on Internet, and it will be gradually transformed into a cyber community,” suggests Mrs Choppy.

“The aim must be to make any language a working language for it to stay alive,” she added.