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Krio |
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Sierra Leone Krio is the lingua franca and the de facto national language spoken throughout the West African nation of Sierra
Leone. Krio is spoken by 97% of Sierra Leone's population and unites the different ethnic groups in the country, especially
in their trade and social interaction with each other. Krio is the primary language of communication among Sierra Leoneans
at home and abroad. The language is native to the Sierra Leone Creole people or Krios, (a community of about 300,000 descendants
of freed slaves from the West Indies, United States and United Kingdom), and is spoken as a second language by millions of
other Sierra Leoneans belonging to the country's indigenous tribes. English is Sierra Leone's official language, while Krio,
despite its common use throughout the country, has no official status. The Krio language is an offshoot of the language brought
by the Nova Scotian Settlers from North America, Maroons from Jamaica, and the numerous liberated African slaves who settled
in Sierra Leone. All freed slaves—the Jamaican Maroons, African Americans, Nova Scotian Settlers, Sierra Leone Liberated Africans—influenced
Krio, but the Jamaican Maroons, Nova Scotian Settlers, Igbo and Yoruba Liberated Africans were the most influential. The basic
English structure of Krio is an offshoot of the English spoken by the Nova Scotians and Maroons, while some of the African
words in Krio come from the Yoruba and Igbo languages spoken by the liberated Yoruba and Igbo. Krio is distinct from Pidgin
English as it is a language in its own right, with fixed grammatical structures and rules. Krio also draws extensively from
other European languages, namely Portuguese and French, e.g. the Krio word gentri/gentree, which means wealth or to acquire
wealth, is derived from the Old French word gentry, and the Krio word pickin, which means child, comes from the Portuguese
word pequeno. |
Names (more)[en] Aku dialect[fr] Aku [nl] Aku |
Language type :
Living
Technical notes
This page is providing structured data for the language Krio. |
ISO 639 CodesISO 639-3 : kriLinked Data URIshttp://lexvo.org/id/iso639-3/krihttp://dbpedia.org/resource/ISO_639:kri More URIs at sameas.org SourcesAuthority documentation for ISO 639 identifier: kriFreebase ISO 639-3 : kri GeoNames.org Country Information Publications Office of the European Union Metadata Registry : Countries and Languages |