Creole peoples

Creole peoples may refer to different ethnic groups around the world. The term has been used with various meanings, often conflicting or varying from region to region. Creole peoples vary widely in ethnic background and mixture and many have since developed distinct ethnic identities. The development of creole languages is sometimes mistakenly attributed to the emergence of Creole ethnic identities; however, the two developments occur independently. In some places, they are ethnic groups formed during the European colonial era, from the mass displacement of peoples brought into sustained contact with others from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, who converged onto a colonial territory to which they had not previously belonged. In some cases, often involuntarily uprooted from their original home, the settlers were obliged to develop and creatively merge the desirable elements from their diverse backgrounds, to produce new varieties of social, linguistic and cultural norms that superseded the prior forms. This process, known as creolization, is characterized by rapid social flux regularized into Creole ethnogenesis. The English word creole derives from the French créole, which in turn came from Portuguese crioulo, a diminutive of cria, meaning a person raised in one's house. Cria derives from criar, meaning "to raise or bring up", itself derived from the Latin creare, meaning "to make, bring forth, produce, beget"; — itself the source of the English word "create". The word Creole has several cognates in other languages, such as créole, creolo, criol, criollo, crioulo, kreol, kreyol, krio, kriol, kriolu, and kriyoyo. In Louisiana, the term Creole has been used since 1792 to represent descendants of African or mixed heritage parents as well as children of French and Spanish descent with no racial mixing. Its use to describe languages started from 1879, while as an adjective, from 1748. In Spanish-speaking countries, the word Criollo refers to the descendants of Europeans born in the Americas, but also in some countries, to describe something local or very typical of a particular Latin American region.