A student recently shared some interesting thoughts with me regarding potential grammatical parallels between so-called creole languages like Haitian Creole:
what I found very interesting was the footprint of some grammatical structures in Bambara (particularly the prefixes be, te, ye, ma before verbs to indicate tense and negation) in Kreyol language (spoken in Haiti, St Lucia, Dominica, etc., called Kweyol anywhere except Haiti). As you may know, Kweyol is very french based but it entails a lot of linguistic features from Africa as a result of slavery (mostly in French West Africa) and also Kalinago (the indigenous people’s language in Dominica). While in french the verbs are conjugated to indicate tense, in Kweyol you can form different tenses using prefixes before verbs. For instance:
Je mange= Mwen ka manjé
J’ai mangé= Mwen té manjé
Je mangerai= Mwen ke manjé
This feature looks very african-rooted to me now that I’m learning Bambara.
Does anyone else know of other features in Creole languages that remind them of Manding language varieties like Bambara?