Creole as a language

The author describes the characteristics of Krio, as speakers of the language themselves call it, but which is better known throughout West Africa as Creole, Patois, or, quite wrongly, Pidgin. Krio is the mother tongue of not many more than 25.000 Creoles, living for the most part in and around Freetown, but it is being increasingly adopted by speakers of tribal languages in Sierra Leone, in preference to English, as a lingua franca. The author believes that, once Krio is accepted as a language in its own right, many of the problems of teaching English in Sierra Leone will disappear. In Freetown a group of Creole Scholars have begun to collect texts from which grammars and a dictionary can be prepared.