“Ène langue qui nous comprend”: The Pragmatism and Politics of Translating the Qur’an into Mauritian Kreol

This article examines Mauritian Kreol Qur’an translations — a largely unknown and previously unexplored genre of Kreol literature — with particular attention to the translators’ language choices. It traces the publication history of these translations and explores the language attitudes expressed by their authors and publishers, in an effort to understand the place of Kreol within the multilingual Muslim community of Mauritius. The sources reveal a clear shift toward the use of written Kreol in Islamic literature at the expense of French during the period in which the corpus was published, from the 1970s to the 2010s. The textual analysis focuses on orthography, vocabulary, and grammar, showing that Muslim translators often opted for hybrid forms marked by borrowings from the lexifier language, French. They generally treated Kreol as a tool to reach pragmatic goals, primarily related to religious education, rather than as an end in itself. Nevertheless, their efforts cannot be fully disentangled from broader social and political debates surrounding the use and status of Kreol in Mauritian society over recent decades.