Report from Reunion Island: The Creole language at school

Audio 48:30

In his CP class at Laurent Vergès elementary school in Le Port, Stéphane Marcy teaches one day a week in Creole.

The rest of the time, he alternates with French.

© Margot Hemmerich

By: Emmanuelle Bastide |

Margot Hemmerich

In Réunion, 80% of the population is Creolophone.

However, only 5% of the 8,000 teachers on the island are authorized to teach Creole.

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Twenty years after the creation of CAPES in 2001, attitudes are slowly changing.

National Education now recognizes the educational need to rely on the mother tongue of children from an early age, but the weight of the colonial past continues to make Creole a less valued language than French. 

Report by 

 in kindergarten and first grade classes and with the various actors involved in the field and in the institution to develop bilingualism on the island. 

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