Sentences: Putting it all together

Word order

In Louisiana Creole, like English, there is a set order of words in a sentence: subject-verb-object. Remember that pronouns take different forms depending on whether they are subject or object, like ‘I’ and ‘me’ in English.

Mo linm twa. ‘I love you’
To linm mwa. ‘You love me’

In this section, we’ll look at some more complex kinds of sentences so you can put together everything you’ve learned so far.

Yes-no questions

There are a couple of different ways of turning a statement into a question. Just like English, you can raise your intonation at the end of a sentence, keeping the structure the same:

T’olé manjé. You want to eat.
T’olé manjé? You want to eat?

You can also use the question word èske at the start of the question. This is like ‘Do you…?’ in English.

Èske t’olé manjé? Do you want to eat?

Wh-questions

If you’re asking who, what, when, where, why or how, the structure you use is similar to yes-no questions, but you have to add those wh-words.

Who

Ki moun li yê? Who is he?
Ça ki konné? Who knows?
Ki Jeff yê? Who is Jeff?

What

Ki kalité tròk to gin? What kind of truck do you have?
Ki lè t’olé jwènn? What time do you want to meet?
Ça ki sô nom? What’s his name?
Ki çé ça? What is that?
Ça t’olé? What do you want?
Ça t’apé parlé pou? What are you talking about?

When

Ékan to gònn? When are you leaving?
Kan to vyin bæk? When are you coming back?

Where

Éyou to sòr? Where are you from?
Éyou to rès? Where do you live?

Why

Kòfær to tris? Why are you sad?

How

Komen to yê? How are you?
Komen to kwi tô gombo? How do you cook your gumbo?

If you ask a question with the verb ‘to be’, remember you need to use yê.

Relative clauses

Sometimes, we want to use a whole sentence to describe a noun. This sentence-within-a-sentence is called a relative clause. An example from English is ‘The man, who I met yesterday’. Or: ‘The man I met yesterday’. Both of these structures are also possible in Creole:

Nom-la mo jwènn iyær. The man I met yesterday.
Nom-la, ki mo jwènn iyær. The man, whom I met yesterday.

You can also modify a longer phrase with a relative clause and ki:

Mo gin in kouzin ki travay o Téksas. I have a cousin who works in Texas.

Sometimes, we want to talk about the relative clause itself, as in ‘I like what you’re cooking’. In these cases we can use ça or ça ki.

Li manjé ça ki mo kwi. She ate what I cooked for her.
Fé ça t’olé! Do what you want!
Piti gin pou fé ça yê paren di yé fé. Kids have to do what their parents tell them to do.

Other times, we want to talk about where something is. For this, we can use the word éyou (you will also hear its variants aou, ou, ayou, etc.).

Vilaj mo té né é élvé. The town where I was born and raised.
Bayou éyou no fé lashash. The bayou where we go hunting.
Li té pa kapab trouvé éyou li shyin té. He couldn’t find where his dog was.
Éyou no rés, li joli. Where we live, it’s pretty.