I'm Humeira, a frontend engineer from Mauritius. This year, I'm trying something different; building things fast and putting them out there without getting stuck in endless overthinking. Balancing that with an 8:30 to 5:30 job isn't exactly a breeze, but it's been exciting! After launching Journaling Club, this is my second project for January. I'm figuring things out as I go, and honestly, it's been fun so far.
A few years ago, I set out to learn how to write in Kreol Morisyen, but guess what? I hit a wall. There were no reliable online resources. My only option was to purchase a dictionary from local bookshops in Mauritius, but that felt like an extra hurdle in my learning process. I wanted something more accessible.
Luckily, I stumbled upon Lalit Dictionary, and it became my go-to resource. Everything I learned and how I write in Kreol today is from this.
But here's the thing, it's been years since then, and I feel like Kreol Morisyen is still not easily accessible online. Every day, I see comments where Kreol is written with a strong influence of French spelling, which often shows how deeply rooted the French language still is in the way people write it. So, I thought, why not do something about it? I decided to scrape Lalit website and build this little app using their data. I hope it encourages more people to embrace and start learning Kreol Morisyen!
The data I scraped from the Lalit website is available here open-sourced.
In my recent research, I discovered that some words have different orthographies, but I don't have access to this data. If you're interested in contributing to this project, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.