petit nègren.

1890 S. P. Oliver in Madagascar: Robert Drury's Jrnl. 335 Créole French, or Petit nègre, together with a species of ‘Pidgin-English’, forms the basis of a species of Lingua Franca throughout the coast line of the great African Island [sc. Madagascar].

1903 World To-day May 643/2 There is also a species of ‘French Pidgin’ which is extensively used in the French possessions in the Far East... This curious language is called ‘petit négre’ [sic]... It has no auxiliary verbs, no genders, and uses the infinitive for all moods and tenses.

1944 French Rev. 17 259 The natives themselves, for their own linguistic convenience, have adopted a form of Pidgin French known as petit nègre, which is used along the West African coast all the way from Dakar to Brazzaville and the Belgian Congo.

1964 E. Palmer tr. A. Martinet Elements Gen. Linguistics v. 156 ‘Petit nègre’ is the nearest equivalent in French to pidgin.

1998 A. Dalby Dict. Langs. 202/2 Petit-Nègre ‘Little Negro’ was a similar temporary development in West Africa, especially Ivory Coast.

2015 M. de Jager tr. D. van G. Last & R. Futselaar Black Shame iv. 79 Even an open-minded man like Delafosse assumed that Africans would not be able to master refined French idiom. This discriminatory conviction was codified when in 1916 the army published a manual of this ‘petit-nègre’ to enable French officers to communicate with their soldiers.