Tayo, also known as Saint-Louis Patois (French: patois de Saint-Louis), is a French-based Creole spoken on the outskirts of Nouméa, the capital city of New Caledonia. It is spoken by about 3,000 people in the village of Saint-Louis, about 15 km (9.3 mi) from Nouméa. The language developed out of the contact of speakers of many different Kanak languages in the mission, and the use of French for official purposes and as the language of prestige. The language contains structural elements primarily from Melanesian languages and lexical elements mainly from French.

Saint-Louis was founded as a Marist mission in 1860 in the early French colonial period of the island, in order to convert the native Kanak population to Christianity and a European way of life. The missionaries took converts from surrounding Kanak tribes, especially the Cèmuhi, Drubea and Xârâcuu to live in the mission. Saint-Louis therefore became a highly multilingual society with a diverse range of Kanak languages as well as French. In order for different ethnic groups to communicate and also because French was the language imposed by the missionaries, a simplified French became the language of communication and the native language of the next generation, which developed into Tayo Creole, mixing French vocabulary with mainly Melanesian language structures.

The girls school in Saint-Louis has been widely considered instrumental in creating the conditions for the formation of Tayo, especially by Speedy (2013). There, Kanak girls were schooled in standard French, and Kanak languages were forbidden, although in practice girls used many linguistic resources to communicate such as code-switching, translation and the use of interlanguages. These communicative practices resulted in a form of French with Melanesian structures. Men and boys meanwhile had less exposure to French working in the field. When the girls married husbands from the community their language had greater prestige than Kanak languages, thanks to the ideology of the missionaries. Therefore, despite the societal multilingualism that had been the norm in New Caledonia at the time, in which children would learn the different native languages of their mother and father, couples communicated with each other and their children primarily in simplified French and this became the first language of the next generation, as Tayo Creole.

There has been a debate among linguists as to the impact of Reunion Creole in the formation of Tayo. Chaudenson proposed that Tayo was actually a ‘second generation’ creole, directly descended from the creole language of Reunionese migrants. He based this claim on phonological, lexical and grammatical similarities between the languages and the fact that some Reunionese had settled near Saint-Louis. Ehrhart and Corne refuted this claim, arguing that Tayo contains mainly Kanak structures. Speedy agrees that Tayo is largely structurally Melanesian, although she also argues that Reunion Creole was a type of French that interacted in the formation of Tayo.

Tayo nouns do not display much internal morphology, with some number and definiteness information encoded in modifiers and clitics outside of the noun.

Tayo nouns can be pluralised with the modifier tule, which can be contracted to tle or te. This is placed before the noun as shown in example (a):

(a) tule laser-la le travaj

PL nun-the/this SI work