Another story of Z: Plural marking in spoken French, Fa d'Ambô and Réunion Creole

Convergent evolution is observed in languages as well as in living species. Thus the
three languages spoken French, Fa d’Ambô, and Réunion Creole independently
 developed a way of signifying plurality in count nouns involving the presence of a /z/
phoneme of uncertain morphological status at the left end of the stem. Two of them
are creole languages with different lexical bases, Portuguese for Fa d’Ambô, French
for Réunion Creole. As for spoken French, its inflectional morphology markedly
differs from Written French inflectional morphology. Such independent
developments satisfy all requisites to qualify as convergent evolution. Yet, spoken French
diverged from Written French only as far as exponence is concerned, not in terms
of the semantic-pragmatic rationale for number specification, whereas Fa d’Ambô
and Réunion Creole departed from their respective lexifiers at both levels. The
difference is bound to be related to the creole vs. noncreole statuses of Fa d’Ambô and
Réunion Creole on the one hand, and spoken French on the other. The difference
between Fa d’Ambô and Réunion Creole, on the other hand, is due to the different
language ecologies in the midst of which the two languages emerged.