I've got a Creole friend who would most definately disagree.

There's a difference between a Creole and a creole:

Your Creole friend is probably a ``a person of mixed French or Spanish and black descent speaking a dialect of French or Spanish'' or possibly a ``white person descended from early French or Spanish settlers of the U.S. Gulf states and preserving their speech and culture''. The creole I'm talking about is a ``language that has evolved from a pidgin but serves as the native language of a speech community'' (where a pidgin is ``simplified speech used for communication between people with different languages'', usually referring to a melange of the languages involved).

The generic language term derived from the specific language, which derived from the name of the people, but it's a valid term nonetheless.

(Definitions from Merriam Webster Online.)