Traveling their highest, Carpet and Aladdin draw the attention of something new. Well, several somethings.
In the first few minutes of the episode, they’re only shown as floating orbs of light making interested cooing noises and giggling and, for perhaps the first time, they are drawn to explore the world below, following our heroes back to Earth.
These don’t appear to be drawn from any specific folklore, though “sprite” itself is sourced from European folklore to do with elves, fairfolk, etc. As far as I know, the writers just went with a generic word that wasn’t “fairy” for these creatures they invented, and that’s all well and good. If you do some digging you might find a few things that ring similar, though.
The DVD Fairy 