Student presentation 4 : Haitian Creole

Information about Haitian Creole below the jump.

HAITIAN CREOLE LANGUAGE

            Today I would like to present you the Haitian Creole language that is spoken by about twelve million people in the world. The number includes all Haitians in Haiti and, via emigration, about two to three million speakers residing in:

ñ  the Bahamas

ñ  Cuba

ñ  Canada

ñ  France

ñ  Cayman Islands

ñ  Dominican Republic

ñ  Venezuela

ñ  French Guiana

ñ  Martinique

ñ  Guadeloupe

ñ  Belize

ñ  Puerto Rico

ñ  Ivory Coast

ñ  USA

            Since it is a creole, it is based on other languages. The most important one, the one on which the Haitian Creole is largely based, is the 18^th to 21^st century French. French is mixed with some African languages as well as with Arabic, Spanish, Taino (a language of the Tainos –  pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Bahamas, Greater Antilles and the northern Lesser Antilles) and English. Although there are hues of all those languages, while listening to the Haitian Creole, probably the only one that will be brought to your mind is French. Samples of conversations can be found in Internet, on the YouTube service.

            The origins of the Haitian Creole are not precisely documented, the exact date or moment of the creation is unknown. Following, there are many theories on the formation of the language. Some of them are more probable and some are less.

            The leading theory states that a form of creole had already started to develop on West African trading posts, before the importation of African slaves into the Americas. And that, since many of those slaves were being kept for some amount of time near these trading posts, before being sent to the Caribbean, they would have already learned the very basic and simple creole, even before getting there. It shows that although Haiti is a capital of the language, a fatherland of the Creole and its roots may have been somewhere else.

            Another theory presumes that the creole was locally developed when slaves speaking languages from the regions of sub-Saharan Africa stared to relexify them with the vocabulary from the French language.

            Haitian Creole, along with French, is one of the two Haiti's official languages. But it was not always so. It needed time to be recognized as a prior language of the island. The most important role in this process played a Haitian writer Felix Morisseau-Leroy (1912-1998). He wrote in the Creole for poetry and plays. By 1961 he succeeded in having it recognized as an official language of Haiti, after expanding its teaching in schools and use in creative literature, because before, the sole literary language was French. What is a common truth, for the language to gain an official status it needs prestige. The official status was also maintained under the country's 1987 constitution.

            The Creoles orthography was standarized in 1979. Although the use of Haitian Creole in literature has been small, it is still increasing. Today there are various newspapers, as well as radio and television programs, that are produced in the Creole. Moreover, Haitian language and culture is taught in some colleges and universities in the United States and in Bahamas. But the most important thing that prove the Creole's prestige is that it is used by all the citizens in their everyday lives.

            Although there are quite a lot of people who speak the Haitian Creole, they are almost hundred percent its native speakers. Haiti is isolated from the rest of the world by a significant    language barrier. Also lexical information on the Internet is incomplete, since there are no users who update and use it in machine translators. The problem is that very few non-Haitians are able to communicate easily in the language, despite the courses offered by some countries. And what is the most awkward thing, most Haitians do not understand other languages, even French – in spite of multiple similarities.

            As the consequence of the problem, after the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010, international help badly needed translation tools for communicating in the Haitian Creole. But they had no idea who to contact as translators. It impeded the whole action showing how important is a language in a process of communication.

           

            Now let's move to some information about the linguistic aspects of the Creole. In this language, orthography strictly follows pronunciation, except for proper nouns and foreign words.

            The Creole is composed of 32 sounds:

a, an, b, ch, d, e, è, en, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n , ng, o, ò, on, ou, oun, p, r, s, t, ui, v, w, y, z

among them the ones underlined are vowel sounds.

            The only accent in the language is accent grave  (è) while in French there are also the most popular accent aigu (acute accent, é), accent circonflexe (circumflex, ê), accent tréma (ï) and cédille (ç).

            What concerns grammar, it differs from French, although the world order is the same (SVO). There is no grammatical gender and verbs are not inflected for tense or person. They are usually the same spoken words as the French infinitive, but there's no conjugation in the language. Since verbs have one form only, changes in tense are indicated by the use of tense markers:

            te         simple past

            t ap     past continuous

            ap        present continuous

            a          future

            pral     future, “going to” equivalent

            ta         conditional future

            example: (mwen – I, manje – to eat)

                            mwen manje          I eat.

                            mwen te manje      I ate.

            The lexicon is mostly French, but the sentence structure is like that of the West African Fongbe language (a well developed language of African tribes). It is because many of the enslaved people that were brought to Haiti came from West Africa. Example:

            French             Fongbe            Haitian Creole

            ma bécane      keke che         bekan mwen

            (my bike)        (bike my)        (bike my)

            In the Creole there are six pronouns, one for each combination, it means:

                        singular                                         plural

1.      mwen – I, me, my, etc.          1. nou – we, our...

2.      ou – you, your...                    2. nou / ou – you...

3.      li - he, she, it, her...                3. yo – they, their...

           

            Whether we are talking about a man or a woman we find from the context of the situation or from the rest of the sentence. Example:

            Li se frè mwen – He is my brother.

            The world  frè meaning brother suggests that the subject is male.

            What concerns plurals, if a noun is definite, to pluralize it there is a yo marker added at the end. Example:

            Liv yo – The books.

            If it is indefinite, there is no plural marker and its plurality is determined by context. Example:

            Fi yo mete rob – The girls put on dresses.

It is evident that the girls in question won't put all the same dress so the noun is considered plural.

            After exploring the language further it becomes evident that there are multiple similarities between the Haitian Creole and French. What follows, a French speaking person is able to understand a lot of of the Creole. To finish, here are some examples of simple expressions in the language:

            Bonjou!                      Good morning!

            Bon apre-midi!          Good afternoon!

            Bònn nui!                  Goodnight!

            Eskize mi!                  Excuse me!

            A pi ta!                       See you later!

            Koman ou rele?        What's your name?

            Koman ou ye?           How are you?

            Mwen la.                    I'm fine.

            Adye!                         Goodbye!