Haitian Creole

What Saint-Domingue gave the language

The language formed in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the 17th and 18th centuries. The move to sugar around 1690 brought an estimated 800,000 enslaved West Africans in the following century, many of them speakers of Gbe and other Kwa languages. With no shared language, they learned French from colonists who spoke Classical French and regional dialects such as Norman and Picard, and the speech drifted further from French with each new arrival. Claire Lefebvre argues that the result is a relexification: words that look French in a grammar that works like the African substrate, especially Fon.

Which laws raised its standing

The Act of 18 September 1979 raised its status, and the Institut Pédagogique National set an official spelling that year. The 1987 constitution made Creole and French the official languages. It called French the language of instruction and Creole a tool of education.

Why k and w caused a quarrel

Irish Methodist missionaries H. Ormonde and Primrose McConnell drew up the first technical spelling in 1940, later revised with Frank Laubach. Charles Pressoir and many educated Haitians disliked its k, w and y as too American and linked them with Protestantism. The c and ou of French spelling carried the opposite charge, of colonialism. The official system now has 32 symbols, no silent letters, and no q or x; the grave accent in è and ò is the only mark left, and it separates èn, an oral vowel before n, from en, a nasal one.

Where French still dominates

French is the high language of formal occasions and Creole the everyday one, for the minority who speak both. Until the 21st century, primary schools taught only in French, a second language for most pupils. The Bernard Reform of 1978 tried to teach the first four primary years in Creole with little success, and Creole teaching grew after the 2010 earthquake made basic education free. The daily Le Matin printed a whole edition in Creole on 28 October 2004 to mark the new Creole Day.