What is Haitian Creole?

Here is an article of interest on the every-day language spoken in Haiti. It comes from an article by Albert Valdman, a scholar from the University of Indiana.

What is a creole?

The people in Haiti call Haitian Creole kreyòl (Creole in English), so we will call it Creole. The term creole comes from a Portuguese word meaning "raised in the home." It first referred to Europeans born and raised in the overseas colonies. It was later used for languages that arose on the plantations that the Europeans established, where cash crops (indigo, coffee, cotton, sugar) were produced using slaves imported from Africa. Creole is the most widely spoken and most developed of a large group of creole languages that are found today in all former French plantation colonies, including Louisiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guyana and islands in the Indian Ocean. Nothing about their structure differentiates them from other languages nor makes them inferior. The grammar of Creole is just as complex or simple as that of English or French, for example, and its vocabulary meets all the needs of its speakers.

How was Creole formed?

In a way, Creole resulted from African slaves' efforts to speak the French that they heard when they arrived in the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Slaves came from all over West Africa and spoke many different languages. On any one plantation, several African languages were spoken. Also at that time, most of the French people in Saint-Domingue spoke French dialects and everyday spoken French. That type of French, called Popular (common people's) French, differed a lot from the French spoken by the ruling classes in France called Standard French. The slaves, seldom able to communicate with fellow slaves in a common African tongue, tried to learn Popular French. Slaves who arrived later, especially field slaves who had little contact with French speakers, tried to learn the approximative variety of Popular French the other slaves spoke rather than Popular French itself. Over time, this approximative form of French became more and more different from the French varieties and came to be recognized as a language in its own right--Creole. Creole has kept the original meaning of Popular French words whereas in France these words were replaced by words from Standard French, and some Popular French words changed their meaning.