The Lord’s Prayer in Haitian Creole:
- Papa nou ki nan sièl la,
- Nou mandé pou yo toujou réspékté non ou.
- Vi-n tabli gouvènman ou,
- pou yo fè volonté ou so latè,
- tankou yo fè-l nan sièl la.
- Manjé nou bézouin an, ban nou-l jòdi-a.
- Padonnin tout mal nou fè,
- minm jan nou padonnin moun ki fè nou mal.
- Pa kité nou nan pozision pou-n tonbé nan tantasion,
- min, délivré nou anba Satan.
- Amèn.
Haitian Creole (1700- ), also known as simply Creole or even Kreyol, is the main language of Haiti. About 8 million speak it. Most live in Haiti but some live in Miami, Cuba and elsewhere.
Creole grew out of the broken French of the African slaves in Haiti. The slaves came from different parts of Africa and had no common language other than pidgin French, the simple sort of French that the slaves masters spoke to them in. But the French was too simple to use as a full language. The children of the slaves, growing up knowing nothing else, made it into a full language, making pidgin French into creole French. This became Haitian Creole.
Haitian Creole can do anything that French can do. But because it is the language of the poor in Haiti – the rich speak French – many look down on it.
Haitian Creole is like French but much simpler. The grammar does away with things like gender and word endings that make French hard to learn. It is more like English: word order and short little words put here and there help you to make sense of it.
Most words come from French:
English | Latin | French | Creole |
sing | cantare | chanter | chante |
goat | capra | chevre | kabrit |
cheese | caseus | fromage | fromaj |
key | clave | clef | kle |
night | noctem | nuit | nuit |
place | platea | place | kote |
bridge | pontem | pont | pon |
The difference is not as bad as it seems on paper: Creole spelling is way more up to date than French spelling.
What makes Creole different is the way these words are put together.
It is no more bad French than French is bad Latin. French itself is simpler than Latin in many of the same ways that Creole is simpler than French. It merely takes French one step further.
But is it a separate language? Some, out of pride for the Haiti they grew up in, say that it is. And because the grammar is so different, it is hard to think of it as French. Yet if you go by the simplest test to tell if two languages are the same – whether a speaker of one can understand the other – then Creole is, in fact, just a form of French.
It is a form of French by its very nature: for society to function those at the top, who spoke French, had to be able to understand it, even if they could not speak it themselves.
If you speak French, you will not understand Creole right away, but once you hear it enough you will. It is not like learning a whole new language, but rather getting used to a different form of a language you already know.
See also:
Thanks for clearing that up. The haitian folks i’ve asked never could explian it in a way that i could understan.
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sounds sexy…i love it when men speak to me in different languages, major turn on. I’ve always wanted bilingual children.
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Much of the things we study is all about ‘perspectives’ -Kryeol is no exception to that rule.
It all depends if you want to view Haitin kreyol as
‘Pidgin French’. ‘Broken English’ the term used in the
English-Caribbean islands.
It would have been interesting if an African approach hcould be found that had undertaken. For instance how many loans words from Africa are in the language?
Is the syntax underlying the language more closer to ‘Africa’
or France, although it is utilising ‘French’??
And so forth!!!
Then you have the issue of when does a ‘language’ become a distinct form of language
I remember someone saying – can’t remember who though saying that English, French etc can be rightly viewed as ‘Broken Latin’, but obviously very few will conceive it that way
Thanks!!
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I guess I meant something like this, even though I only had a very quick glance at the article
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=v06NQqs48lYC&pg=PT144&lpg=PT144&dq=African+syntax+of+Haitian+language&source=bl&ots=i_x32UnbQ7&sig=wDPUFuCr0zu37zKzqgEvT_RGOGM&hl=en&ei=zk9US4fRCaf20gSww52iCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CBIQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=African%20syntax%20of%20Haitian%20language&f=false
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I wish more people were like Mr. George Clooney. What he has done to help the Haitian people is just amazing. So many of the Hollywood celebrities are just phonies looking for publicity. George is one of the true greats.
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I’d actually have to strongly disagree with your belief that Haitian Créole (or any créole language for that matter) is simply “a form of French” or whatever European language the créole is derived from.
As you said, the language of Haiti and French in general does contain many similar words (92% of the words in Créole are derived from French). However that, by virtue of itself, doesn’t make Créole merely a variety of French. Italian and French have an 89% lexical similarity, as does Spanish and Portuguese, yet most reasonable people wouldn’t claim that any of the above are varieties of the same language.
Also of relevance is the question of mutual intelligibility. Given that Créole and French share a great deal of common vocabulary, its natural that they would be somewhat mutually comprehensible, yet the exact degree of inherent comprehension between the two languages is actually rather small. Créole grammar is rooted in the grammar of the Niger-Congo languages of West Africa, and is gramatically more similar to other Créole languages such as Jamaican Patois and Cape Verdean than it is to any European languages. Most French-speakers cannot understand créole without extensive-long term exposure to the language and one of the main markers of social division in the French Caribbean overall is the usage and mastery of French vis-à-vis that of créole.
I grew up the first 7 years of my life in St Martin (live in Queens now), where a large percentage of the population is of Haitian descent. We have our own version of créole as well as the Haitian variety, and both varieties are generally incomprehensible to the French tourists, and it usually takes weeks of exposure.
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Right, I know that. That is why I said in the post:
“If you speak French, you will not understand Creole right away, but once you hear it enough you will. It is not like learning a whole new language, but rather getting used to a different form of a language you already know.”
The only thing you are saying different is that the grammar comes from Niger-Congo languages. Which, if true, would be interesting so if you have any references on that I would like to read about it.
As to Spanish and so on, the lines where one Romance language ends and the next one begins are more a creation of government and public education than linguistics.
For example, from what I hear people in northern Portugal can understand both European and Brazilian Portuguese as well as Spanish and Galician. And that is partly due to exposure, like watching Brazilian television shows. The languages are close enough that you do not need to learn them separately.
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lol I know you mentioned that there are difficulties in understanding, but what I’m saying is that while it may not SEEM like you’re learning a whole new language, you still are because you’re learning an entirely new way of expressing your thoughts and sentiments through words. What makes Creole more than simply a variety of French is that you’re not simply re-arranging French words, but you’re learning to think and communicate with a completely different mindset. This is also part of the reason why languages created through the African diaspora (including Black American English) contain so many proverbs, expressions and idioms which make no sense in their European counterparts, but have rough equivalents in other creole languages. Mutual comprehension of two language systems does indicate that they’re related, but doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the same language, and comprehension is oftentimes one-sided. To take as an example Portuguese and Spanish, most people who are literate in either language can easily read the other, but speaking is a completely different story. My mother’s dominican, and I’m a fairly competent spanish speaker but I can barely understand portuguese, whereas most portuguese can understand understand castellano, since the pronounciation of castellano is generally more conservative (fewer dropped sounds, no nasals, less slurring) and thus sounds “clearer” to their ear. Given a few weeks of exposure it’s possible for the two to make conversation fairly easily (during the world cup I’ve seen spanish reporters talking to brasilian fans in spanish, and the brasilians would answer in a comical spanish/portuguese hybrid), but that’s by virtue of the fact that they’re closely related languages, not necessarily the same language.
Much of the research regarding the origins of Haitian Créole and other creole languages is in french, but I’ll try and find some links regarding the history of the languages of the African Diaspora, its actually pretty interesting stuff.
And I agree with what you said regarding the Romance languages…most of the divisions which occured among that language group were as a result of political boundaries, not necessarily cultural ones. Case in point-one in twenty Catalan speakers lives in France, and Occitan, the second largest romance language in France, only holds official recognition in Catalunya, despite being spoken by more than 500 times more people in France than in Spain.
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Interesting comments. I honestly have no idea where one language begins and another ends, however I think it’s worth mentioning that many creole speakers have no problem understanding their standardized counterparts.
Questions
-Is Haitian Creole standardized?
-Could we say Creole is a dialect instead of a completely different language than French?
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I actually disagree with your assessment that Creole is a dialect of French. French speakers cannot understand Creole without learning it essentially as a second language, and Creole speakers with no exposure to French do not understand it. It is in no way a form of French by it’s very nature, it’s only ties to French are in vocabulary.
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Lol…seeing the word “Haitian” makes me want some Haitian food.
😀 damn you
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@abagond
I’ve done some readings on Creole languages of the Caribbean. Rossari Rossao is right, Haitian Creole is not some form of French. It is distinct in syntax, grammar. Yes, the vocabulary of the language is mostly of French origin, but the way it is spoken and written is very, very different from French. A French person would not understand much of it, save maybe recognizing some of the vocabulary. English contains many words of French origin, but does that mean a French speaker could understand English? For that matter, English contains so much of its vocabulary coming from other languages (non-Germanic languages). If what makes a language ‘Creole’ is just diverse vocabulary, then English is more of a ‘Creole’ language than Haitian Creole.
If you want some good reads on Haitian Creole, check out Michel Degraff at MIT. He’s a respected linguist, and he’s been arguing for quite some time that Haiti must support Creole language learning in schools. The usual pattern in Haiti (and most of the Caribbean where Creole is spoken) was for schools to teach in French, which doesn’t really work when most of the students only speak Creole. Degraff, if I am referring to his work correctly, argues against a sort of ”pidgin’ origin for Haitian Creole.
I can’t speak for the entire Caribbean, but there have been numerous literary endeavors in Haitian Creole (or the Creoles of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, etc). People have been writing in these Caribbean Creoles for centuries, and it’s not French. Check out the long history of Haitian Creole poetry, for example. In older Creole texts, one might see the see of a French orthography, but the standardized orthography in use today in Haiti is quite different from French, and very phonetic.
http://www.nathanielturner.com/opengatehaitiancreolepoetry.htm
Click to access degraff2009creole_exceptionalism_and_the_mis_education_of_the_creole_speaker.pdf
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/degraff/publications.html
Click to access degraff2011creoles_in_cambridge_encyclopedia.pdf
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/degraff/publications.html
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“It is a form of French by its very nature: for society to function those at the top, who spoke French, had to be able to understand it, even if they could not speak it themselves.”
This is hilarious. Everybody speaks creole in Haiti. You wrote this bit of unintentional comedy because you are persuaded that ” those at the top” are by nature different from the rest. It would take a miracle not to speak a language you hear from cradle to grave.
“If you speak French, you will not understand Creole right away, but once you hear it enough you will. It is not like learning a whole new language, but rather getting used to a different form of a language you already know.”
Really? I can make pretty good guesses about some words in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, I don’t think that qualifies me to claim I speak these languages.
Champ de Mars, the main park of Port-Au-Prince is Chanmas in creole, I don’t see the resemblance. Three words meaning Mars’ field becomes one word that doesn’t mean anything in creole except for the name of the place in question. The same is true for the word “kob”, one of the variations for cents in Haiti. I only figured out why that word exists in Haitian creole when I read that one Nigerian Niara was equal to 100 “kobos” just as one Gourde is equal to 100 “kobs”. Nothing ‘French’ here.
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