Krazy Kreyol

I'm going to indulge myself today and geek out about Creole for a bit. For me, learning Creole was one of the most exciting things about this opportunity, and I haven't been disappointed. I've been interested in linguistics for a while, and a "creole" is a fascinating example of linguistic evolution in action. "Creole" is a general linguistic term, like "pidgin." A pidgin is a sort of trade language that spontaneously evolves when two or more groups of people who don't speak the same language need a way to communicate. A pidgin is very easy to pick up, and handy when you want to order food, buy livestock, or something like that. But it's not very easy to communicate complex ideas or emotions in pidgin. So, when a generation of children is raised speaking pidgin, something magical happens: it takes on rules and syntax that allow it to be a real language, capable of expressing anything that can be expressed by other languages. A creole is a second generation pidgin.

When African slaves were brought to Haiti centuries ago, families were forcibly separated and people from different tribes were placed together to ensure that they couldn't easily communicate and plot against their masters. But eventually they did cobble together a pidgin using mostly French words, along with some Spanish and English. And yet the article structure is a remnant of some of the African languages previously spoken by these tribes.

A lot of the French words get glued together. Words that start with vowels often get the article permanently attached. "Church" in French is "eglise"; "the church" is "l'eglise." In Creole, it's "legliz." "Friend" in French is "ami"; "my friends" is "mes amis." In Creole, it's "zanmi."

The best part about Haitian Creole is that there's none of the complicated grammer or gender of French. But that complexity is expressed in other ways. The poverty of grammer is offset by a richness of expression. There are endless idioms and proverbs and certain specific ways of saying things in Creole. We have a book in the office of 999 Haitian proverbs. There are 40 of them just about dogs. I think my favorite is, "you can't neuter the same dog twice"; kind of the Haitian equivalent of "fool me once..." When I first saw this book, I thought, a lot of these must be specific to villages or areas, there's no way every Haitian is familiar with all of these. But I tried reading ones I selected randomly and asking people if they'd heard them before, and 9 times out of 10 they had indeed. There's other books of proverbs that get up in the thousands.

English and Creole have a lot in common. The French invaded the British Isles a few hundred years before they invaded Hispaniola, but they left about the same imprint. Most words that are three syllables or longer are roughly the same in English, French or Creole. People who are learning either English or Creole often say that it's easy to get the basics down for simple communication, but there's a sort of false summit that comes when you realize that fluency is a long way off.

And just as English was long considered inferior to French, even by those who spoke only English, language is a matter of status in Haiti. I've heard different figures, but the one most often cited is that only about 20% of Haitians speak French. Those that do sometimes lord it over others to show how educated they are. But every Haitian speaks Creole. Some say that they don't, but that's like people in North America who say they don't watch T.V. My landlady speaks Creole to her maid and her gardener, but she only speaks French to me. I always reply in Creole, and I can tell it's somewhat annoying to her.

I much prefer to speak Creole here for a lot of reasons. It's more fun, and at this point it's easier. And unlike with Creole, when I speak French here I'm likely to get corrected on every little mistake I make.

Well I should go, I'm hogging the computer. As they say in Creole, "a pi ta": later.