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Page 1 of 2 This article was written by Dr. Hugues St.Fort. Dr. Hugues St.Fort was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Completed both primary and secondary education there. Higher education in France: B.A. in French literature at the Université de Besançon, Master’s in French Applied Linguistics at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, and a Doctorate in Linguistics at the Université René Descartes in Paris, in 1982. He allso taught Linguistics at Queens College, City College and Bank Street in New York City. Presently he is teaching AP French and Native Language Arts (Haitian Creole) for the Board of Education of NY City and an adjunct assistant professor of French at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, NY.
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Source: http://www.ahadonline.org/eLibrary/creoleconnection/Number20/haitiancreole.htm A. Creole Languages. Throughout the world, but mostly in some parts of West Africa, in the Indian Ocean, in the Caribbean in general and in the South Pacific, a number of languages referred to as pidgins and creoles are spoken by several million people. These languages are essentially contact languages. According to the classic definitions offered by linguists[i] who have studied them, pidgins are said to have developed in trade or other contact situations where different groups of speakers do not share any common language and have to create a new means of communication. Creoles are believed to be pidgins that have expanded both their linguistic structures and their communicative functions and have become the native language of an entire speech community.[ii] Caribbean Creoles emerged mainly in the context of European colonization around the seventeenth century when millions of Africans were captured in Africa and transported to the Americas to work as slaves on Caribbean plantations. France, Spain, Britain, Portugal and the Netherlands are the most important European nations that were involved in the colonial expansion and in the slave trade.
The languages of these nations became ideologically dominant on the Caribbean islands (English in Jamaica, French in Haiti, Martinique or Guadeloupe…) but the overwhelming majority of these populations continue to speak a creole variety based lexically on the language of the former colony. There are several groups of creole languages. These creoles are not mutually intelligible although their speakers may somewhat understand each other . They are identified by their lexicon, i.e. vocabulary, words, which is heavily of European origin: Haitian Creole (HC) is based lexically on French, Jamaican Creole is based lexically on English… But the syntax , the system of rules of creole languages is very much different from the lexifier languages , i.e. the language that furnished to the creole the majority of its words[iii]. Linguistically speaking, creole languages are in no way inferior to their lexifier languages or to other languages spoken in the world. Like all languages, they reflect the universal grammatical properties and the mental processes common to all natural, (i.e. human) languages: English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, Hindi, Quechua, etc… Ideologically speaking, creole languages have been battling powerful social forces more interested in keeping the low status traditionally given to them than using that language spoken by all native Haitians to develop literacy and formal education throughout the country. Despite remarkable advances in the last three decades, the ideological dimension is by far the one that causes the most concerns.
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