Etymology

The word creole comes from the Portuguese term crioulo, which means "a person raised in one's house", from the Latin creare, which means "to create, make, bring forth, produce, beget". In the New World, the term originally referred to Europeans born and raised in overseas colonies[7] (as opposed to the European-born peninsulares). To be "as rich as a Creole" at one time was a popular saying boasted in Paris during the colonial years of Saint-Domingue, for being the most lucrative colony in the world. The noun Creole eventually came to denote mixed-race Creole peoples and their mixed Creole languages.

 

Origin

Haitian Creole (Kreyòl Ayisyen), commonly referred to as simply Creole, or Kreyòl in the Creole language, is a French-based creole language spoken by more than 12 million people worldwide, and is one of the two official languages of Haiti, where it is the native language of a majority of the population.

 

The language emerged from contact between French settlers and enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the 17th and 18th centuries. Although its vocabulary largely derives from 18th-century French, its grammar is that of a West African Volta-Congo language branch, particularly the Fongbe language and Igbo language. It also has influences from Spanish, English, Portuguese, Taino, and other West African languages. It is not mutually intelligible with standard French, and has its own distinctive grammar. Haitians are the largest community in the world speaking a modern creole language.

 

Haitian Creole is also spoken in regions that have received migration from Haiti, including other Caribbean islands, French Guiana, France, Canada (particularly Quebec) and particularly in the United States. It is related to Antillean Creole, spoken in the Lesser Antilles, and to other French-based creole languages.

 

Official language

The Constitution of 1987 upgraded Haitian Creole to a national language alongside French. It classified French as the language of instruction, and Creole was classified as a tool of education. The Constitution of 1987 names both Haitian Creole and French as the official languages, but recognizes Haitian Creole as the only language that all Haitians hold in common. French is spoken by only a small percentage of citizens.

 

Orthography

Haitian Creole has a phonemic orthography with highly regular spelling, except for proper nouns and foreign words. According to the official standardized orthography, Haitian Creole is composed of the following 32 symbols: a, an, b, ch, d, e, è, en, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, ng, o, ò, on, ou, oun, p, r, s, t, ui, v, w, y, and z.  The letters c and u are always associated with another letter (in the multigraphs ch, ou, oun, and ui). The Haitian Creole alphabet has no ‘’q’’ or ‘’x’’; when ‘’x’’ is used in loanwords and proper nouns, it represents the sounds /ks/, /kz/, or /gz/.

There are no silent letters in the Haitian Creole orthography.

All sounds are always spelled the same, except when a vowel carries a grave accent (`) before (n), which makes it an oral vowel instead of a nasal vowel:

(en) for /ɛ̃/ and (èn) for /ɛn/;

(on) for /ɔ̃/ and (òn) for /ɔn/; and

(an) for /ã/ and (àn) for /an/.

When immediately followed by a vowel in a word, the digraphs denoting the nasal vowels (an, en, on, and sometimes oun) are pronounced as an oral vowel followed by /n/.

 

Grammar

Haitian Creole grammar is highly analytical: for example, verbs are not inflected for tense or person, and there is no grammatical gender, which means that adjectives and articles are not inflected according to the noun. The primary word order is subject–verb–object as it is in French and English.

 

Many grammatical features, particularly the pluralization of nouns and indication of possession, are indicated by appending certain markers, like yo, to the main word.