Haitian Creole: a Challenge for Education

Extract

Haitian Creole is a unique language, as are all creole languages. Mother tongue of almost six million people—without counting those who have immigrated—it has its own particular ways of expressing in words, of making sentences and forming a discourse. However, for more than two centuries it has been excluded from many circuits of communication. The limits imposed on it have kept it from developing a creativity, at the vocabulary level as well as that of organizing a discourse that would assure a function of plural communication, both oral and written. The present challenge of this long-throttled language has posed an important number of problems in linguistics, teaching, culture and politics because of new communication systems and especially because of education.