About three weeks ago I was encouraged by some Haitian friends to start using Duolingo. They knew of my interest in learning their language, and they had talked with me about the differences in the French and Haitian Creole languages, but there really wasn’t a place that would make it easy for me to learn kreyòl ayisyen.
Then Duolingo announced they were releasing their course on Haitian Creole! They urged me to sign up, and so I did.
I’m now about three weeks in, and it’s been a whirlwind. Here are some observations:
Learning a language isn’t just about learning words. It’s about learning rhythms and logic and meanings of the language, and it’s going to involve learning about the people who speak it. While Haitian Creol (kreyòl ayisyen, Kreyol, or “HC”) is not the only Creole in the world, it does have a definite location for its creation and its extension. HC is firmly planted in Haiti, a Caribbean nation that was a brutal forced labor camp run by the French for decades up through the beginning of the 19th century. France exploited the people of Haiti, rendering most of them as enslaved people, and regularly refreshing their population of enslaved people by capturing more and more Black Africans to replace the ones who were dying of exhaustion, malnutrition, or torture at the hands of the French. The first Black nation to wrest its freedom from the West, Haiti was established as a Republic in 1804, and was immediately subjected to the wiles of the Europeans and Americans to destabilize this dangerous nation of free Black people. (So much of the laws and brutality of the enslavers in the United States during the years from 1804-1861 were in reaction to the establishment of Haiti—the enslavers were scared to death that their enslaved human beings might learn of a free Black nation and then engage themselves in their own struggle to overthrow the slave society in the South.)
Haiti comprises people from various nations & people groups in Africa as well as some Indigenous from the Americas (the Indigenous inhabitants of Haiti were killed by their enslavement of the Spanish and French), and some Europeans who are typically among the elite in Haiti. The enslaved people from Africa did not share a common tongue—there are quite a few languages in Africa—and one great way to break up solidarity within the enslaved is to be sure that they do not have access to their native tongues. So over the course of the years, a rough pidgin of mostly French and some English and Spanish was hammered out to be an understandable proto-language. Some of the elements of the construction of the language are lifted from French, the tongue of the enslavers who would not learn the languages of their enslaved, some are lifted from English or Spanish, and some are lifted from the languages of African, most commonly Fon. That ad-hoc language gradually was regularized and popularized, and at some point the pidgin—the language of thrown-together words and sentences—evolved into a language of regular use with regularized rules for speaking, spelling, and writing. At that point, the pidgin became a creole.
A creole language is a language that is hammered out through wide use among various groups of people who do not otherwise have one language in common. Creole is not limited to Haiti or even to French-influenced languages: there are French-inspired creoles across the Antilles that are nearly mutually intelligible with Haitian Creole, and there are creoles that are based upon English or Chinese or other languages around the world. So when I refer to Creole as common language of the people, I mean the language that was created out of the bits and pieces of other languages, and specifically the kreyòl ayisyen of Haiti, which I will call “HC” for “Haitian Creole.”
One interesting part of the development of HC is the common greetings echo the conditions of the people who were developing the language. “Sa k pase?” (“How are you?”) has an answer “M pa pi mal” (“I’m not too bad”). What else can you say when your family and your people are under brutal occupation by enslavers? The best that you can say is that you are not too bad.
HC is an energetic, plosive language. It can sometimes sound like French (there is a shifting between French and HC all the time, it seems, among the better educated), but it is much more explicit in its sounds and enunciation. Not always! I struggle sometimes to catch a swallowed “se” or “yon” or whatever, and sometimes two words melt into each other in a way that takes me three or four tries to understand. But mostly it’s straightforward, and roughly pronounced the same. There are some regional differences between North, Central, and South, but they’re not overwhelmingly different.
Some sounds are still a little difficult for me to repeat. I’ve never really be able to trill an “r” in Spanish or French, so I still don’t get it right. But because the HC “r” is more from the back of the throat, it’s easier for me to try. The nasal “an,” “en,” and “on” are still not quite there for me—I really want to sneak in that “n” sound—but it’s not part of the pronunciation. Instead, they are nasal vowels that have their own pronunciation that uses your nose as well as your mouth to make the sound.
But the good thing is that in general what a word is spelled as is how it sounds like. And spelling includes the letter combination (much like English diphthongs and letter pairs) so that “ch” is always “sh,” for example. It can throw the learner off when words aren’t crisply spoken, but in a real language, things get smoothed around anyway. But it’s predictable.
Another great thing about learning HC is the community of HC speakers. Everyone I meet wants to help me learn, providing me with videos and songs and books that can help get me up to speed quickly. I do find that learning by listening to music is very helpful to learn not just the words but the cadence, and with so many teaching videos available I have many people ready every hour of the day to help me.
I’ll write more later. For now, I must return to my lessons. Bonswa! N a wè pita!