TALK

Haitian Creole is a fascinating language. It is a vernacular language, a language that is nonstandard to a specific place or region, a mix of the languages spoken by both French conquerors and African slaves between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It emerged from the French plantation colony of Saint-Domingue, which today is the country of Haiti. Today, the language reflects the grammar and vocabulary of both French and Native African languages, such as Ewe, Fon, Yoruba, and Ibo.

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Most scholars say that Creole developed as a result of the unusually high ratio of Africans to Europeans in the colony’s early history and Haiti’s early isolation from France, most notably after its independence in 1804. What sets Haitian Creole apart from most of the surrounding Creoles is that it is used for both formal and public functions, notably in schools, in churches, and at political meetings; many Creoles, in contrast, are used just in informal situations. 

 

Haitian Creole can also be considered a pidgin language, a grammatically simplified language made up of several different languages. Pidgin languages unite different groups of people through speech under one dialect that takes the best elements of another language and molds them into one powerful form of communication. This is interesting to think about when we look into the history of all languages. Any language spoken today has either been influenced or combined with another language at some point in time; perhaps to some degree, all languages are pidgins.

 

This shows just how interconnected we are and how no matter what words we use to describe our ideas and emotions, we all originated from the same place. We can use this same knowledge when we think about the defining factors that make up race. Even though we seem diverse and different on the surface, we all share the same beginnings as a human species. It is time we stop judging one another other based on our differences and realize that, together, we can form a beautiful pidgin society that supports what makes us different in a safe environment that awards everyone equal opportunity in shaping it.