kreyòl ayisyen or Haitian Creole, a fusion of other languages

February 4, 2015 4:28 PM

The term "Creole" comes from a Portugese word meaning "raised in the home". The language resulted and developed probably after 1680 and before 1730 from the efforts of African slaves who wanted to speak the French they heard when they arrived in the European plantations in the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). African slaves came from many different parts of West Africa and they used to speak many different languages. On any one plantation, several African languages were spoken. They were seldom able to communicate among themselves in a common African tongue. The slaves, on their arrivals in Haiti, first came into the contacts with the French settlers, speaking several dialectal forms of French as they also came from different parts of France. Thus, as a common mean to communicate, the slaves tried to learn Popular French .

The slaves who arrived later had little contact with the French speakers; they learnt an approximative variety of Popular French that their other fellow slaves have so far developed and spoke. Over time, this approximative variety of French became more and more distant from its origin and came to be recognized as a distinct language with own unique identity named "Creole"-- with a distinctive vocabulary and a unique grammar system. They started using French words, but arranged them in a different structural grammatical form-- in ways more familiar to their own grammars and sentence structures.

Thus, it is not surprising that more than 90% of the Creole vocabulary are of French origin. Haitian Creole evolved in this way from a combination of French and several African languages like Fon, Ewe and Wolof. The grammar of Creole has been just as simple or complex that of French or English and its vocabulary meets all the needs of its speakers and writers today.

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kreyòl ayisyen or Haitian Creole, a fusion of other languages

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