Michel DeGraff - Haiti Observer Blog

French and Creole are the two official languages of Haiti and still, French is given more importance than Creole. This discrimination, as seen by many intellectuals worldwide, is primarily because of the fact that Creole is a mix of several West African languages and French. Creole, which is today the lingua franca, actually started when African slaves arrived at Saint Domingue and tried to speak French by whatever they picked up through listening. The reason why they tried to speak French was that the African slaves from different parts of West Africa had different languages and they failed to communicate with each other. Hence, they picked up French.

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Haiti and MIT signed a joint initiative in digital learning in Kreyol. Kreyol is the most spoken language in Haiti and the initiative will promote education of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) disciplines in Kreyol language. Under this project, open education resources that are technology based and developed by MIT will be taken and translated to Kreyol and then provided to the Haitians to assess the effectiveness of the initiative. The work will be accomplished using the help of educators and professors from various Haitian institutions that will include Université Carïbe, State University of Haiti, Université Quisqueya, École Supérieure d'Infotronique d'Haïti, Foundation for Knowledge and Liberty and NATCOM.

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