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Creole is not a bastardized attempt at speaking a foreign language. Rather it is a language in its own right. (Dr. Carrington) Question: Provide a comprehensive linguistic description of a named Creole which supports the above statement. Creoles, according to John Holmes in the Introduction of Pidgins and Creoles Vol. 1: Theory and Structure were referred to as broken English, bastard Portuguese, nigger French and isikula (coolie language) by earlier generations (1). This contempt according to Holmes usually stemmed from the feeling that creoles were degraded replications of the superior European Languages (1). Holmes defined Creoles as expanded pidgins, whose linguistic structures and communicative functions have become the adoptive native language of an entire speech community (1). Speakers of Creoles were perceived as semi-savages whose partial acquisition of civilized habits was viewed as offensive to the superstratum speakers (1). Creole speakers, who were subsequently able to access education, became convinced that their Creole speech was wrong and highly unacceptable. Speakers, as a result, would try to re-structure their Creole to make it more similar to the language which was perceived as structured and standard. It was determined that many linguists for decades perceived Creole languages to be either aberrant or not worthy of any form of study or analysis (Bloomfield 1933:471.)(1). With the constant changes in the dynamics of language, linguists, according to Holmes have come to realize that Creoles are in fact not wrong versions or degraded duplications of other languages but rather they are new and developing languages (1). It was mentioned earlier from Holmes book that linguists believed that the words used in Creole languages were largely taken from older languages to fulfill an urgent need for communication during a period of a linguistic crisis. This subsequently resulted in Creoles being perceived as distorted and degraded versions of the older language from which their words originated (1). Caribbean Creoles, according to Hugues St. Fort in his AHAD eLibrary article, What is Haitian Creole?, emerged, mainly in the context of European colonization during the early seventeenth century. Hugues article goes on to discuss how the languages of the colonizers became intrinsically dominant on the Caribbean islands. Despite the strong European influence, vast numbers of inhabitants of the colonized islands, spoke and continued to speak a Creole variety based lexically on the language of the former colony. For the purpose of this paper, the Haitian Creole, linguistic structure will be examined to support the statement: Creole is not a bastardized attempt at speaking a foreign language. Rather it is a language in its own right. (Dr.

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Carrington). This paper will serve to justify the claim of linguist such as Claire Lefebvre and John Holmes that Creole languages are not simplistic or degraded replicas of their lexifier rather they are structured and developing languages. Holmes noted in Section 1.1 Pidgins and Creoles and Linguistics, that Creole languages structure and development were examined by linguists as linguistic systems. Analysis of the structure of creoles, their phonology, syntax and word formation, proved that Creole systems were quite different from those of the language from which they were believed to have drawn their lexical base (1). Their systems, according to Holmes, were so different that they could not be considered even as a dialect of their base language. Creoles were consequently characterized as new languages, governed by many of the same linguistic dynamics which shaped English and other dominant proper languages (1). Dan Perrys article in The Los Angeles Times, titled In Haiti, French Is No Lingua Franca, documents that though a law in 1969 in Haiti gave Creole limited legal status, studies show that 9 out of 10 islanders speak only Haitian Creole. The Haitian Creole is prevalently used on Haitian radio and during parliamentary debates. French to date have remained the badge of privilege and power (4). Also, he identified in his article that in a nation where barely a fifth of Creole speakers can read or write, the upper crust uses French to maintain their superiority and in the process quietly suppress the Haitian Creole. Creole languages, for decades have been in a literal on-going battle with the social forces of many Caribbean islands (April 2, 2000) (4). Haitian Creole, according to Hugues St. Fort in his AHAD on-line eLibrary article What is Haitian Creole?, is a member of the group of French-based creoles because an important part of its lexicon derives directly from French. A comprehensive linguistic examination of a language fundamentally involves the examination of the languages pronunciation which includes the phonetics and phonology, the grammar which includes the morphology and syntax as well as the meaning which includes the vocabulary and discourse. This thereby reveals the inner structure of the language and provides a base for comparison to other lingua francas which are perceived as being standard. David Crystal in Child Language, learning and linguistics (2nd edn), The Structure of Language, highlights that though there are many possible models of the structure of a language, all accounts agree that certain components are essential (phonology, morphology and vocabulary) in any study of a language (15). Language models are fundamentally implemented to

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assess the constituents of a Creole, which according to linguists essentially makes it a language in its own right. St. Fort in his on-line eLibrary article What is Haitian Creole? highlighted that Haitian Creoles semantic system and morphological system differ considerably from its superstratum French. He goes on to state that linguistically, Haitian Creole languages are in no way inferior too its lexifier language which is the French. Like all languages or more specifically the lingua francas of the world (French, English, Russian and Arabic) Haitian Creole according to Canadian linguist Claire Lefebvre in her book Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of Grammar: The Case of Haitian Creole illustrates the universal grammatical properties and the mental processes common to all natural languages(8). Haitian Creole possesses components of grammar which allows for variation and divergence from its source language. Lefebvre also highlights in her book that, the mental processes which are attributed to the acquisition of a natural language, is evident in the examination of the development of the Haitian Creole language (8). Lefebvre in her analysis refers to these mental/cognitive processes as the process of relexification. By definition relexification is referred to as the mental process that is available to speakers who are in possession of a mature lexicon. Relexified lexicons constitute the first instantiation of a new language, which is referred to as an early Creole (8). Hence, according to the relexification process, Haitian Creole as well as other Creoles is in no way a bastardized attempt to speak a foreign language, which in this case the French language. The relexification hypothesis also contradicts the assessment of earlier generations and linguists, that creoles are created by children who are deprived of a model for language which was greatly advocated by Bickerton (1981, 1984) (8). Rather, Creoles are created by speakers who already possess a mature lexicon. This claim according to Lefebvre is compatible with the fact that the lexical entries of the relexified lexicons reproduce the semantic and syntactic properties, of the substratum languages and the phonological representations of the superstratum languages (8). Haitian Creole, like many other Creoles can be assessed and analyzed by utilizing the model of language structure, which essentially incorporates the main branches of the linguistics. During the 1980s, the Haitian Creole was outfitted with an official orthography, which resulted in the language being the subject of a great number academic research. St. Ford highlights in his AHAD on-line eLibrary article that, linguists, found it very difficult to generate a standard description of the Haitian Creole phonological system simply because there are many regional variations in

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pronunciation. For monolingual Creole speakers the rule of pronunciation is usually standard and can be easily differentiated. Studies have shown that there are evident phonological variations between North and South Haiti and in Port-au-Prince the vowels of these variations are very similar to the superstratum French. According to some linguists this is primarily because most of the bilingual Haitian Creole- French speakers live there. Lefebvre attributes the similarity to the relexification process which states that a phonological representation of a Creole is usually derived from the superstratum (8). The English language from analysis is documented to have borrowed many words from the French. In the online book Their History and Culture , Refugee Fact Sheet, No.10 (1994), Haitian Creole by Michele Burtoff Civan with Fequiere Vilsaint and Gepsie Morisset, documents that the sound systems of Haitian Creole and English share many similarities. They also noted that Haitian Creole lacks the /th/ sounds in thick and the, the /i/ sound in pin, the /a/ sound in hat, and the /r/ sound in row. Haitian Creole however, contains other nasal sounds that do not exist in the worlds leading lingua franca English. Haitian Creole according to its orthography contains ten vowels and three semi-vowels (/i/,/e/,/e/,/e/,/a/,/a/,/u/,/o/,/c/,/o/,/wi/,/w/,/y/) This, according to the Civan, Vilsaint and Morisset is a result of the recent standardization of Creole orthography the sound system correspondence was made consistent for the ease in the acquisition of literacy skills, meaning, each sound is consistently represented by a written symbol (Refugee Fact Sheet, No.10 (1994). The Haitian Creole according to its orthography has seventeen consonant sounds, whereas the superstratum French contains eighteen consonants whose pronunciation are very similar to that of the English language. The Haitian consonants are : /p/,/b/,/f/,/v/,/m/,/t/,/d/,/s/,/z/,/n/*,/l/,/r/*,/j/*,/s/./k/,/g/,/h/*. Civan, Vilsaint and Morisset notes that, common variants are marked (*) it is important to note that the /n/*in the final position often nasalizes the preceding vowel. The /r/* in Haitian Creole is not pronounced like English /r/. The consonant /h/* only exists in the Creole spoken in southern Haiti. (Refugee Fact Sheet, No.10 (1994.) Lefebvre in Chapter 8, Issues in the Study of pidgin and Creole Languages from her study was able to evaluate that the phonological representation of tense, mood and aspect markers of the Haitian Creole primarily derived from the French phonetic strings (211). Imperative to the model of a language structure is the universal grammatical structures, also referred to as the semantical and syntactical dimension of a language. Haitian Creole shows

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significant divergence from the French and English language. This according to Lefebvre is in agreement with the relexification process which attributes the semantic and syntactic properties of a Creole, to be derived from its substratum language which in the case of the Haitian Creole is the Fongbe an earlier West African based pidgin (210). Fundamental to universal grammatical structures is Word Order. Haitian Creole like English follows the Subject-Verb-Object order. The evidence of this word order is evident in the representations of affirmative and negative sentence structure of the Haitian Creole; also word order structure is reflective in the questions which are the commonly referred to as interrogatives. Examples of Subject,Verb,Object in Haitian Creole in the book Their History and Culture , Refugee Fact Sheet, No.10 (1994), Haitian Creole by Michele Burtoff Civan with Fequiere Vilsaint and Gepsie Morisset. Haitian- Jan (S) pran (V) ptre (O). English John (S) takes (V) pictures (O). Haitian- Jan (S) pa (neg) pran (V) ptre (O). English John (S) doesnt (neg) take (V) pictures (O). Haitian- Eske (?) Jan (S) (pa) (neg) pran (V) ptre (O). English Does (?) nt (neg) John (S) take (V) pictures (O)? Another aspect which is critical in determining if a language has structure is by examining its word classes or parts of speech. Nouns, according to the Refugee Fact Sheet, No.10(1994), Haitian Creole by Civan,Vilsaint and Morisset, are not marked for gender or number which is prevalent in French. There are no grammatical distinctions in Haitian, however in French for example le and la are the grammatical distinctions (le soleil (the sun masculine) vs. la lune (the moon feminine.) In the Haitian Creole there is also no plural s, which occurs in both French and English. Haitian Creole expresses the concept of gender and plural by using specific words. For example: fr (brother) vs. s (sister) and kek liv (some books). These assessments all contribute to hypothesis that Creoles are not just simplified, deformed replicas of a proper language. Pronoun representation in Haitian Creole according to Civan, Vilsaint and Morisset is noted as being simpler than that of French and English. Only one form is used for Subject, object and possessive. Pronouns in Haitian Creole may occur in either the full or contracted form. Like the worlds lingua francas, the Haitian Creole and by extension other Creoles possess critical structural elements which substantiates the claim that Creole is a language in its own right. In the

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(Refugee Fact Sheet, No.10 (1994) there are examples of Pronouns representation in Haitian Creole, such as Full forms *mwen- I, me, my. *ou- you, your. * li-he, him, his, she, her, it, its. *mou-we, us, our, you, your (pl). *yo- they, them, their. *M- I. *m-me/ *m- My. Contracted forms *m- I, me, my. *w-you, your. *l- he, him, his, she, her, it, its. *n-we, us, our, you, your (pl). *kote li him, her, it. Civan, Vilsaint and Morisset also highlights in, Haitian Creole that the Haitian Creole verb system is very different from that of the French and English verb system. The Haitian Creole verb system has no subject-verb agreement; there are also very minimal verb tense changes. Instead of the changes which would normally occur in English and French, Haitian Creole uses a system of markers or what they refer to as short participles, which precede the verb, which would indicate the tense or tense change. In the Haitian Creole the particle te is used to indicate past tense, ap would be used to indicate the progressive tense and pral(e) would indicate the future. Verbs without markers in the Haitian Creole may indicate simple present tense or immediate past tense (Refugee Fact Sheet, No.10(1994), Haitian Creole). Examples of the Haitian Verb system as documented in the on-line book Their History and Culture: Haitian Creole Haitian Jan ranmase liv yo. Haitian- Jan ak Gabi rammase liv yo. Haitian- Li te marye mwa pase. English John collects the books. English John and Gaby collect books. English She got married last month.

In Haitian Creole there are two types of Articles, the definite and the indefinite which is synonymous to that of the French and English languages. Though similar, Civan, Vilsaint and Morisset note that there are some significant differences in the placement, usage and form of Haitian Creole articles. The definite article in Haitian Creole exhibits both a singular and plural form and is always follows the noun in a sentence. Civan, Vilsaint and Morisset notes that this is

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the result of the singular definite article being determined phonologically by the sound of the preceding element, this is exhibited in a variety of forms in this Creole. Examples of Haitian Creole Articles system as documented in the the above mentioned (Refugee Fact Sheet, No.10 Tab la the table Kay la the house Timoun nan the child Ban an the beach dam nan the lady mont lan the watch vant lan the belly radio a the radio biwo a- the desk kamyon an the truck

The plural definite article is recorded to have one invariant form yo (tab yo the tables). The indefinite article is represented with the article yon which always precedes the noun. Another integral factor in determining if a language is structured is the vocabulary or lexicon of the language. Haitian Creole lexicon and many other Creoles are primarily derivative from the superstratum language. In the case of the Haitian Creole, the lexicon is heavily Frenchbased. In the study done by Lefebvre in Chapter 8, Issues in the Study of pidgin and Creole Languages on the Haitian Creole, she noted that through the process of relexification, the lexical system which is in the process of being relexified, each entry will acquire a second phonological representation which is derived from the lexifier language. Each lexical entry which would be the entry from the substratum and the entry from the intended new Creole will at a certain point during relexification would have two phonological representations (208). The Haitian Creole word base according to Civan, Vilsaint and Morisset, Their History and Culture: Haitian Creole has been enriched with borrowings from other languages with which Haitian Creole speakers had come into contact with during colonialism. Though the French lexicon is predominant in the Haitian Creole, the words incorporated were modified in a variety of ways depending on the parametric values. A lot of the words from the French language have undergone phonological changes primarily because the Haitian Creole sound system is different to that of the French sound system. The meanings of the words were also changed. The semantic field were in some cases were extended or restricted.

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Their History and Culture, Refugee Fact Sheet, No.10(1994), Haitian Creole by Michele Burtoff Civan with Fequiere Vilsaint and Gepsie Morisset, highlights the following examples of Haitian Creole words derived from French which were either expanded or restricted. Examples of the drop of the first syllable. Haitian Creole rive Haitian Creole dlo Haitian Creole- kalkil Haitian Creole pt French arriver French de leau French calcul Examples of the fusing of the Noun with the Determiner. Examples of where a vowel change is incorporated Example where the r is dropped. French porte. Haitian Creole like many other Creoles does have structures, structures which can be examined, analyzed and compared to the modern lingua francas of the world. Apart from the Creole being part of the identity of many Caribbean people, studies have been able to ascertain that Creoles are indeed languages in their own right. Valerie Youssef in Varilingualism: The Competence Underlying Code-mixing in Trinidad and Tobago notes that Creoles continue to serve the functions of solidarity friendship, emotions of all kinds, and national identity. (2004:44) Therefore, just as a fathers child has its own identity so too must Creole languages everywhere. Creole languages must have been born of a parent, but through relexification and borrowing etc; a new and independent language was generated. Creole language is the new voice and history of a people, let it never be silenced.

Works Cited

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Burtoff, Michele. Vilsaint, Fequiere. Morisset, Gepsie. The Haitians Their History and Culture Haitian Creole. Refugee Fact Sheet No.10 1994. Published by Center of Applied Linguistics. The Refugee Service Center. Web. 28 March 2012. < http://www.cal.org/co/haiti/creole.html.> Crystal, David. Child Language, learning and Linguistics (2nd edn). The Structure of Language. NY: Press Syndicate of The University of Cambridge. 1987. Web. 28 March 2012. < http://www.davidcrystal.com/DC_articles/Linguistics24.pdf> Holmes, John. Pidgins and Creoles. Vol. 1Theory and Structure. Introduction NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print. Lefebvre, Claire. Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of Grammar: The Case of Haitian Creole. Canada : Cambridge Press. 1999. On-line March 2012. <http://www.assets,cambridge,org/97805215/93823/sample/9780521593823web.pdf> Lefebvre, Claire. Issues in the Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Co. 2004. Print Perry, Dan. Associated Press: Los Angeles Times. In Haiti, French is No Lingua Franca. (April 2, 2000)(4) Copyright 2012 Los Angeles Times. Web. 19 March 2012. <http://www.articles.latimes.com/2000/apr/02/news/mn-15087.> St. Fort, Hugues. AHAD: What is Haitian Creole? Published: Friday, September 16, 2011. Revised: 5th November, 2004. Web. 19 March 2012. < http://www.ahadonline.org/eLibrary/creoleconnection/.../haitiancreole.htm.> Youssef, Valerie. The Competence Underlying Code-Mixing in Trinidad and Tobago. University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. U.S.A: Cambridge University Press. 1992. Print. Publication November 2009. Web. 19