Are they mutually intelligible?
about like cajun french and canadian french to france french. you could be understood.
There was a thread about that some time ago. I’ll try to find it again. BRB.
Short answer would be : not very at all.
One of my best friends is French, and has expressed an interest in working in Haiti (she’s working on her masters in public health). I asked her this awhile ago, and she told me she can’t understand Haitian Creole very well, but it is still close enough to French that she thinks she could pick it up very quickly.
This is inaccurate. “Standard” (as thought of in France) French and Canadian French are much, much closer to each other than Cajun French or Haitian Creole are to anything else.
Seconded. Apart from the odd word here and there, the only problem with understanding canadian french is people with a really thick accent. Both are essentially the same language, like british and american english (as for cajun, I once watched a guy interviewed on TV with subtitles and having missed the context didn’t notice during the whole interview that he was actually speaking cajun french)
On the other hand, caraibeans french creoles use a much different vocabulary (even though generally derived in some form or another from original french words, see the example given above by another poster where a creole word is composed by the last part of a first french word and the first part of a second one) and grammar, and it’s generally mostly not understandable for a speaker of standart french (and anyway requires a lot of guesswork).
I was looking around and came across the incorrect statement. So I had to register and post a correction.
Cajun french is nearly identical to the french spoken in New Brunswick Canada. Cajun french is about as intelligible to standard french as canadian french is. It is over 95% french words with only a few borrowed words.
What you were thinking of is Louisiana Creole French which is a completely different language.
Kreyòl ayisyen in comparison with French is like Jamaican patois compared to English. If you listen to spoken Jamaican patois (beginning at 0:34 in the linked clip), see how much you can understand of it. As you listen to the patois, keep in mind that almost all of the vocabulary comes from English. The grammar, however, is quite different.
That will give you some idea of the intelligibility between French and Kreyòl. Except that Kreyòl is the official language of a nation, and as such has an established literary standard form, while Jamaican patois has low prestige and no official status.
I was in Haiti this year for a while. Native English speaker with four years of French under my belt, a long time ago. A little bit of Spanish. I understood about 50% of oral, very little of written, unless I spoke aloud, it’s phonetic. Kids there were taught proper French. My proper French speaking, but no Creole, amused them to no end. My own kids looked at me like I had sprouted a second head when I’d converse in French.
I don’t see a huge problem with native French being able to communicate in Creole. It is amazing how tiring it is to speak another language is when you’re not used to it.
First, it’s necessary to distinguish between Haitian French and Haitian Creole. Haitian French is reasonably similar to the French of France and other French varieties.
Haitian Creole is an entirely separate variety; it resembles French only in that most of the vocabulary is French. The grammar, including many grammatical particles, is wholly different.
Haitian Creole is the best known example of creolization, a linguistic phenomenon that occurs in situations of slavery or other kinds of displacement in which a population is obliged to learn another language without benefit of mass language education. The first step is the creation of a pidgin, a form of communication that uses the vocabulary of the imposed language without a fixed grammar. In the next generation, when children acquire the pidgin as their first language, they impose a grammar on it, resulting in the creation of a fully structured language called a creole.
It’s thought that a good part of Haitian Creole grammar is similar to Fon languages spoken in Benin. For example, where French has mes bécanes (my-PL bikes), Haitian has Bekàn mwen yo (bike my-pl), similar to Fongbe keke che-le (bike my-PL). Possessive nouns and certain other particles such as articles are also postposed. The grammar is also far more analytical than inflectional like French.
Haitian Creole has recently undergone efforts to develop a standard written form and is now recognized as an official language of Haiti alongside French.
This is what I was going to recommend as a comparison. An English speaker traveling in the Caribbean will encounter something unintelligible, but what is still a form of English. When I was there years ago, I asked a guy who sort of latched onto us as a “guide” what language he was speaking when he spoke to the other locals (I couldn’t understand a word of it). He replied: Broken English. We all had a good laugh.
As the clip shows, many Jamaicans are fluent in more-or-less standard English (spoken with a Jamaican accent) as well as Jamaican patois, which is very difficult to understand for most English speakers.
When I visited Belize, my hosts would switch between standard English when talking to me, and Creole when speaking among themselves.
And the other Maritime Provinces as well. What I’ve been taught all these years is that the Cajuns are the descendants of Acadians (hence the name) who were exiled from what is now Maritime Canada to Louisiana. Thus, the Cajun and Acadian French dialects are closer to each other historically than they are to Quebec OR France French.
I think this epitomizes the low esteem in which Jamaican patois/Creole is held compared to Haitian Creole. It is regarded as just “bad” or “broken” English, rather than as a language with a distinct grammar.
Here’s a classic Cecil column on a mistaken attempt by HUD to produce a brochure in Caribbean English Creole, which was taken as being deeply offensive by some.
However, the examples given of the brochure are not even Jamaican Creole, but rather an attempt at writing a Jamaican English accent phonetically. Jamaican patios is much more different grammatically than what appears in the brochure.
Not at all. Canadian and French French are essentially identical, with the odd different word here and there. There’s as much difference as between British and American English.
Creole, on the other hand, is at best very difficult to understand for a French speaker. Some words will be recognized, some might be guessed if the French speaker pays a lot of attention and try to figure out what the related French word could be, some won’t be understood at all. Generally, if I hear of overhear people speaking in Creole, I won’t understand what they’re saying, even though from time to time a whole sentence will make sense.
It’s not totally unintelligible, but still a foreign (though closely related) language. Besides the vocabulary, the grammar, the structure of the sentence, and many very common words (pronouns, for instance) are different. The last part is possibly the most problematic. If you can’t readily recognize things like “I am” , “she’s going to”, etc… you have a big problem making sense of what is being said, even if you can pinpoint some other words. If in “She came to the town where I live” you only understand “town” and “live”, for instance, the Creole speaker could as well use Greek.
I wouldn’t say anything about Cajun French, on the other hand. I remember once watching randomly some subtitled interview of an old guy and not noticing that what he was speaking was Cajun French (or anything related to French) until the rest of the broadcast made this clear. Now, it might have been in part an issue of accent, and maybe if I had known he was speaking French, I could have paid attention instead of just reading the subtitles, and understood at least in part, but it seems to me that Cajun French has followed his own somewhat divergent path. This isn’t a really informed opinion.
Not onlu I didn’t notice it was a zombie, but I didn’t even notice I had already responded. Sorry for that.
Hmm. Thanks for the information. I didn’t know that such a language existed. I guess that’s what I heard in the interview. How and when did it appear?
I know of two French speaking Canadians, one from Quebec City and the other from the backwoods of Nova Scotia who cannot understand each other’s French. I know one of them fairly well and she told me the story.
I believe that most Hatians can summon up a comprehensible French if they have to. Certainly most of them in Montreal can.
When I go to Barbados, I simply cannot understand any of the native English but they can virtually all summon up some form of mid-Atlantic English.
As a native French speaker, I find everyday conversation in Haitian Creole largely unintelligible. However, a few times a caught radio shows in Creole dealing with more formal scholarly discussions. As essentially all the vocabulary came straight from French I found I could understand close to 80% of what they were saying once I had gotten used to the accent. As soon as the banter became more colloquial, though I was lost.
When England took over the eastern part of Canada after the French and Indian War (think it’s called the seven years war in Europe), they told the French people living there to become English or GTFO. Some of the ones that GTFO went to what was then French Louisiana, and became known as Cajuns.