Ah ok!
It’s worth noting that it was fairly common through history for the leaders of a nation to speak a different language from the people.
https://historum.com/t/examples-where-the-rulers-spoke-a-different-language-to-their-people.89694/
If you can give orders to your peasants, that’s usually sufficient so far as conversation goes.
It’s really sad. If nothing is then, Haiti might get in worse situation.
I used to think that language loss was a terrible thing. I started to change my mind when I learned that the European Union spends over 1 billion Euros per year on translation. Just translating new documents from one language to another. And the EU is just a small part of the planet with a couple of dozen languages, and this is just translating a small number of mostly unimportant texts. Consider all the minority languages whose speakers don’t have the resources for such translations, and the vast amount of world literature and other text that is inaccessible to all but a small number of people who speak a particular language. There is two thousand years of Chinese literature alone that I will never be able to read, not to mention hundreds of other languages with rich histories. I now think it will be a great day for humanity when we all speak one language, and the diversity of languages is all part of our primitive past.
Italian is still alive and kicking however
Would you have the U.S. officially interfere with another country on the grounds that they are not speaking the “correct” language?
“We” aren’t in a position to do anything about it. The US is not the world police.
Given that English does not seem to be the OP’s native language, how about we interpret slightly differently.
What could possibly be done to preserve the Haitian Creole language? Not by Americans, but anyone.
A couple of nitpicks first: The language is called Haitian Creole, not Haitan Creole. The people of Haiti are called Haitians, not Haitis. Also, Haitian Creole is somewhere between a different language than French and a dialect of French. This is what happens when a language is creolized and continues to change over several centuries. It’s sort of like what happened to Afrikaans as it changed over centuries from Dutch in South Africa.
Note that while it’s possible to teach classes in elementary schools and most classes in high schools in Haitian Creole, it starts to get difficult in high school to teach classes there in that language. It’s harder to find textbooks on high school level in some courses in that language. It’s nearly impossible to find many college-level textbooks in that language. The textbooks have to be in French (or possibly in a few other languages that have a lot of speakers around the world). The more technical a subject is, the fewer languages a textbook on the subject has been translated into.
Wikipedia defines Creole as:
a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form, and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period of time.
In a sense, most world languages are Creole. English certainly is, even though academics have tried to confine it to a codified structure, it has always evolved and assimilated words from other languages.
The language problem in Haiti is similar to the Basques and the Welsh, mentioned in another thread. In France, the Académie Française continues to fight a (losing) battle to keep the French language “pure”. Outside the Sorbonne, I doubt that many “ordinary” French people care much when they go away for “le weekend” with a “best-seller” to read on la plage.
People I met from islands such as Martinique and la Réunion spoke French in addition to Créole; Wikipedia states that e.g. 95% of reunionnais speak French and 90% speak Creole; it’s not like you are forced to pick one or the other. Furthermore, I believe that suppressing minority languages is no longer official policy.
On Tahiti, I got the impression it could be that only a minority of the population actually speaks Tahitian, but I am not sure since I don’t either, therefore could not give it a try, unfortunately.
How similar are Creole and French, anyway? Are they like, say, Yiddish and German?
Sadly it’s really upsetting that we can do absolutely nothing to save the creole language. Maybe it’s time for the creoles to abandon the Haitan creole language and start focusing on French just like the Hawaiian language was abandoned in favor of English
Basque I agree. Welsh is in much better position than both
No. Haitian Creole has some grammatical features from African languages that make it incomprehensible for French speakers. A lot of vocabulary is shared. I could communicate in Haiti, but only because Creole speakers could figure out my French if they were patient. I could not understand their Creole at all (but am not a native French speaker, which might have helped).
Just so you’re clear on correct usage …
In English usage the term “creole” is a category of languages. There are many languages that are of the creole type. Nobody nowhere speaks “creole”.
Haitian Creole (upper-case C) is the English name of a particular creole-type language. Many creole-type languages include the word “Creole” (upper case) in their English name. Bahamian Creole is one such but there are a dozen more in the Caribbean alone.
The Haitians speaking Haitian Creole refer to their language in their language as Kreyòl.
I think the Haitian Creole language won’t survive if it continues to be treated the way it is now. It’s a possibility that it will go extinct or become a dead language the same way old Norse did. Maybe it’s time for the Haitians to abandon the Haitian Creole language and start picking on French.
“Many Haitis”? How many are there? I only know of the one.
My daughter lived there for 4 years. You’re way out of touch.
The vast bulk of the public speaks Kreyòl, grudgingly using half-assed French when they have to interact with the government. Which in an utterly dysfunctional country like Haiti is almost never.
This is a government that can’t do a damned thing except visit random violence on their citizens. They can’t even organize having schools of any sort for most of the populace. There is no way they can organize killing off Kreyòl.
Frankly, because Haiti is so economically backward and isolated, I bet Kreyòl will outlast, say, Basque precisely because the Basque country is so much more economically and politically modern and integrated with the larger world than is Haiti.
Old Norse did not become a dead language. It changed into Swedish etc. Technically, Icelandic etc. are Old Norse, but since the two phases of the language are quite distinct, they get labeleld as if they were separate languages.