Making Creole Count: shining the spotlight on Creole in the French school system
How can Creole and regional French be better taught and better accepted in the French school system?
Creole in the Francophone Antilles
While the popularity of bilingual education seems to be exploding across the globe, Creole education in Francophone Guadeloupe and Martinique is a relatively new phenomenon, despite years of informal Creole integration into the curriculum over the past five decades. The process of being seen as a version of “corrupt French” or “patois” to a legitimate language (or languages) has been a long and slow process of what Sylvain Auroux dubbed “grammatization” and legitimization — even by its speakers.
What exactly is a “creole?” While the definition sometimes varies, a “creole” is a natural language that stems from mixture or adaption of different languages over a period of a time (usually in the form of a “pidgin”), which eventually becomes the native language of a generation of children. While “pidgins” are typically defined as using “simplified” linguistic structures, a creole language has a fully developed set of grammatical rules. There are French-based creoles, Dutch-based creoles, Spanish-based creoles, Arabic-based creoles and more. Haitian Creole, as well the Creoles of Guadeloupe and Martinique are all French-based creoles. While elements of French vocabulary may be recognizable, they have often taken on a different meaning in these French-based creoles, and the grammatical system is all its own. Take, for example the word kabann in several French-based creoles, which means bed (“lit” in French) and not cabana (or “cabane” in French).
Today, the creoles of Guadeloupe and Martinique are no longer seen as “French patois.” Since 2002, French students have had the opportunity to take Creole classes as a regional language option. A few students in metropolitan France have even had the opportunity to study with the metropole’s only certified Creole instructor, Tony Mango. University students can pass an option of the CAPES, the exam needed to become a high school teacher and above, in Creole — although the mere existence of this exam has been highly contested since its inception.
Despite these few students who don’t live in the Carribbean, most students studying Creole are already Creolophone, and the instructional textbooks reflect this. Unlike a textbook for a French-speaker learning Spanish, these textbooks assume a certain phonemic awareness for Creole sounds and vocabulary.
One question that continues to persist in both the academic and everyday realms, are the distinctions between “academic” or “written” French, regional Antillean French, and Guadeloupean or Martiniquais Creole. Where does one end and the next begin?
While we once spoke of Ferguson’s diglossia in a strict sense, today most sociolinguists lean towards Lambert-Félix Prudent’s linguistic continuum model, in which the three languages seem to pass from one to another on a sliding scale. In Prudent’s continuum model, there’s no clear distinction between French, the “acrolect” or “high language”; Creolized French, the “mesolect” or “middle language”; and the “basilectal” Creole, which is most removed from French:
←French (acrolect) — Creolized French/regional French(mesolect) —Creole (basilect)→
What do elementary Creole textbooks tell us about the current situation?
What does all this mean in a practical sense? How is Creole and regional French being received at school? While an occasional piece of negative press seems to surface every news cycle, many positive reports of bilingual classes seem to show a growing trend towards Creole promotion. But, what do the textbooks tell us? Are they as positive?
In 2018, I gave a presentation about a particular textbook, in which students are asked to “correct” phrases in regional French, and to rewrite them in “good” French and Creole, thus equating the idea of regional French as being “bad” in some way. The same book gives the “correct” French phases in the answer in such a formal register, that any student to use them in metropolitan France would almost sound like a walking textbook. For example, the textbook suggests that the French inverted question form
À quelle heure t’endors-tu le soir ? (At what time do you sleep at night?)
Is the representative of “standard” metropolitan French and is a correction of the regional French and Creole forms,
A ki lè ou ka pwan sonmèy lèswa ?/À quelle heure tu prends sommeil, le soir ? (Literally: at what time do you “take sleep.”)
The textbook fails to explain that the inverted question is the most formal, written phrase, and
- Leads to confusion about language registers.
- Creates a sense of linguistic inferiority about both the regional and Creole forms, which when “corrected” seem even further away from “standard” French than before.
This is one example, but there are many more like this.
Why does it matter?
Every child should feel that their language, or languages, are valued. While there’s no harm in teaching students about different language registers, they should at no point feel that their language is somehow inferior to the “high” language variety, or, in this case, believe that all metropolitan French citizens speak a sort of “oralized” written French, when in fact, they employ a variety of slang, informal structures, and faulty sentence structure.
After years of being cast aside, it’s a wonderful advancement that Antillean Creole is finding its place in the classroom, but it’s important that students feel that their regional languages are not a collection of “faults,” but important languages in their own right.
