What are Creole languages, anyway? | Michel DeGraff
Is this a valid linguistic category? Michel DeGraff of M.I.T., who leads the MIT-Haiti Initiative that creates STEM and STEAM materials for his mother tongue, Haitian Creole, helps us understand.
This is a transcript of Episode 5 of “Speaking of Us”. To listen to this episode, visit Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts. If you enjoy it, please leave a review and subscribe for new episodes! Thanks to Cara Judkins and Gian Pablo Antonetti for transcribing this episode.
KRISTEN: Hello, and welcome to “Speaking of Us”, where we explore what language teaches us about who we are and where we come from. I’m Kristen Tcherneshoff.
DANIEL: And I’m your co-host, Daniel Bögre Udell.
KRISTEN: Today we have with us a special guest, Michel DeGraff. Among many other things, he’s one of the warmest and friendliest people you will ever have the pleasure of knowing. We had the chance to meet him earlier this year in January at Northwestern where the three of us were all present for a conference. In his other accolades, he’s a linguist at MIT, focusing on Linguistic Theory, Creole Studies, and Language Advocacy, especially in terms of education and human rights. He’s also the Director of MIT-Haiti Initiative which we will touch on later in this episode, and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. Thank you so much for joining us today Michel.
MICHEL: It’s my pleasure and thank you so much for having me as one of your first guests. It’s an honor. And thank you for this nice introduction.
DANIEL: Well, it’s an honor that you’re dedicating some of your time to Wikitongues. We have a lot to talk about today, including your relationship with the Haitian language, the problems of Creole Linguistics, and your own language activism based in Boston. But before we do, we have to thank two of our patrons. Christopher Fitts and Coleen McQueen. Thank you two very much for your generosity. You give us life and keep us going. You make Wikitongues possible.
So, Michel, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your mother tongue, Haitian Creole.
MICHEL: So, I was born in Haiti and growing up in Haiti for the first 18 years of my life, I really had no clue that my native language, Haitian Creole, which we call Kreyòl in Haiti, I never thought of it as a real language. Back then, for us Haitians, the real language was French, and Creole, that we call Kreyòl, was viewed as a broken variety of French that we should just give up as quickly as we can in order for us to become good students, good humans. We had to speak “proper French” because Kreyòl was viewed as being an improper, bastard, broken variety of French. So, that was basically a constant in the first 18 years of my life. Kids, some of my friends who could barely speak French, when they went to school, they were silenced because they could not speak Kreyòl and at the same time, they had very little French fluency and if you make a mistake as you speak French in the classroom, people would make fun of you. And if you were caught using Kreyòl, even on the playground, you would be punished. I remember very well that in our weekly report cards , it was stated very clearly that kids, students were not supposed to speak Kreyòl. It was like a violation of the school rules to be caught using Kreyòl. So, that was basically the first 18 years of my life.
And then I decided to study Computer Science. I was lucky enough that my parents managed to get funds together to send me to study actually in New York City, at CCNY — The City College of New York. And there, I was, again I had no clue about linguistics I had no clue whether or not Kreyòl was actually a language, so I was studying computer science and by chance, one of my first internships during the summer, summer of, let’s see, ’81 was at AT&T Bell Labs where I got to work with linguists, with researchers in AI — artificial intelligence. And there we were writing code for computers to process language, to speak texts or to understand texts. And my job was to write code to have the computers speak out newspaper articles like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. But then often those programs would mispronounce names like Catherine Deneuve and pronounce it as Catherine “Deneuve.” It’s a French name that has different spelling-to-sound systems. So, I had to write code to have the computer understand that Deneuve should be pronounced “Deneuve”, not “Deneuve”.
And as I was doing so, as I was thinking of Kreyòl and French, and I realized, oh gosh, someone could write programs to have Kreyòl be pronounced properly. Then I started asking myself, well then, Kreyòl has its own rules, it’s not like broken French rules, it has a solid, robust, stable set of rules. Then I started asking myself but, according to the work I was doing on French and Spanish and English, Kreyòl would count as a language. Then I got very intrigued by this notion that here am I writing programs for French and English and then I have this native language that I thought was not a real language, but as I can tell, by what I’m doing with linguists and with very advanced researchers, Kreyòl should count as a language. That’s why I got drawn into linguistics and little by little, it dawned on me that for the first 18 years of my life, I had been mis-educated into the belief that my native language was not a language.
So, then I got deeper into linguistics and, over time, I became fully engaged in this work to, first of all, try to have children in Haiti not be brought up with this false notion that Kreyòl is inferior. At the same time, I got to understand the role that language plays in under-development and for Haiti, and other countries like Haiti like in the Caribbean and Africa and Latin America, for them to be able to prosper and to develop properly, they have to make use of their local languages, their vernaculars, their mother tongues, as we call them. So now, my relationship to Kreyòl has totally changed from what it was when I was in Haiti. As Kristen mentioned, I advocate for the use of Kreyòl, not just as a language per se, but as a tool for education, for development, and for human rights basically. So that’s, in a nutshell, the arc of my relationship with my native language, Haitian Creole. From basically self-hatred, denial, to now — let’s call it — self-love and having language blossom, not just for me, but for the whole nation, that way it can really be used for education and development and human rights basically.
KRISTEN: So, it sounds like it’s correct to say that your interest in your own language in terms of encouraging yourself to use it and others to use it really got started when you did that internship at Bell Labs, correct?
MICHEL: Definitely. That’s when I first got to understand that Haitian Creole is a language and also that the language itself can be viewed as some natural system in the mind that operates according to rules, and that these rules are not written firstly in textbooks. That those rules live in the human mind and that the goal of scientists, linguists, psychologists, computer scientists is to understand how these rules work and what makes language, all languages work. That quest was started at Bell Labs through collaborating with computer scientists working on language processing.
KRISTEN: So, we were discussing your internship with Bell Labs and how this launched your personal awakening of, I guess we could say, decolonizing this psychological conditioning. And I was curious to know when you had this desire to start reconnecting with your mother tongue, with Kreyòl, what were your first steps that you took? What happened? Was there anything that you actively started doing or were you using the language on a daily basis or trying to read more materials? Or other forms of working more with your language.
MICHEL: Well, going back to that stage, what I remember is, I felt like I had to understand more what linguistics was about because I felt that basically I knew very little about what linguistics was and why it is that I believed during my childhood basically, that Kreyòl wasn’t a language. So, I said ok, I am going to apply to programs. I had the chance at Bell Labs to go back to school, so I applied to programs where I could study both computer science at a graduate level and linguistics. That was one of my first steps to try to understand linguistics, about what makes a language a language and how languages work, and then also, what about Kreyòl (Haitian Creole) but also other Creoles that make them so misunderstood. So, the next step took me basically six years of doctoral studies to get my PhD.
DANIEL: So, after you achieved your formal linguistics education, um, what did you do to carry your newfound passion for Haitian Creole into the public sphere and encourage engagement with the language in a different way for other Haitian speakers?
MICHEL: That’s a good question and actually there two, looking back. The path was actually quite circuitous because doing a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, it was very theoretical. So what I was doing there was to look at the syntax of Haitian Creole and other Creole languages trying to understand how these languages emerged over the course of history through contact between Africans and Europeans in the Caribbean. So it was very theoretical. But, the quest at first was a very internal quest, a very intellectual one trying to get a sense of “what are these Creole languages? What are they made up of and how did they emerge in history?”
As I was doing that, I had this concern having to do with Haiti and real-life issues, having to do with education, I had them in the background, but they weren’t foregrounded. And I think they got foregrounded afterwards. I was lucky that my thesis, which was looking at the syntax of HaitianCreole, that thesis got into the hands of someone who became a dear friend and a mentor, Professor Yves Dejean. And when he read that thesis, I was very fortunate that he decided to write back to me and send me feedback. He sent me copious feedback. But one thing he told me that I will never forget is that: “This work is excellent, beautiful work. But if you want your work to have deep meaning, you have to make it useful to your compatriots. You have to make it useful to Haiti. So, what I’m going to do for you, if you want, I’m going to invite you to come to Port-au-Prince and then teach to my team.”
Because back then, Yves Dejean was the head of what is called the Creole Language Bureau in Haiti which was part of the Secretary of State for Literacy and he was a visionary. So, in his mind, he understood very clearly that Haiti was being kept underdeveloped because of a whole series of factors, including linguistic factors — including the fact that, in spite of all decrees and curricula that clearly stated that Kreyòl has to be used in education, but in fact, in practice, Kreyòl was still being, in a way, excluded from both the classroom but also from other centers where power is created like the justice system, the different ministries, from economics to even the Human Rights Ministry. They would not use Kreyòl the way they were supposed to use it.
So, himself, when he became the head of this Creole Language Bureau, he had a mission to make sure that Kreyòl would enter all these spaces. But he wanted his employees to understand that, in fact, there are very valid scientific reasons as to why they should think of Kreyòl on a par with French, on a par with English, on a par with Spanish; therefore, they should understand linguistic theory and what scientists have to say about Creole languages like HaitianCreole. So, he said: “I’m going to invite you to do some seminars, in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince, with my team. That way you can share your knowledge with them so they can understand that this is a major issue that, up until today, most Haitians do not understand the value of their national language.”
So, I went there in 1994. That was two years after my PhD and that experience totally changed me because not only did I get to teach about linguistics in Haitian Creole, but I also had the chance to visit the school that Yves Dejean had founded called Sant Twa Ti Flè, meaning “Three Little Flowers Center”. He called it Sant Twa Ti Flè to the memory of three little girls who had died in that area called Fort Royal near Petit Goave in Haiti. So he took me to that school, and for the first time ever, I saw children learning biology, geography and mathematics in Kreyòl. And I had never seen before Haitian kids having so much fun in the classroom. Those kids were laughing, they were asking questions, they were investigating issues of how do ants make children, they were liberated, they were enjoying the whole process of learning.
In my experience, as a child, I had never seen any classroom where kids were asking questions and discussing and debating in the same way. At that point I said “oh gosh!” I looked back at my own education, the fact that, although I went to probably one of the best schools in Haiti, a French Catholic school called Saint-Louis de Gonzague, I had never seen such exchanges between students and teachers. At Saint-Louis de Gonzague, it’s a top-down model where the teacher often comes with plasticized notes — notes that are under plastic — and writes the notes on the blackboard, then the children just copy the notes, memorize them, and recite them for the exam. You see, at Sant Twa Ti Flè where Yves Dejean took me, for the first time I saw active learning in action. And it became clear to me that there was active learning exactly because the children were able to use their native language. They were not being hindered by having to use French, which none of them could ever speak fluently. You see? So, I think that after the Bell Labs experience, that experience in Haiti with Yves Dejean, both in the Creole Language Bureau and also at the Sant Twa Ti Flè, these were epiphanies in my relationship with language and education and linguistics.
DANIEL: And, these days you’re very active on Twitter and other social media accounts. This is really exciting to Kristen and me because we’ve researched other cases of language activism online creating positive and liberated spaces for a language to be used. So, my question is, how is that going? Have you been able to create a strong digital community for Haitian Creole online?
MICHEL: Well, actually, so there, in a way, Haiti is fortunate because when I started doing that work, merging linguistics and education, and when I launched this MIT-Haiti Initiative, what we found and which I didn’t know beforehand is that there already was a very active community on the internet using Haitian Creole. And I read this paper, as I was doing research about the use of Kreyòl and other so-called local languages on the internet, I found this paper by Kevin Scannell (Caoimhín Ò Scanaill). Kevin Scannell has this social media, platform that he calls Indigenous Tweets. So basically, what they are doing is they’re building corpora for so-called minority languages. I prefer to use the term minoritized languages because no language is a minority language per se. In terms of their uses, they’ve been minoritized, so I prefer the term minoritized languages. Um, so Kevin Scannell (Caoimhín Ò Scanaill) has this platform and what he’s also done is to work with various activists around Indigenous languages. And there was one article that I read by Te Taka Keegan, Paora Mato, and Stacey Ruru and the paper was about the use of Twitter by activists trying to revitalize their Indigenous languages. And this particular article was focused on te reo Māori, but what they found is that among all local languages, Haitian Creole might be the one that has the most users on Twitter.
So, their hunch is that Haitian Creole, actually, might be the local language that is the most popular on Twitter. And then, I did some work with Kevin Scannell, and what we found in the case of Haiti itself is that tweets in Haitian Creole far exceed tweets in both English and French. In fact, um, by almost twice the number, right. So, which to me, was extremely heartening, because, often, you hear as an excuse from, say, policy makers in Haiti, even people who work in education, and even people who actually believe in the power of Kreyòl, they say “well you know Michel, we would write these notes in Kreyòl, we would write curricula in Kreyòl, but then who’s going to read it? Because the same people who can get on the internet and can read texts in Kreyòl can also read texts in French.” But then, the data show clearly that this answer is misleading because people who technically could write in French in Haiti because they’ve gone to school, they’ve learned French in school, they prefer to write in Kreyòl because they feel more comfortable writing in Kreyòl. And you can see that every day. If you go, say, to the Facebook page of the Ministry of Education, if you go to any major Haitian newspaper website, the articles are typically in French, but if you look at the comments below the article, they are typically in Kreyòl. And that contrast is so clear, say, on the Facebook page of the Ministry of Education because they are supposed to be writing in Kreyòl as well because Kreyòl in Haiti is legally the national language and it’s also official, but yet most of the communications by the Ministry of Education are in French. But if you look below when they post something on Facebook, most of the comments are in Kreyòl.
So, to make a long story short, there is a very vibrant community of Haitians using Kreyòl on the internet and this is what, I think, has given the work I’m doing at MIT even more meaning and more impact because there’s already a thirst for the use of Kreyòl in all fields, including education and other fields where you need to create knowledge and share knowledge.
DANIEL: So, let’s talk about the linguistic differences between Haitian Creole and the French language. Wikipedia lists you as a Haitian Creolist but, when I first met you, was after listening to a wonderful presentation about all the problems with Creole linguistics. So, can we dive into that a little bit?
MICHEL: Before say, the 17th century, there was no Haitian Creole. And what we know is that Haitian Creole started emerging after the initial contact between the French settlers in the colony of, back then, it was called Saint-Domingue. Saint-Domingue was the colonial name of Haiti. So the contact started in the mid-17th century. So, basically, the language started emerging in the late 17th century and the 18th century, and very quickly French observers started writing reports to describe these new varieties. In fact, the very first documents written in Kreyòl, in Haitian Creole, or its ancestors, were written by — they were actually commissioned by — Napoleon, because Napoleon, as he wanted to communicate with the Africans who were revolting against slavery and against colonization, he had to use Kreyòl to reach to them. So, he commissioned translations of French proclamations into Haitian Creole, and that was the end of the 18th century.
So basically, Haitian Creole emerged out of this contact between speakers of different French varieties because back then there wasn’t just one French spoken in Haiti. There were a whole set of varieties influenced by, what they call the “Patois”: Norman French, Occitan, the languages of d’Oil and d’Oc, and on the other side, you have the African languages, like Igbo, Fongbe, Yoruba, Congo… There was a whole set of languages. And out of this mix, as the Africans and the French were trying to communicate with each other and as the Africans were learning varieties of French, that’s how Kreyòl emerged.
And I like to compare that process of language contact that, in turn, gave birth to a new language, I like to compare it to the way French emerged in Europe out of contact between speakers of Latin and speakers of Frank and Celtic languages. We have similar patterns: you have conquerors who bring their language among a “barbaric” set of people — that’s the way, the Romans view it back then — and as those “barbaric people” as they were learning varieties of Latin, they created their own kind of Latin, which was then called Old French. So, Old French emerged out of a situation of contact very similar to the way that Kreyòl emerged out of the contact between French and African languages. And that was in the 17th and 18th century.
KRISTEN: And so, this constitutes the question of when do we determine what groups languages as Creole languages or languages without the “Creole” before because, as is the same with the example you gave with French, the language we’re using now, English, you could say that was also a Creole that emerged through Germanic languages and meeting with the languages the Vikings spoke and losing different verb endings — I’m not an Indo-Europeanist but, things changed, things moved, and we have English as we have it today. So, you’re dating Kreyòl back to the 1700s, and so, when can we say that Haitian Creole is a language in its own right? When do linguists classify it like that?
MICHEL: Yes, that’s a great question. And what I would say is that that distinction is pretty much the same as what you can make between a dialect and a language, right? I don’t think it’s a linguistic question, I think it’s a political question, right? Because there is no clear boundary that would allow you to say that’s a dialect and that’s a language. As this famous quote, I think it came from maybe [Ulrich] Weinreich, a language is a dialect with a navy and an army. So basically, a language is a dialect with political power behind it.
I think that the same is true in the case that you just described, Kristen. When do you recognize a language as its own entity or when is it viewed as a variety of a different language? I think these are political considerations. But, I think at some point, clearly, if you have two languages whose speakers cannot speak to each other, cannot understand each other, then clearly you have distinct languages. And I think today it is clear that Haitian Creole has its own syntactic, lexical, and morphological patterns that make it quite different from French, so it’s a distinct language from French. But in terms of the term “Creole” itself, and this is a very lively debate in linguistics, my own conclusion, after lots and lots of years looking at this question, is that there is no such thing as a “Creole” type. There is no such thing as a “Creole typology”.
“A language is a dialect with political power behind it.”
So, the term “Creole” describes a particular sociohistorical process, and this is a position that my colleague Salikoko Mufwene explains so clearly: if you look at the history of the world’s languages, and if you look at the way Creoles have evolved, there is nothing that is specifically “Creole” to the history of a Creole language. The term “Creole” can only be used as an ostensive term, to refer to these languages that were born at this particular sociohistorical context in the Caribbean out of colonization by the Europeans. And you can reserve the term “Creole” for these languages without assuming there are some linguistic structural criteria that would define what a Creole is. So, that’s my take on this question.
DANIEL: So, just to elaborate a little for listeners who aren’t familiar with some of these concepts, in linguistics, we classify languages based on their genealogy which is effectively an evaluation of their roots, right? And so, English is often classified as a Germanic language with heavy Latin influence, right? And what that means is that English merged from the confluence of Old Saxon, primarily, which was a Germanic language close to German, Dutch and Norman French, which was a variety of Latin. And there are a lot of languages in recently colonized parts of the world, especially the Caribbean and parts of South-East Asia, where, instead of getting that more specific classification, a language just becomes called a Creole language.
MICHEL: In my analysis, what I show is that Haitian Creole is a Romance language, and there is no need to assume that it would fall in a special category. So for me, the term “Creole” is a sociohistorical term, not a term that would refer to a particular linguistic type. So that’s what I see from all the data that I have been looking at for the past 15 years or so.
“I think one very good reason why the European scholars in the 17th/18th century could not link, say, Haitian Creole to the Romance languages because by doing so, they would have then to agree that speakers of Creole languages in the Caribbean, meaning the Africans, majority, that those can be connected to the rest of humanity.”
KRISTEN: In terms of this classification, I was working on a piece this past week on the “Khoisan Language Family” which has since been debunked but, prior to the debunking of the Khoisan Language Family…the Khoisan languages are comprised of the ‘click’ languages that you are often shown and discussed in terms of videos [referring to pop-culture language videos] but, they were always just lumped together because they were under-studied by linguists, as a lot of languages around the world that are not majority languages, majority-spoken languages, are understudied so they were always just lumped together as one language family because they had clicks in it and other languages didn’t.
And, it sounds a lot of what you’re describing in that in previous times, politicians, linguists, whoever would lump Creole languages together maybe just because of how they emerged and maybe because of where they were spoken, the people who used them because it was just easier to lump them together. But when you start getting into it, and breaking down into it, there isn’t a relationship across those languages because they do emerge in different settings and have different influences and are geographically very dispersed. So trying to create a link just because it’s easier is well..the easy way out.
MICHEL: Well, actually, what I also looked at, which I find very interesting when connected to the issue of education, is that there was one, I think, one very good reason why the European scholars in the 17th/18th century could not link, say, Haitian Creole to the Romance languages: because, by doing so, they would have, then, to agree that speakers of Creole languages in the Caribbean, meaning the Africans, the majority, that those, then, could be connected to the rest of humanity. Because remember back then languages were used as markers of humanity, so there were famous linguists — like Schleicher, philosophers like Humboldt — they had this notion that a language is an expression of the genius of nations. But in fact, Schleicher made it very clear that, when he came up with the notion of family trees, for him those family trees could be used to measure grades of humanity; language could be used to determine advances of civilization: who were the advanced peoples, the advanced humans, versus, who were the primitive humans? And, for example, what Schleicher did was to compare Chinese with Latin. And he said:
“Well look at Chinese, the Chinese words are so simple, they have no conjugation, they have no markers to show, say, time and mood. But now, compare it to Latin! Latin has all these beautiful ornaments on the verbs. Therefore, we can use that to say that the Chinese people are inferior. And then the people who speak Latin or Greek, they are the advanced people.”
You see? So, from that perspective, the first scholars who looked at Creole languages could not, it was unthinkable for them to, link, say, Haitian Creole spoken by Blacks, Africans…those languages spoken in the Caribbean could not be connected through family trees with languages spoken in Europe. So, my point is that there was a very “good reason” by the need to keep the Africans as slaves and to apologize: well, you see, they are slaves by nature; they are not like us because their languages cannot be like our languages. You see?
So, they had to create this special grouping called “Creoles” in order to say that those languages really were reflexes of lower intelligence. And then that’s what you find if you look at the earliest treatments of Creole languages be it in Mauritius, in Madagascar, in the Caribbean, on the coast of West Africa: it was a common pattern [to assume] that those languages reflect the lower genius of lower human beings. So [it is assumed that] the Africans, they could not learn anything like French or English or Portuguese or Spanish; what they had to do was to transform those advanced languages into bastard tongues. You see?
So, I’ve written about this issue in depth to analyze how these views about Creole languages, although they are not as blatant today, but you can still find remnants of these views in today’s linguistics. And that’s part of my work as well is to demystify those views because those views have real impact on the way, say, Haitians view Kreyòl at home… because, if linguists say that these languages are exceptional, they are lesser, they are primitive, and if you’re a Haitian teacher or a Haitian parent, why would you use that to teach your kid? Why wouldn’t you use the next best choice, which is French? So, there is a direct connection between the views that linguists have promoted around Creole languages and the way that those languages are misused or disenfranchised in the Caribbean or in Africa or in Latin America. But that’s a common pattern — that language, indeed, can be used as a weapon for oppression or liberation.
DANIEL: As Weinreich said, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And on that note, we’re going to take a very quick break. And, when we come back, we are going to learn about how Michel DeGraff is changing perceptions of Haitian Creole, both in the United States and at home in Haiti.
KRISTEN: Welcome back to Speaking of Us and thank you for tuning in. We are here with Michel DeGraff, a linguist based at MIT. And we were discussing with him before the break about mother-tongue education in Haiti and how schools are still primarily taught with French as the language of instruction and so, we want to hear from you Michel about your work at the forefront for advocating for mother tongue education and we wanted to know, why is this important? Why is this not already occurring?
MICHEL: Great questions. So, why it’s important to teach in the mother tongue, which in Haiti, for the vast majority, is Haitian Creole — it’s Kreyòl. It’s a basic issue of human rights, of psychological well-being, of quality education, of development. It’s all of that together because — so basically, there is a beautiful quote by Professor [Ekkehard] Wolff that says that, of course, “language is not everything in education, but without language, everything is nothing” — meaning that if you don’t get the language right, then nothing can succeed. And that’s why it’s very important that, in a country like Haiti that’s been so impoverished, and I’d like to stress it’s impoverished, it’s not a poor country intrinsically, it’s been made poor, and one factor that’s made it poor is the fact that education has, for the past two centuries, been done in a language that most Haitians do not speak fluently, do not speak at home.
So, therefore, the children, the kids from the get-go are handicapped by having to learn in French, which they do not speak. Even the teachers themselves are not fluent in French, so can we ever hope that the school system will succeed and will create cohorts of well-educated Haitians. It’s impossible, and that’s why it is so important to try to make sure that teachers, parents, civil society understand the importance of teaching in Haitian Creole. Of course, that’s not the only thing that could make the schools successful, but it’s basically a boundary condition, a necessary condition in order to ensure that the students and the teachers can have access to quality education.
So, you asked why it hasn’t happened yet? Well, I think the answer is straightforward because, on paper, it should be happening. On paper, since 1987, Haitian Creole has been recognized as the one language that everyone speaks in Haiti. So, Article 5 [of the Haitian Constitution] states clearly that everyone speaks Haitian Creole, and the next sentence says that we have two official languages, French and Kreyòl. And in practice, in fact, most decrees, most communications by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Justice, even if you go to court, the whole thing happens in French, when sometimes even the lawyers and the accused do not speak French properly.
So, why is that? Well, the short answer is: neo-colonialism. The fact is that, although we have been independent since 1804, in many ways Haiti is still a colonized country. It’s colonized both from within [and without]. [From within] there’s a small class that speaks French, and French has become a privilege that they use for what the linguist Carol Myers-Scotton has called elite closure [see below]. The use of French in Haiti ensures that the elites can remain closed to themselves. And then [from without] there’s larger geopolitical forces where France has been pushing for Haiti to remain a “Francophone ally.” Haiti is a major player in the Francophonie movement that benefits not Haiti, but benefits France. You see? So, those are some of the factors of why today, although legally Kreyòl should be language of instruction, the language of most transactions in the formal spheres, that hasn’t happened yet.
KRISTEN: And how does it benefit France for former colonies, former territories to use French as the language of instruction still to this day?
MICHEL: Well, I think the answer, we can get it straight from the horse’s mouth. So, there was a President of France called Giscard d’Estaing. In the 70s, Giscard d’Estaing made a speech that was actually very clear about the importance of the French language and French culture. And he said clearly that language, culture, they are vehicles for economic and political power. So basically, he understands that if you get countries to keep to French as the official language, then it allows France to influence their economy, their politics, and you see the same thing in Africa. In Africa, if you look at West African countries that are called “francophone,” even the monetary apparatus relies on France. Right, so basically language is a tool for “soft power.” That’s often the way they call it: language as a tool for soft power. Before, you would use boats and cannons, but today, what the French use among other means for control, they use language. And Giscard d’Estaing explained that very clearly. And that’s not just the case with France. If you look at 1492, you know, the use of Spanish in the conquest of Latin America, there too, language played a key role in trying to convince the Incas, the Mayans that their language was not language, their language was basically “barbaric,” and they needed to speak Spanish in order to become human. Right?
So, basically, it’s a classic case of hegemony: once you convince the people that you oppress that they deserve their oppression because their culture, their language, their religions are inferior, then you ensure control, you control their minds.
DANIEL: What would you say to people who make the case that we all should just assimilate to a handful of languages because that is where true economic benefit lies?
MICHEL: Well, I would say that that could be a good argument, but then we’d have to look at the science of learning. The science of learning, including the science of linguistics as well, tells us that the best way to learn those “fancy international languages” is to start with your foundations. Right? You cannot build a 10-story building without first having strong foundations. And what we know, from the science of learning, is that the strongest foundations are built on the assets that the children bring to the classroom and those assets include their home language, their native language. And, so basically, what’s going to hinder those children is not the mother tongue.
On the contrary, what’s going to hinder them, what’s going to handicap them — and we have data to show that — is when they cannot build those foundations using their native language. Because once they have those strong foundations, then they can learn French and English and Spanish and Swahili and Mandarin. So, once you have this foundation, then the sky is the limit. But, if from the get-go, the child is handicapped by not being able to learn to read and write properly, then that’s it. What’s going to isolate and hinder those children in ignorance is going to be the lack of access to being able to learn in their native language. You see? So to me, that’s the basic issue. It’s not either the mother tongue or the so called “international language”; the issue is how can you do both? How can you equip the child to best learn other languages like English and French, etc., but also learn math and science and geography, but at the same time, still feel like they are complete human beings that can honor their home language, their home cultures, what their parents speak, the ancestral knowledge, etc.
You see? Because as the child goes to the classroom and sees that their native home language is excluded, it also excludes so much else. It also excludes all the experiences the child has built from that moment on. From the moment the child was born, the child has all this knowledge that was built through their native language. Once that child goes to school and the teacher says “forget about it”, you see, that’s what hinders the child. Not the mother tongue.
DANIEL: In other words, when we keep our languages alive, our children learn better. And that is perhaps the best argument for linguistic diversity there is.
KRISTEN: So, you’ve been working on these issues and helped develop a platform at MIT focusing on mother-tongue education for kids in Haiti through problem solving and STEM technologies. Could you tell us a bit more about this platform and its journey to inception?
MICHEL: Yes, so that too in a way is a very long story. But to try to find one point when it started it would be right after the earthquake. Actually, when the earthquake happened in 2010 — January 12, 2010 — I happened to be on the phone with Yves Dejean, which I mentioned earlier. So Yves Dejean was an educator in Haiti. And, actually, we were discussing the issue of how to get the Ministry of Education to really implement the use of the mother tongue in the school system. So, Yves Dejean wrote, actually, a beautiful book, one of the most important books I’ve ever read in Kreyòl, actually in Kreyòl it’s called “Yon lekòl tèt anba nan yon peyi tèt anba,” which literally means “An upside-down school in an upside-down country.”
And his point is that the school is upside down because it’s using the one language that so few Haitians speak and the one language that most Haitians speak is not used in the classroom. So that makes the school upside because the kids are bound to fail from the very beginning of their school entry. And then it goes on to show that this is a handicap for the entire country, and it blocks development. So, on that day, as we were on the phone, we got cut off because the earthquake happened and for a couple of days I had no clue whether he was alive. And when I did at the end get in touch with him and he was alive, I was so grateful for that. Then we said, well you know now more than ever that the schools are destroyed, places are destroyed, if we’re going to try to help, this has to be in the forefront; we have to make sure that any rebuilding would have to include the mother tongue, the national language, at the center of rebuilding. So we cannot rebuild schools as if they were bricks, just bricks. We also have to think of what goes into the teaching.
And then, so basically, that gave me the basic impetus to create this initiative. Because at MIT we have some very, very creative and brilliant educators. My colleague Vijay Kumar was then the head of the Center [for Educational Innovation and Technology]. So we met and we discussed how we can help rebuild the school system in Haiti at this moment. And, little by little, we brought in some other colleagues from mathematics, from the Center for Teaching and Learning, and little by little, we came up with this idea that we should invite educators in Haiti, from schools, from universities, people producing digital tools for teaching and learning, so we could sit down and think of how can MIT and Haiti put forces together to help create a better system.
And that’s how this was created, this MIT-Haiti Initiative. That was 10 years ago, and we’ve done workshops in Haiti, we’ve created a whole suite of digital tools for teaching math and chemistry and biology and physics in Kreyòl, promoting active learning which is of a different sort than what you would find in most Haitians schools where kids are just learning by rote, by memorizing formulas without much understanding because it’s all in French. Basically, we’re showing that teachers teach better and the children learn better when it’s done in the mother tongue using active-learning pedagogy. So that’s basically the core of the project.
DANIEL: And, what steps would you recommend today for anyone listening and who wants to start this process for their children if they don’t have access to mother tongue education for their child, and if there is a void of resources or institutional support, how can anyone start creating an immersive environment for their child?
MICHEL: That’s a good question. I would say that if you speak a language that doesn’t have a critical mass of people using it on the internet. So, in the case of Haitian Creole, in a way we were lucky because there was already a critical mass of teachers, parents, students using Kreyòl in writing. And also the language has an orthography that has been official since the late 70s. But in many cases, it’s a very different situation. In many cases, you don’t have this critical mass, right? So I think that’s where it’s important to enlist the parents, the community, the political leaders, the artists. I’m not sure if there’s one recipe that would fit all. I think it would have to be based on the actual profile of the community. But clearly parents and community members have to play a key role in creating the right environment, the right immersive environment. Also, what you often find, and this reminds me of a recent exchange with a couple of friends, that people are concerned about how can they make sure kids grow up immersed in their language. And often, the answer is, it’s the parents, the community itself that has to take care of that. But of course, there are different layers because if the parents and the community don’t believe that the language is worth it, that might not happen.
So, there has to be some realization that says well look, that’s an asset. That’s why you need the political leaders, you need activists that will help push the language forward. So, I think it’s a very complex question that you asked. But I think we have to look at each language and look at the profile of the community to see what are the avenues to make the right change. And that would depend on the exact profile for each case.
KRISTEN: Great, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we wrap up, on our last episode, we asked our guest to recommend a cultural piece from their language community be it an artist, a poet, a film, a musician. Is there someone or something that comes to your mind that you’d like to recommend people to watch or listen to or engage with?
MICHEL: That’s a very tricky question.
KRISTEN: Something that you hold dear, or something that brings back memories of childhood. If anything comes to your mind.
MICHEL: So, what I would say is if anyone wants to listen to music in Kreyòl, in Haitian Creole, I would strongly recommend for them to go to YouTube, and then to basically explore. Luckily Haitian artists have been extremely prolific, very very prolific. There’s lots of music, poetry, theatre, films, in Kreyòl, on YouTube, and if you want to know what my own preferences are — and so here I’ll do a shameless plug — go to my own Facebook page, Michel DeGraff, or go to the MIT-Haiti Facebook page, and there we often share music and arts and theatre pieces that people might enjoy. So, that would be one route to discover artists who promote Haitian Creole. YouTube or at least, check out my Facebook page.
KRISTEN: Yes, you can find Michel and MIT-Haiti Initiative on Facebook, Twitter, and I think YouTube also, and I think Instagram. And Michel, at least, is often sharing information, and often writes in Kreyòl, French, and English so you get a good breadth of language and culture through his social media feeds.
MICHEL: Thank you, and actually that also goes back to the previous question where you ask what steps one could suggest to start this process of creating an immersive environment for the children. I think that social media can be extremely helpful. In my experience, I found that lots of Haitian Creole speakers have been producing interesting materials that they share on social media. And what’s often needed is a way to curate these materials because not all of it is of the same quality. But that would be, I think, a good step to consider: to enlist social media to gather materials for your native language and then make sure that your children have access to curated materials. Not just any old materials on YouTube, but you can take a pick of what’s there or you can produce materials for your children. Recently, what we did, just yesterday, we posted a video of my own family singing a children’s song in Kreyòl alongside the text, so as you sing you can also read the text. And the book was also produced by a Haitian in the US, Genise Vertus, and it’s a song about the Haitian flag, because we have Flag Day coming up on May 18th. And it’s a very short book, easy to make, and you can imagine that any parent could make a similar book based on a song, and have children sing the song while having the text on the side of the video and that’s a very easy, beautiful literacy tool. So, I think technology can be enlisted to help create these immersive environments.
DANIEL: Michel, how do you say “thank you” in Haitian creole?
MICHEL: Mèsi.
DANIEL: Michel DeGraff everybody! This has been Speaking of Us. If you want to find more of Michel’s work, you can see him on Twitter @MichelDegraff. You can also find him on Instagram and Facebook and in any of his accounts, you will find links to MIT-Haiti, his project facilitating STEM and STEAM education in Haitian Creole.
KRISTEN: And, on our website, you can find this episode along with the accompanying transcriptions and related blog posts where we’ll list all of Michel’s information and link to MIT-Haiti Initiative. And so you can find more information there!
DANIEL: At www.wikitongues.org/podcasts.
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