On October 31st the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Haitian Creole Program hosted a webinar entitled The Genesis of Creole Languages and Historical Developments. This seminar was organized by Websder Corneille, Lecturer of Haitian Creole at IU, and came at the end of October’s Creole Heritage Month, coinciding with UNESCO-proclaimed International Creole Day, celebrated annually on October 28th.
The panelists were Dr. Carla Martin, Dr. Fabiola Henri, Ernst Djeride Jean-Baptiste, and Dr. Penda Choppy. CLACS director Dr. Serafin Coronel-Molina offered opening and closing comments, and esteemed Creole language scholar Dr. Salikoko Mufwene joined as an external commentator. The webinar’s participants explored diverse issues in Haitian, Mauritian, Cape Verdean, and Seychellois Creole, including linguistic justice in education, technology for under-resourced Creole languages, the infamous Creole Debate and the myth of Creole exceptionalism, and new developments in Creole linguistics.
Ernst Djeride Jean-Baptiste, a graduate researcher at the University of Ottawa and Communications officer at the MIT-Haiti Initiative, described the need for mother tongue instruction in primary schools in Haiti. Many students, he said, are failed by an education system that deprivileges Haitian Creole in favor of French. The other panelists resonated strongly with this sentiment, as it echoes the situation in many countries where Creole languages must compete with prestige colonial languages and are rarely given equal status in professional and educational domains. Jean-Baptiste’s work with the MIT-Haiti initiative promotes technology-enhanced active learning in Haitian Creole for native speakers of the language.
Dr. Fabiola Henri, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Buffalo, spoke on the vulnerable position of Creole languages in terms of linguistic revitalization and development, particularly her native language of Mauritian Creole. On the EGIDS Scale, a metric which assesses a language’s stability and usage between 1-10, Creole languages consistently fall between 5-10, ranging from vigorously spoken within localized communities to moribund or extinct.
Henri detailed the intersection of Creole languages and technology, noting that many current innovations such as Speech to Text and Large Language Models require massive datasets in order to train the models. These large corpora do not exist for many Creole languages, and Creole language communities who wish to preserve and promote their languages are at a significant disadvantage by being unable to access cutting edge language technologies. Dr. Henri highlighted the need for developers of linguistic technologies to collaborate with dedicated Creolists and build tools for these languages.
Dr. Carla Martin, Lecturer at Harvard University and scholar of Cape Verdean Creole, spoke about the unique positionality of music in Cape Verde as a tool for linguistic justice. Cape Verdean Creole (Kriolu) is the oldest living Creole language and is the first language of nearly every Cape Verdean. Despite this, Portuguese remains the nation’s official language and is afforded considerably more prestige. Martin’s study of this diglossic society revealed one site in which Kriolu functions as the language of prestige – in music. In a subversion of the professional and legal domain, it is the command of Kriolu, not Portuguese, which establishes a musician as a true representative of the Cape Verdean spirit and culture. There is tremendous potential, Martin says, for music to be used as a means of expanding Kriolu use in primary school classrooms and advocating for the language to be given equal status with Portuguese in broader domains of Cape Verdean life.
Dr. Penda Choppy from the University of Seychelles detailed her work using Seychellois folktales to uncover the history of Creole identity and development in Seychelles. She gave the audience insight into the way traditional folktales encoded historical information about the development of Seychellois Creole and preserved diaspora culture. She also shared her work to revitalize the creole garden, the traditional Seychellois kitchen garden which for many generations has been a means of transmitting and preserving ecological, cultural, and linguistic knowledge in Seychelles.
Dr. Salikoko Mufwene, one of the world’s leading creolists, added some comments and carried on discussion with the panelists at the webinar’s close. He currently holds positions as the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago and Visiting Professor at College de France. Dr. Mufwene highlighted the insufficiency of the infamous Creole debate to explain the complex distribution of Creole languages and pidgins as they are spoken in our world today, and exhorted the panelists to continue advancing the field through their diverse research and advocacy work.
After the presentations, audience members engaged with the presenters and commentators in an invigorating discussion about their work and other topics within Creole studies. We are grateful to all our panelists for their participation, to Dr. Mufwene and Dr. Coronel-Molina for their presence, and to everyone who joined us for this exciting conversation.
The webinar has been collaboratively organized by the Haitian Creole Program, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University, Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, DO KRE I S review, Wikitongues and Spanish For Entities.
Margaret Carpenter
Graduate Student, Indiana University Bloomington
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