So there's some beautiful pieces that goes, actually, it's huge.
It's six volumes, and it's called
the Atlas of Haitian Creole.
It's online, so I'd be happy to share the reference with you.
I mean, actually, it has maps.
It also has recordings.
You can actually go and listen to the various dialects
of Haitian creole.
And what people have found striking is
the fact that, in terms of variation,
it's quite restricted, so anywhere you are in Haiti,
you can speak to someone who speaks Creole.
You can speak Creole.
So there are some words that are kind of-- shibboleth
of seven regions, but overall there
is no issue with misunderstanding.
You know, Asians understand each other
when they speak creole even though, at first, it
might be a bit of hesitation if you come
from two different regions.
And that atlas actually documents that very well--
that you have lots of lexico idiosyncrasies across regions,
but the grammar itself is pretty much similar,
which one might think, it's surprising
given that you have all this influx of Africans
in various language groups.
You'd expect more variation, but people have also
argued, given the fact that, if you
look at the history of Haiti, the country was
for a long time pretty isolated after independence.
In fact, that's something that we can talk about later.
The European forces and the American forces,
even though Haiti helped the US in terms of its independence,
getting more territory-- like, I don't
know if you've heard about the Louisiana purchase which
was caused because of Napoleon losing Haiti,
because of Haitian Revolution.
But yet, the US quarantined Haiti very quickly, why?
Because Haitian was an example of black liberty, which
was a threat to the world back then.
Haiti was unthinkable and unacceptable,
so it had to be embargoed.
And that embargo, people have argued
is what actually created this isolation that, in turn, gave
Haitian creole pretty much it's uniformity,
because there was little traffic from outside to Haiti.
For a long time, Haiti was pretty much self-contained,
and that helped the language gel as, you know,
a pretty uniform system.
AUDIENCE: And was it always uniform over time?
MICHEL DEGRAFF: Well, over time, the data is not so--
we don't have enough data to document
that, whether over time, there was more or less variation.
Because what we have is pretty fragmentary.
We don't have lots and lots of evidence about, say,
18th century Haitian creole.
We have some archival data but not
enough to be able to compare what happened
in different regions of the country, but what we do have,
going to the 17th, 18th century--
you know, strike us as pretty similar to the Haitian-spoken
now.
So there were French scholars who were writing down
what they would hear.
They were writing down a variety of Haitian creole
from the 18th, 19th century, and I can still read those text.
Of course, they were written with French autography,
and maybe that's another confound.
They were probably imposing their French onto the creole
that they were transcribing, but if you read that creole back
then, the structures are pretty similar to the creole of today,
which also is striking as compared to English,
which has evolved much faster.