Diglossia and language conflict in Haiti

Valdman, Albert

doi:10.1515/ijsl.1988.71.67

Cited by 16 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Despite being the language spoken by over 70% of the population, people reported several reasons for rejecting Kreol in schools among which a) its low status vis-à-vis French and English, b) its lack of contribution to academic success, higher studies abroad and access to job opportunities, c) its creation of confusion between Safran's (2008) claim that continued use of colonial languages in the aftermath of colonisation deemphasises the role of language in the formation of ethnic identity, in the case of Mauritius, the ethnicisation of language was maintained (Eisenlohr, 2004(Eisenlohr, , 2010. Previous research on Haiti and Louisiana, where a similar French-based Kreol exists have found that the status of the language remains low vis-à-vis French, its superstratal language (Dejean, 1993;Valdman, 1988Valdman, , 1997. Therefore, several questions arise from the above, however I will only raise three for the purpose of this paper: first, how are colonial languages maintaining their status in this multi-ethnic and multi-lingual context?…”

Section: So What?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The dynamics of language and ethnicity in Mauritius

Sambajee

2016

Int'l Jnl of Cross Cultural Management

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The link between ethnicity and language has been well established in research but its contextual, perspectual and variable nature demands that this connection be re-examined in each attempt to understand a nation. This paper is about Mauritius, a postcolonial context where French and British colonisation has left salient features which continue to influence the dynamics around language and ethnicity in the country. By describing its demographic characteristics and its linguistic and political situation, I retrieve some of the key facets of this multi-ethnic and multi-lingual nation which evidence resistance by both the state and the populace against the established colonial languages. To compensate for the lack of appropriate theoretical framework in existing research on Mauritius, I use Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theoretical framework to uncover the realities faced by both the state and the people of this country and the impacts these may have in the workplace

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Section: So What?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The dynamics of language and ethnicity in Mauritius

Sambajee

2016

Int'l Jnl of Cross Cultural Management

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“…With this background, the media of the 1970s and 1980s transmitted many hysterical 2 For descriptive work on Haitian Creole, among others, the reader is referred to the following authors. For sociolinguistic analyses see Valdman (1988), Dejean (1993), Howe (1993), and Zéphir (1997). For grammatical analyses, see DeGraff (1993DeGraff ( , 1997DeGraff ( , 2007, Valdman (2007), and Harbour (2008).…”

Section: The Sociolinguistic Situation Of Haitian-americans In South mentioning

confidence: 99%

Adverb code-switching among Miami's Haitian Creole–English second generation

Hebblethwaite

2010

Bilingualism

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The findings for adverbs and adverbial phrases in a naturalistic corpus of Miami Haitian Creole–English code-switching show that one language, Haitian Creole, asymmetrically supplies the grammatical frame while the other language, English, asymmetrically supplies mixed lexical categories like adverbs. Traces of code-switching with an English frame and Haitian Creole lexical categories suggest that code-switching is abstractly BIDIRECTIONAL. A quantitative methodology that codes the language-indexation of the token in addition to the surrounding lexical items was used for all mixed (e.g. xYx/yXy, xYy/yXx, yYx/xXy) and unmixed (xXx/yYy) adverbs. Discourse position, especially the left-periphery, is found to be a significant factor in adverb code-switching. Sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic analyses which acknowledge the ‘low’ status of one language and the ‘high’ status of the other explain better the frequency of mixed English adverbs in a Haitian Creole frame and the rarity of mixed Haitian Creole adverbs in an English frame than a minimalist approach, such as MacSwan's (1999 and subsequent work), which uses phi-feature valuation and entails asymmetry without bidirectionality. While I provide confirmation for Myers-Scotton's (1993) Matrix Language Frame approach, I emphasize that trace bidirectional data need to be accounted for by a theory that is grounded in the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic realities.

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“…Lofficial also uses the term l*qdl rlk, which he describes as"le niveau ressenti comme le plus rude de la langue " (1979:118) [the level felt to be the roughest of the language]. While these metalinguistic terms are mentioned in the sociolinguistic literature on Kreydl (Valdman 1988(Valdman , 1989a, and are commonly known by Haitians in a variety of social classes, the words rdk, swa, and gwo are not listed in the various Kreydl dictionaries in their metalinguistic usage. It is informative for later discussions of the orthography to elaborate on the semantics of these expressions because they carry important cultural meanings.…”

Section: Kreybl Speech Varieties and Metalinguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%