Haitian Creole: Structure, Variation, Status, Origin by Albert Valdman (review)

Even though the title of the book recalls one that Albert Valdman published in 1978 in French, this is a new work that reflects advances in research over the last forty years.

Chapter 1 is a substantial introduction. It gives a general account of the differences between pidgin and creole languages, followed by a sketch of the often violent and unstable history of Haiti, from the arrival of Christopher Columbus until the present day; it then briefly discusses the role of French and Creole in Haiti and lists descriptive studies of Haitian Creole. Section 1.4 gives very valuable information about Atlantic French-based creoles not often discussed in the linguistic literature. In this section, Valdman mentions poorly known French creoles spoken in the Lesser Antilles such as the variety spoken in Trinidad and Tobago, to which the first description of a creole language by Thomas in 1869 is dedicated, the endangered Guïria Creole spoken in Venezuela, and Karipúna Creole, spoken by indigenous peoples in the northeastern Brazilian state of Amapá.

Chapter 2, “The Phonological System” (pp. 58–78), points out that the phonological system of Haitian Creole does not differ greatly from that of French. This chapter prepares the reader for the discussion of spelling in chapter 4.

Chapter 3, “Variation in the Forms of Words” (pp. 79–95), deals with morphophonological processes—systematic alternations in the forms of words—that are very frequent in Haitian Creole and differ significantly from those of French. As Valdman points out, awareness of these alternations is central for the development of spelling systems.

Chapter 4, “Toward a Systematic Autonomous Spelling” (pp. 95–138), starts with general considerations about spelling systems—specifically, the notion of biuniqueness. In section 4.3, Valdman reviews the history of the development of etymologically based orthographies for Haitian Creole; he takes the opportunity to provide excerpts from older texts, starting with La Passion de Notre Seigneur selon Saint-Jean en Langage Negre, probably written between 1720 and 1740. Section 4.4, on phonemic spelling systems presents the three systematic, autonomous orthographies developed in Haiti since the 1940s, one of which was recognized as official. In the last section of the chapter, Valdman addresses the challenges of morphophonological variation for spelling systems.

Chapter 5, “The Structure of the Haitian Creole Lexicon” (pp. 139–65), argues vigorously against the common view that Haitian Creole originated in an impoverished pidgin. Its numerous examples illustrate the rich word formation resources of Haitian Creole, as shown by the most comprehensive dictionary (Valdman, Iskrova, and Hebblethwaite 2007). A review of the variety of mechanisms of lexical renewal achieved by derivation and the creation of compounds shows that Haitian Creole is capable of meeting all the communicative needs of a language on its way to literacy. The chapter also discusses contact phenomena with the neighboring languages, Spanish and English, without neglecting the fact that the main source of loanwords remains French.

The next three chapters deal with the syntactic structure of Haitian Creole. Chapter 7, “Basic Sentence Structure” (pp. 189–208), discusses some important features of Haitian Creole predicates, starting with the relative lack of inflectional affixes, the multifunctionality of word classes, and the resulting importance of word order. While these features are shared by almost all creoles, the following section on the copula deals with a feature more specific to Haitian Creole, the syntactic operators ye and se. As in numerous other French-based creoles, reflexivity can be marked either by concepts referring to the human body plus the personal pronoun (kò/tèt + pronoun) or by a direct-object pronoun, and there is no overt passive marking.

In chapter 8, “The Verbal System” (pp. 209–52), Valdman addresses some issues of typological comparison; he places Haitian Creole near the analytic pole of a synthetic-to-analytic scale, thus continuing an evolution already present in vernacular French. He then discusses the use of the tense-mode-aspect markers Ø, ap, te, and a...