Haitian Creole

Haitian Creole (Kreyòl ayisyen; ISO 639-3: hat) is the primary language of nearly all Haitians and is also spoken across a large diaspora. It developed in colonial Saint-Domingue through contact between varieties of French and languages spoken by enslaved Africans; most vocabulary has French sources, but its grammar cannot be reduced to “broken French” or to a simple list of African substrates. Distinctive structures include preverbal tense–mood–aspect markers such as te and ap and postnominal definite articles whose forms vary with surrounding sounds. Haitian Creole has shared official status with French under Haiti’s 1987 Constitution. Its standardized, largely phonemic Latin orthography dates from 1979, and the language is used in literature, broadcasting, religion, and increasingly education, although French retains substantial institutional prestige.

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