From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Variety of French spoken in Haiti
Not to be confused with
Haitian Creole
, a French-based creole language.
Haitian French
(
French
:
francais haitien
,
Haitian Creole
:
franse ayisyen
) is the variety of
French
spoken in
Haiti
.
[1]
Haitian French is close to standard French. It should be distinguished from
Haitian Creole
, which is not
mutually intelligible
with French.
Phonology
[
edit
]
The
phoneme
consonant /
?
/ is pronounced [
?
], but it is often silent in the syllable coda when occurring before a consonant or prosodic break (
faire
is pronounced [
f
?
ː]). The nasal vowels are not pronounced as in
French of France
, /
??
/ → [
a
], /
??
/ → [
??
], /
??
/ → [
o
], and /
œ?
/ → [
œ?
]. The typical vowel shifts make it sound very much like other regional accents of the
French Caribbean
and the
Francophone
countries of
Africa
.
[2]
The perceivable difference between Haitian French and the French spoken in
Paris
lies in the Haitian speaker's intonation, where a subtle
creole
-based tone carrying the French on top is found.
[1]
Importantly, these differences are not enough to create a misunderstanding between a native
Parisian
speaker and a speaker of Haitian French.
[1]
In
Haiti
, the
French
spoken in
Paris
is very influential, so much so that a growing number of
Haitians
would rather speak it as precisely as possible and pursue this by listening to
Radio France Internationale
and matching the somewhat conservative style of speech heard on that station.
[1]
In the educated groups, French is spoken more closely to the Parisian accent. It is within this group that a major portion of enrollment is provided for the private schools and universities. Even in this group however, a native accent of the language usually occurs in everyone's speech.
[3]
See also
[
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]
References
[
edit
]
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Etienne, Corinne. "French in Haiti: Contacts and conflicts between linguistic representations". In Piston-Hatlen, D.; Clements, C.; Klingler, T.; Rottet, K. (eds.).
Pidgin-Creole Interfaces: Studies in Honor of Albert Valdman
. John Benjamins Publishers.
doi
:
10.1075/cll.28.12eti
.
- Etienne, Corinne (2005). "Lexical particularities of French in the Haitian press: Readers' perceptions and appropriation".
Journal of French Language Studies
.
15
(15 3): 257?277.
doi
:
10.1017/S0959269505002152
.
S2CID
145721220
.
- Auger, J.; Word-Allbritton, A. (2000). "The CVC of sociolinguistics: Contacts, variation, and culture, IULC".
Indiana University, Bloomington
(2): 21?33.
- Schieffelin, Bambi B.; Doucet, Rachelle Charlier (1994). "The "Real" Haitian Creole: Ideology, metalinguistics, and orthographic choice".
American Ethnologist
.
21
(1): 176?200.
doi
:
10.1525/ae.1994.21.1.02a00090
.
External links
[
edit
]