Care & Feeding: I Don't Want My Husband To Teach Our Child Creole

[minoanmiss]

I am currently pregnant. My husband who is American and born to Haitian parents wants to teach our son Haitian Creole. I am apprehensive about this because Creole is not even an official language and it almost seems regressive for our son to learn Creole. The fact is French is the official language of Haiti, but only 5 percent of the population speak French because of limited education of the country. There are three dialects of Creole and my husband doesn’t even know which one he speaks. Additionally, he cannot even read or write in Creole. Creole is not a real language and I feel as though it’s not worth it for him to teach our son. I suggested he teach our son French instead. I’d prefer it over Creole. He says he won’t, and wants to teach him Creole. Am I wrong to think this way? We live in America, and we are both American. I want to focus on teaching our son English and mastering the English language first. What should I do?

—Language Differences

Dear Language Differences,

Why is it so difficult for you to accept that your husband wants to share what he knows about his own culture with your child? What’s at the root of your discomfort with raising a multilingual child? What’s stopping you from teaching your child English and French while your husband teaches him a Creole dialect? What’s driving this (erroneous) preoccupation you have with “real” and “official” language?

I want you to really sit with your answers to these questions. Take some time considering why you’re harboring such strong resistance to your husband imparting lessons on his (and your child’s) shared cultural identity. You married someone Haitian American. Your child, the grandchild of Haitian grandparents, will have and should learn about his Haitian heritage. Get comfortable with that reality.

One of the reasons languages and dialects are lost (or become categorized as “unofficial” by people living outside their lands of origin) is those languages are not passed down from one generation to the next. Their nuances are gradually ceded to the assimilation native speakers have deemed necessary to survive. It’s no coincidence that your husband doesn’t read or write in the Creole dialect he learned. He is trying to prevent what spoken dialect he knows from being lost to his child. He wants to pass down what he and his family have worked hard to retain. There’s nothing at all objectionable about that.

You asked if you’re “wrong to think this way,” and the answer is yes, Language Differences. Your attitude in this letter reads as not just wrong but xenophobic and racist. Despite that, I do hope you’re all able to reach an agreement on this issue that works in the best interests of your child.

—Stacia

Comments

[cereta]

Hi! Person who knows just enough linguistics to be dangerous, here.

Any creole is, by definition, a "real language." That is what differentiates a pigdin from a creole: that people use it as their first language.

(Fun fact: English a creole. One of the languages that formed it was French. How many English speakers speak French?)

So, you know: go pound sand, LW.

[fox]

[shorter fox: cereta is right!]

Hi! Person with three degrees in linguistics, here.

A creole is a “real” language. Hatian Creole is so firmly established that I’m not even confident it is strictly accurate to call it a creole anymore; it is a language whose name is Creole.

LW is a racist and a snob and she should feel bad about herself.

[conuly]

English is not a creole. There is absolutely no evidence for the English = creole hypothesis. English is a straight up, noncreolized Germanic language with a lot of loanwords.

But everything else is correct.

[sara]

Nah, English is a creole.

[conuly]

No. It's not. Or, at the very best, that hypothesis is very highly contested and even the people who subscribe to it can't quite agree which languages it's a creole of. Middle English and... Old Norse? Middle French? Something Celtic?

The evidence often boils down to "English has a lot of borrowings" and "English grammar is less inflected than other Germanic languages".

Fair enough, except that most words used by most people most of the time have straight up Germanic origins or were borrowed after the supposed creolization, and English grammar was heading in the less-inflected direction before the various creole-hypothesis invaders started making their mark on the language.

So... what you're left with doesn't amount to much more than bupkis.

[sara]

Your assumption that I don't know what I'm talking about is fascinating.

And English is a creole.

[conuly]

You can keep saying it. That doesn't make it true.

[ellen_fremedon]

English grammar was heading in the less-inflected direction before the various creole-hypothesis invaders started making their mark on the language.

For the Middle English creole hypothesis, yes--OE was losing its inflections in the Danelaw as a result of contact with Old Norse, which had a lot of substantially similar core vocab and the same word order but different inflectional endings. But there's also the argument for creolization with a Celtic substrate to account for things like the progressive tense and do-support, which don't occur elsewhere in the Germanic family but are common in Brythonic.

[conuly]

Fair enough, though I really think that the evidence could just as easily be explained by language contact without creolization - but again, that just shows how shaky the "yup, creole!" argument is. The first comment in this thread said "Yup, creole - with french!"

If the people asserting it can't even agree on what English is a creole of, it's hard to take it too seriously.

Edit: Not that I know literally shit about Frisian, but my mother's pulmonologist is Frisian and she has a pulmonology appointment soon. Which causes me to look this up rather frantically - does Frisian do the same thing with questions as English does?

Frisian is, as we all know, either the language most closely related to English or not but anyway very closely related.

This edit is 100% caused by the pulmonology appointment. I should ask him, but actually, I think he only speaks Dutch, French, and English. And that one sentence.

[cereta]

That...will come as a great shock to any of my linguistics professors who are still roaming this world, but okay.

[conuly]

Do they all agree on which supposed non-Germanic languages make up the primary creole substrate languages? Because that's gonna come as a shock to me.

[cereta]

I'd ask them, but I barely remember their names. Look, it's been 30 years since my History of English class, so if those wacky kids have come up with some new stuff, I freely admit to not knowing. Not a hill I want to die on.

[ayebydan]

creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language.

Yes, it is. Colonialism just makes people think it isn't. English is begged, borrowed and robbed from start to finish. But colonialism makes people think it isn't. It is why nothing grammatically or phonetically makes sense. Because it is a bs language made from stealing from others.

[conuly]

All languages have borrowings.

English does not particularly have more or less than other languages.

All languages have grammatical quirks.

English does not particularly have more or less than other languages.

As for spelling, which is not phonetics, that... okay, that's partially screwed up by our custom of borrowing words from foreign languages and then not spelling them according to usual English spelling rules, but that's a matter of orthography and not an argument for or against the creolization hypothesis.