One of the most solidly entrenched misunderstandings about Haiti concerns its language, Creole. For many years popular wisdom held that Haitian Creole was an inferior form of French, the language of the island's colonizers and, until recently, the "official" language of Haiti. According to this view, Creole was developed by a people who were capable only of an imperfect imitation of the dominant language.
Other theories have also held that Haitian Creole, like other creoles, is an imitative mutation of different language combinations. But recent research shows something quite different. Haitian Creole evolved in modern times and may contradict notions of language being timeless. This language, as well as other creoles, may give insights into the universal properties of all human languages, and into the origin of language itself.
Misconceptions about language are not at all uncommon. The disparity between the lay person's notion of language and the linguist's scientific analysis plagues scholars. Ethnocentric and amateurish opinions on language abound in the popular media, and linguists generally label these notions as prescriptive. Prescriptivism is an ideology that professes the absolute, correct, and unchanging nature of language; it implies an authoritarian belief in the unquestioned value of order, stability, and tradition.
In addition to the belief in an unchanging, correct form for communication, prescriptivism supplies its adherents with surprisingly precise options about "primitive" and "civilized" languages. Primitive languages are simple, easy-to-learn (though not worth learning), poor vehicles for expressing refined thoughts; they contain only a few hundred words and have only a few constantly repeated sounds.
Another belief of prescriptivists' is that people with a primitive language have to make up for the paucity of words by gesticulating. Mederic-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery, an eighteenth-century Swiss observer in Haiti, wrote, "Gestures or signs are many and form a basic part of their language." Almost two centuries later, in 1984, an American agronomist attached to a project sponsored by the State Department's Agency for International Development (AID) in Haiti insisted to me, "Haitians use a lot of gestures because they don't have enough words in Creole, and that's why they can't write it down."
This uninformed but popular belief further posits that civilized languages are those with a printed literature, and that only civilized languages have a grammar.
In contrast, linguists recognize that all languages have structure, change through history, and are capable of expressing the full range of human emotions, needs, desires, skills, and experiences. Furthermore, since languages develop in particularly sociophysical environments, they may well describe their own surroundings more economically than outsiders' languages.
Hampered by the notion of the static immutability of languages, the lay person has difficulty not only in appreciating the facts of language change but also in comprehending the development of new languages. Consequently, many muddled notions prevail about the relatively new language in Haiti, the most common being that the language is merely an imitation or transplant of
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