Kreole or French?
by Moise Anilus Kreole or French? Michel Frederic DeGraff is a Haitian professor of linguistics, creolist, and founder of the Haitian Creole Academy at MIT, and the director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, whose latest project has been revolutionizing education in Haiti by using Creole in the classroom instead of French. "The The basic premise of our initiative," DeGraff explains, "is that using Kreyòl for Haitian education is essential to improving quality and access to education for all." While I applaud Professor DeGraff's scholarship and his ongoing efforts to formalize the Creole language for linguistic coherence and autonomy, Creole is far from an autonomous language with adequate grammatical morphemes consistent with global languages like English and Spanish. It is primarily a dialect of French fundamentally intertwined with its syntax and pragmatics. Consequently, in its current state, Kreole needs to have the linguistic verbiage to correspond appropriat...