Michel DeGraff

Michel Anne Frederic DeGraff (born 1963) is a Haitian creolist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His scholarship focuses on Creole studies and the role of language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation. He has advocated for the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language.

Early life and education
DeGraff was born in Haiti in 1963. He grew up in a middle-class family and attended a top school where the instruction was in French. Despite not being a top student, he felt that French was a hindrance as not speaking it well caused complexes of inferiority among otherwise bright children. He believes that he spoke one and a half languages, with Haitian Creole being the "half", when in fact the language that all children spoke well by default was Creole. He recalls that French, although imposed at home and at school, was never used for jokes or on the soccer field.

DeGraff moved to New York in 1982 and enrolled in City College of New York, where he studied computer science. He developed an interest in linguistics during an internship at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1985, as a Summer Intern at AT&T Bell Laboratories' Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence department. In 1992, he earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation on the role of language acquisition in the formation of the syntax of Haitian Creole.

Academic career
DeGraff is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He previously served on the board of the Journal of Haitian Studies. He is also a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy.

In the fall of 2012, he received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce online Creole language materials in the teaching of STEM in Haiti. He believes that Haitian children should be taught in their native language at all levels of instruction, contrary to the tradition of teaching them in French. DeGraff believes that instruction in French, a foreign language for most Haitian children, hinders their creativity and their ability to excel.

DeGraff's research is meant to contributes to an egalitarian approach to Creole, Indigenous and other non-colonial languages and their speakers, such as in Haiti. In addition to linguistics and education, his writings engage history and critical race theory, especially the links between power-knowledge hierarchies and the hegemonic representations of non-colonial languages and their speakers in the Global South and beyond. DeGraff's academic work promotes language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation, especially in Haiti and other Creole-speaking communities.

In 2022, Degraff was elected as a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

In response to the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, DeGraff wrote in support of universal justice and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians, and criticized MIT's leadership's stance on Gaza protests and counter-protests. He resigned from his position on the executive council of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in protest against the organization's stance on the conflict.