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Hatian case study
The grammatical structure of Hatian kreyòl is mostly derived from that of West African slaves and the lexical base comes largely from French colonizers. Arguments about the orthography of kreyòl concerns how speakers want to be defined amongst themselves and as a nation. This first technical orthography was developed in 1940 by Ormonde McConnell, but was later revised with the help of Frank Laubach and the McConnell-Laubach orthography was created.

Haitian scholar Charles Pressoir critiqued this orthography’s lack of front rounded vowels (/ü/, /ö/, /œ/, and /œ̃/) because of their highly marked and symbolic value in kreyòl, in which it acts as a division between the educated minority (urban) and the mass (rural), and lies in the variation of their degrees of similarity to French. The decision of whether or not to include these vowels comes down to the question of determining which of these varieties is the “real” kreyòl, and therefore becomes highly controversial politically. Another criticism of Pressoir is of the broad use of the letters /w/ and /y/ in the McConnell-Laubach orthography. This criticism was based on these letters looking “too American.” Haitians did not want reminders of the American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. This criticism of the “American look” of this orthography was also shared by many educated Haitians, who also criticized its association with Protestantism. The last of Pressoir’s criticisms was “the use of the circumflex accent to mark nasalized vowels” (Schieffelin and Doucet 1998). The complaint here is that the nasal sounds are treated differently from the way they are represented in French, and therefore inhibits the learning of French.

Major language ideological factors that influence this debate over Haitian Creole orthography therefore include that many believe it should not look American because of political history. The question of whether it is important to function as a bridge to literacy in French is controversial, with some arguing that the focus should be on making the language easy for monolinguals to learn and use. The official creation of the orthography is essentially an articulation of the language ideology and therefore brings out political and social tensions between competing groups. A large portion of this tension lies is in the ideology held by many that the French language is superior, which has led to resentment by some but admiration of the language by others. This orthographical controversy boils down to the attempt to unify a conception of Haitian national identity, a highly politicized and controversial topic of which there are many competing views.