“Hybridity” and Scientific Racism in Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain’s Le créole haïtien… — The First PhD Dissertation by a Haitian Linguist and on Haitian Creole

Résumé

Published in 1936, Le créole haïtien: Morphologie et syntaxe is the first research monograph on Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) by a professional Haitian linguist. As far as I know, it’s also the first publication that explicitly stated a specific version of "Hybridity" in the formation of Kreyòl. This sort of Hybridity has come to be known as the (now disconfirmed) "Relexification Hypothesis" whereby Kreyòl is: 

… a form of French fashioned in the mold of African syntax, or, since we generally classify languages based on the history of their grammar, Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) is an African (Ewe) language with a French vocabulary.

This talk is an exercise in intellectual history and critical race theory to try and understand the historically and geo-politically rooted biases in the deep contradictions between Sylvain’s theoretical claims, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, her detailed comparative data triangulating Kreyòl, French and Ewe toward a thorough documentation of systematic parallels, at the levels of morphology, lexicon and syntax, among all three languages. We will analyze certain discursive links between language, linguistics, identity, decolonization and liberation through the prism of the formidable intellectual biography of Comhaire-Sylvain – Haiti’s first linguist and anthropologist and the first Haitian woman to obtain a PhD, back in 1936. Comhaire-Sylvain’s contributions can help us forge a better future ahead – for Creole studies, Creole speakers and more.

Michel DeGraff

Michel DeGraff is Professor of Linguistics at MIT, co-founder and co-director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, founding member of Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen and fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Michel entered linguistics through the “backdoor” so to speak, in 1985, as a Summer Intern at AT&T Bell Laboratories’ Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence department in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Michel obtained his PhD in 1992 with a dissertation on the syntax of Haitian Creole. Today, Michel’s research contributes to an egalitarian approach to Creole, Indigenous and other non-colonial languages and their speakers, as in his native Haiti. In addition to linguistics and education, his writings engage intellectual history and critical race theory, especially the links between power-knowledge hierarchies and the hegemonic (mis)representations of non-colonial languages and their speakers in the Global South and beyond. His work is anchored in a broader agenda for human rights and social justice, with Haiti as one spectacular case of a post-colony where the national language spoken by all (Haitian Creole) is systematically disenfranchised, even in certain scholarly traditions, while the (former) colonial language (in this case, French), spoken by few in Haiti, is enlisted for socio-economic, political and geo-political domination.