Your insulting remarks about Haitians will not stain your...

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Reply to Msg 11970

Your insulting remarks about Haitians will not stain your readers or the Haitian population.

They will only stain you. They simply point out your ignorance about Haiti.

The socio-linguistic picture of Haiti is different from France, Martinique, Guadeloupe or even Canada.

In Canada, it's an equal bilingual situation.

They have two equally international official languagues which are French and English.

In France, Martinique, Guadeloupe, French is their official language.

It's spoken everywhere by everyone around, poor and rich.

Haiti is different.

For many years, French was the only official language.

Haitian children struggled with French.

We studied French in schools for 14 years, those who were lucky enough to go to schools and stay till the end. But, only a few were speaking French at home and with relatives.

The majority of us were speaking Creole at home and we had no relative who speaks French.

As a result, the rates of drop outs and failures were high. The illiteracy was rising.

To help with these problems, recently, Creole became the second official language.

Now, Haiti has two official languages and children are learning in Creole.

Research shows that children learn better when they are being taught in their mother tongue.

They can learn other languages later in life.

The challenge remains.

How to make the transfer of knowledge from Creole (our national language) to another language such as French, English, Spanish, that is international and would open the world to the child.

That's the challenge.

So far, the Haitian officials came up with a compromise between Creole and French in Education.

Bring solutions! Don't bring insults!

There are many Haitians who successfully speak and write French correctly.

It's a challenge though.

However, this is not ground to insult us. Every Haitian is a survivor: we survived so much that's we are heroes just to be alive and well. If we are educated, if we are successful in our lives, if we have professions, whether or not we speak and write correctly one or two or three languages, we don't deserve to be insulted.

A language is a communication tool, not a free pass to a higher social status.

By the way, my French is as good as my English and my Creole.

I was educated in Haiti.

And I am not an isolated care. There are many educated Haitians around the world who express themselves in several languages including French.

Get to know our history, get to know us. You would understand!

Yanick Jean-francois-landess, December 1 2008, 3:35 PM

Topic: Haitians do not speak french

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