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Michel Degraff
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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’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.
Talk Information:
Afrocentricity Vs. “Mission Civilisatrice” In Suzanne Comhaire- Sylvain’s “Le Créole Haïtien…”
March 29, 2024 | 9:00 AM
In her 1936 book Le créole haïtien: Morphologie et syntax (the first research monograph on Haitian Creole by a professional Haitian linguist), Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain made famous the (now disconfirmed) hypothesis that Haitian Creole (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.”
Such a hypothesis narrowly constrains — to the exclusive realm of the lexicon — the contributions of French to the formation of Kreyòl. When I first read Comhaire-Sylvain’s book nearly 40 years ago, that conclusion surprised me, especially after reading her
detailed comparative analyses triangulating Kreyòl, French, and Ewe, and her thorough documentation of systematic parallels, at the levels of morphology and syntax, among all
three languages. In this talk, I’d like to scrutinize certain 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.