PHONEMIC AND ORTHOGRAPHIC REALIZATIONS OF ‘R’ AND ‘W’ IN HAITIAN CREOLE

As part of my research, I’ve read an article talking about the different variations of Haitian Creole. In which I learned more about SHC (Standard Haitian Creole ) and NHC (Northern Haitian Creole). One of the main differences was the use of /r/ and /w/. In the SHC variant it does not use /r/ but in the NHC variant it is used interchangeably with /w/. To further explored this I’ve read an article titled Phonemic and Orthographic Realizations of “R” and “W” in Haitian Creole. In the article written by Christopher Hagen and Jeffery Allen, they collected data from different writings like the bible, websites, training manuals, and published speeches. Along with that, they collected speech samples from people located in Port au Prince, New York, Paris, and Pittsburgh. From those speech and writing samples they discovered that the phonemes /r/ and /w/ are used interchangeably and /w/ is an allophone of /r/. To further elaborate the article talked about how /w/ would appear before rounded vowels like (/o/,/u/) and /r/ would appear with non-rounded vowels like (/e/ /a/,/i/). It was noted that in the article written by Hagen and Allen they also quoted Valdman and Massieux in which they stated “/w/ and /r/ became allographs due to the progressive and regressive conditioning by the labial and non-labial vowels; in which they used the example of /ri/ vs /wi/ however even though they are minimal pairs they still have semantics differences.” (Allen, Hogan 1597). Based on the data that was collected it was observed that Norther Haitian Creole (NHC) use more of /w/ than /r/ especially those who mainly stay in the rural area of Haiti. Also, women are more likely to use /r/ since it’s closer to the french uvular /r/. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article, and I’m excited to explore this topic more for my research.

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