As part of my research I had read an article written by Anne-Jose, Jason F Sigel, and Albert Valdman titled “Morphophonological Variation in Haitian Creole”. It talks about the different morphological variations of Haitian creole in two different geographical regions of Haiti. The regions that were the main focus were Cape- Haitian and Port au Prince both cities have high populations of Haitians living there. The article starts to talk about the different varieties of Haitian creole that are used in Haiti which are Standard Haitian Creole (SHC) and Northern Haitian Creole (NHC) and which are used more often by people living in Cape Haitian. What I discovered reading the analysis of SHC and NHC is that SHC is the written norm based on the speech monolinguals of the capital area in which the front and syllable /r/ is absent which has become popular in the rest of the country.  

Based on that information the researchers wanted to observe who from Cape Haitian is using SHC more than NHC in their daily speech. In which, the researchers are focusing on the third-person singular pronouns li/l (In which happens after a consonant) and capois i/y (which happens after the vowel) to see which one is preferred to be used by the general public. The researchers observed three subcategories to make their analysis the three subcategories include location, age group, and sex. What was discovered from the results was that many speakers who use SHC that live in Cape Haitian prefer to use capois /i/ went to a subject position rather than SHC. However, they prefer to use the SHC variant when it’s after the consonant. When it is the object position SHC and NHC are used interchangeably. Also, it was discovered that there are not a lot of people who speak capois in Cape Haitian. Most people like women and children and teenagers who go to school prefer using the SHC variation while men prefer to speak NHC. This is due to many women traveling outside Cape Haitian and into the city of port au prince in which they are more exposed to the SHC variant. Along with the children who go to school they are taught with the SHC variant. Therefore based on this study it can be said that in Cape Haitian majority of the people prefer to speak SHC rather than NHC due to the fact they are more exposed to the variant than NHC. I found this article very interesting due to my family being from Haiti. My mother side of the family is from Cape meanwhile my father side is from Port au Prince. Ive now seen myself being more observant in how they communicate to each other to see if I can spot out any variation differences when they speak creole.

Work Cited:

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1318&context=pwpl