Diglossia in Haiti: An Overview of French and Haitian Creole in the World

The article uses documentary analysis to describe the two official languages of Haiti. It reports that French is spoken by at least 42 percent of the population, which it puts at about 4.9 million people on figures of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, and that all people born in Haiti speak Haitian Creole. It cites sources that put the number of Creole speakers at 16 million worldwide, 12 million in Haiti and 4 million abroad, and that report 90 to 95 percent of Haitians as monolingual in Creole.

The article recalls that French became the official language in 1918 and that Creole joined it as an official language in 1987, with the 1987 reform making Creole the language of instruction in the first primary cycles. It concludes that French remains the language of government communication, schooling and the intellectual class, while Creole is the language of daily use and of the whole population, and it describes Creole as the inclusive language of all Haitians.