Category: Kreyòl Ayisyen

“Men Audrey West, e men lakay li.” (This is Audrey West, and this is her home.)

So begins the new Haitian Creole (Kreyòl Ayisyen) version of our Jamaican in Wales/Jamiekan ina Wielz documentary.

We’re delighted to add another island language to our growing list of Other Tongues, building still further on our Extensions initiative. In addition to Jamaican and English, this film is also already available in Welsh and Portuguese – as well as Gaelic, of course!

Mavreen Masere of Creole Translations has done a great job of translating and narrating the original documentary text to a really high professional standard. Many thanks Mavreen!

Thanks also to Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle for adding Kreyòl Ayisyen to the Clilstore list of languages, so enabling us to also create the online wordlinked transcript with embedded video on that platform too.

Our Hebridean-Caribbean linguistic linkage started with our engagement with the University of the West Indies Jamaican Language Unit through the international Mediating Multilingualism project. Common island geographies were an obvious initial point of contact. In more recent developments other shared experiences were touched on while exploring some of the factors uniting UK community languages other than English as part of the Multilingual Memories: Birmingham 1984 project.

Looking forward we might wonder if those with a Gaelic linguistic, planning, or educational interest could have more still to learn from the developmental process which has resulted in the establishment of Caribbean creoles like Jamiekan and Kreyòl Ayisyen. When we consider that the deprecation of formulations such as “Tha mi oileanach” may now be counted as “just an aesthetic judgement” in some Gaelic teaching circles, and that “Tha mi tidsear” may indeed be heard on the lips of some Gaelic Medium Education practitioners, then we might begin to wonder if this kind of language change is in some way akin to well-studied processes of pidginisation and creolisation in other contexts, with the significant caveat that in the case of Jamaican or Haitian the claim is explicitly and successfully made for the recognition of a distinct new language, rather than an uninterrupted continuation or “revitalisation” of a pre-existing one.

Food for thought?