Haitian creole phrases pdf

Have you ever noticed home many people studied another language in High School but forget it entirely in a matter of months? This is where actually using your Creole is essential. How to Learn Haitian Creole? Here are a few simple tips we recommend to anyone trying to speak Creole. Everyone who loves Haiti will want to learn to speak Creole.

The richness of Haitian culture is closely connected to this beautiful way of speaking. After only a year of practice and study, I could handle most common conversations. A: You can learn the basic grammar and most common vocabulary in just a few months.

However, it takes much more practice to truly feel comfortable speaking Haitian Creole without a translator. Even after many years, native Haitians will still detect slight imperfections in your speech. A: The basic grammar, phonetic spellings, and comparatively small vocabulary make this language very accessible, especially if you have a background in modern French.

However, it will require constant practice and experience in conversation to become truly fluent. It is used to refer to a noun that has not been previously identified or mentioned. Consider these examples. Where is the dress. Since the definite article occurs after the noun, it varies according to the last segment of the noun or any word it follows.

Se liv la. This is the book. Se tablo a. This is the car. Se sentiwon This is the 5. This is the belt. The plural form of the definite article — Remember that only nouns whose singular form is accompanied by the definite article can be made plural.

Se liv yo. Se machin yo. Se tablo yo. Se sentiwon yo. L ap siye soulye yo. Mari renmen jip li achte a. Li deboutonen chemiz lan. Gen anpil kostim nan magazen Ou bezwen deboukle sentiwon an. Andre pa pran kravat yo. Nan ki ri magazen rad la ye? Ti gason an ap zipe pantalon l. Fi a ap koud rad yo. Indicate the phonetic nature of the last sound segment s of the following nouns. These segments are underlined. Then add the correct form of the definite article to each of them. Fill in the blank with the correct singular form of the definite article.

Answer : plim nan nan valiz la ki sou biwo a. Annou pote plis presizyon! Make the nouns more specific by answering the following questions with the correct form of the definite article.

Example: Se yon pantalon? Se yon soutyen? Se yon kwizin? Se yon bous? Se yon machin a koud? Se tenis? Se rad? Se yon bout kanson? Se yon sandal? Ask a classmate the questions. Your classmate must answer using the correct form of the singular definite article according to the example.

It is always pronounced like the G as in genre or beige. Writing tips Like in English, there are different types of letters for different situations. Depending on the purpose of your letter and who you are writing it to, you may choose to write a formal or an informal letter. Here are some tips when writing an informal letter.

Anvan ou ekri. Think about informal letters you have read or written in English. Imagine that you live in a cold country like the USA or Canada and you have a friend who lives in Haiti. What are the differences between the weather and the seasons in the two countries. Ann ekri. Write an email or a letter to your friend in Haiti minimum 15 sentences in which you describe the weather and the seasons where you live. Provide the following information: Name of the country, state, city where you live Weather conditions snow, windy, icy, cold, hot etc… Temperatures depending on the seasons and how it feels The kind of clothing you wear depend on the weather Activities you do or do not do because of the weather Ask your friend questions about the weather in Haiti C.

Is there something else you want to add? Make the necessary corrections according to the grading guide below. E lafanmi? Use these expressions when talking about natural disasters 1. Pa janm gen Sounami ann Ayiti. Toujou gen anpil inondasyon nan vil - There have been many floods in the city of Gonayiv. Dife pa koze dega souvan ann Ayiti. Listen to the interview. Kijan ou ye jodi a? Radio host: - M pa pi mal! You will hear 10 statements about bad weather and natural disasters.

Ann reponn kesyon! Your classmate is asking a lot of questions about natural disasters. Answer with complete sentences. Kisa yon sounami ye? Kisa ki konn krache dife ak lav. The Noun: gender and number A noun usually refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, or idea. Nouns are divided into proper and common nouns. Consider the following examples in which proper nouns are underlined.

American president. Consider the following examples in which common nouns are identified with two lines. Tan an move anpil. Fi sa a pa byen abiye. If it is indefinite, it has no plural marker; its plurality is clear from context. Iglou yo chaje bwason. Gen douz kodak nan magazen an. Here is a partial list of words nouns and adjectives used to distinguish between male and female.

Chal se ayisyen tou. Draw one line under the proper nouns and two lines under the common nouns to identify them in the following sentences. Example: Dife pa koze dega souvan ann Ayiti. Ti Manno te konn chante mizik 2. Toujou gen inondasyon Gonayiv. Draw one line under singular nouns and two lines under plural nouns in each of the following sentences. Jwenn non ak adjektif feminen yo.

Provide the feminine form for each of the following nouns which refer to male persons or animals. Change the underlined segments into plural in the following sentences.

Pay attention to the article used with each noun before making the changes. Gen yon plim nan valiz la. Kote kodak la ye? Konbyen moun ki gen nan fanmi ou? Annou li Reading strategies and techniques! Predict content You learned that prediction is an important strategy in reading for comprehension.

We can predict the content of a newspaper article by analyzing information from its title and the first sentence of its first paragraph. Once we check its headline, we may decide whether or not we will read this article. Anvan ou li. Imagine that you have an assignment on recent natural disasters in Haiti. You are in a library looking for documents on the subject. What would be your first reaction to these articles?

Pandan ou ap li. Some of the following passages are titles and some are first sentences of articles. Read each of them in order to determine which article you will read depending on your specific topic. Vil Gonayiv anba dlo 6.

Now you have read all these items, answer the following questions in English. Three of the six articles are titles and three are first sentences. Identify them: which ones are titles and which ones are first sentences? Is there something else you want to add or remove? Make the necessary corrections before sharing your answers with your classmates. Jozafa: - O! Sa k pase? Nou la. N ap debat ak lavi a.

Jozafa: - Bon koute non! M ap tande w wi! Ou pa konprann. Se pa sa m vle di. M poko janm konprann sa ou ap di a. Jozafa: - A bon!

Jan nou bezwen dlo pou jaden diri yo! Ou konprann mwen! Jozafa: - Bon! Answer the following questions according to the dialogue. Rezon oswa Konsekans? You will hear 10 statements about causes and consequences of deforestation. Listen to each statement, and then indicate whether it is a Rezon or a Konsekans of deforestation. Rezon Konsekans Rezon Konsekans 1.

Ki konsekans chanjman klimatik kab genyen sou anviwonman an? Kisa k koze deranjman sik dlo a? Soulye sa yo sal. Jip sila a sanble sal. Soulye sa yo nwa men sila yo - These shoes are black but those blan.

Kisa sa yo ye? Identify the following clothing items using the correct demonstrative determiner like in the examples. Sa yo se rad. Sa a se yon chanday. Change the underlined singular elements in the following sentences to the plural. Andre mete soulye sa a. Ti gason an mete slip sila a. Li mete tenis sa a nan pye l. Chal mete sentiwon an. Chal chwazi bous sa a. Sa a se gwo van an. Ann pote plis presizyon! Replace the definite or indefinite article of the underlined nouns by the correct form of the demonstrative determiner.

Etenn dife a. Inondasyon an touye plis pase lapli. You also learned that N preceding a vowel is usually pronounced the same way as in English. However, when N follows the oral vowels a, e, o, it combines with them to form the nasal vowels an, en, on which are pronounced as one single sound each like in van, ven, and pon.

Annou koute Listening strategies and techniques! Imagine that you are listening to a radio station in Haiti. Be ready to listen to two short selections. Think about listening strategies and techniques you use when listening to the radio in English or any other language. You will listen to the recordings twice. The first time, try to grasp the meaning of the entire materials. Identify the type of discourse for each recording as well their purpose. The second time, listen for details so you can be ready to answer some questions.

What is the genre of each the two selections? Justify your answer. Suggest a title for each selection. Ki dat epi ki kote gwo lapli a te tonbe? Ki reyaksyon moun yo apre sa k te pase a? Kisa moun yo te reklame nan mouvman revandikasyon yo a. The quakes aggravated both the economic and the ecological situations.

You may skim to get the gist of the reading and scan it for more specific information. Reading for the main ideas Reading for the main ideas is another helpful strategy that you can use. Topic sentences can provide clues about the content of each paragraph, as well as the general organization of the text.

You will read a text on ecological concerns in Haiti. Apply the techniques and use the strategies you learned to help you understand the text.

Think about the following questions before you read the lyrics. What environmental issues that have an effect on everyone on the planet? What do you know about the environmental situation in Haiti? The following text has five paragraphs.

Before reading the entire text, skim it in order to identify the main idea of each paragraph. Pami viktim sa yo, ladan yo se moun Gonayiv. Moun yo pa gen elektrisite kidonk, recho elektrik pa kab mache. Yo pa gen lajan pou achte recho gaz nonplis. Pandan w ap li. How would you translate the following sentences from the text into English?

Use the glossary of your textbook, your dictionnary and the strategies and techiniques you learned to translate these sentences as accurately as possible. Work in groups of three or four to answer the following questions about the text. Answer using the language in which each question is asked. Depending on the question, you might need to skim or scan the text again to answer.

What is the main idea of each paragraph? Suggest a title for each paragraph. Educa Vision Inc. Coconut Creek, FL All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage or retrieval system except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or a newspaper without permission in writing from the publisher and author.

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For information, please contact: Educa Vision Inc. The French language has been used mostly by the elite for the purpose of perpetuating systems of dominance and hierarchies between themselves and the masses.

As an object of fascination and repulsion, French plays a dubious role in the Haitian society. At the same time, this language reminds the Haitian people of the colonial period when they were under the French slavery yoke. While evoking refinement and culture, the use of French also symbolizes violence, oppression and social injustice in Haiti from colonial times up until today. The French have always asserted their superiority in all areas, including communication and, when Haiti became free in , the Haitian elite simply continued this tradition.

In fact, today, the French language is not being used by the Haitian upper- class and the tiny middle-class as a means of communication. Article 5 states: "All Haitians are united by a common language: Creole. Creole and French are the official languages of the Republic" , Constitution, ch. This word was coined in the 15th century in the Portuguese colonies in West Africa and originally referred to Portuguese and other Europeans born and raised in these overseas colonies. The term was later used to refer to people of mixed European and African ancestry as well as Blacks born in the colonies from African slave ancestors.

Thereafter, with the colonization of the Americas, the term spread to other languages and took many other meanings. There has been an ongoing debate for several years about what word should be used to name the language of Haiti. They did so to avoid confusion with all the other Creole languages spoken in the world. For a long time, Creole languages were denied the status of language.

There is in fact no agreement among linguists and other scholars on the fact that Creole languages arise and develop in similar ways to all natural languages.

Lexical borrowing largely involves terms for goods that are much more widely found in the U. Fort Codeswitch- ing among Haitian, French, and English is common, perhaps the norm. Print media targeting Haitian Americans are mostly in French, typically with a few pages devoted to articles or columns in Haitian. However, the leading newspaper in the U. Spears Most of the published information that we have on Haitian-English bilingual education is for New York City, although programs have been initiated in other metropolitan areas, notably Miami-Dade County and Boston.

It took a while for public school administrators to understand that the overwhelming majority of Haitian students speak Haitian, not French or a Haitian French but a completely different language. Haitian is also taught in courses at universities, among them Kansas University; the University of Massachusetts, Boston; and Indiana Univer- sity, whose Creole Institute has been the most active producer of Haitians with graduate degrees in linguistics.

Some governmental agencies in New York City provide materials and service advertisements in Haitian, and all the major hospi- tals have Haitian-speaking volunteers serving as interpreters and offering comfort to patients who are fully comfortable only with Haitian Joseph Some Linguistic Features Introduction As pointed out above, Haitian is not a form of French, and it is certainly not a corrupt form of French.

It is a language with its own grammar, which in many ways is quite different from French and English, too. Moreover, Haitian is mutu- ally intelligible with neither French nor any West African heritage language.

In the grammar of Haitian, overall we note elements that can be traced to West African languages, to French, or to neither. In the last case, Haitian grammatical features developed independently of transfer from West African languages and French. The Haitian Lexicon Haitian has a strong relationship to French because French was one of the main languages that played a role in its formation in the later seventeenth through early eighteenth centuries, providing most of the words in Haitian.

We use the term transfer instead of bor- rowing because French words came into Haitian during the process of language formation itself. The French words were not borrowings because words are bor- rowed into a language that already exists autonomously from other languages. Look over the data in Table The French determiner appears in parentheses. The l or the full determiner is simply fused to the beginning of the Haitian word.

Thus, the Haitian words in 6 — 9 are monomorphemic. The French determiner remnant, so to speak, is merely part of the Haitian single morpheme and has no meaning of its own.

To the Haitian words in 6 — 9 , one can add the postposed Haitian determiner, a in the case of these example words. There are several phonologically conditioned allomorphs of the determiner.

The tense, mood, and aspect TMA systems of these languages appear to have been transferred to Haitian also see Lefebvre This transfer included only the basic structure of the TMA systems; it did not include the phonemic shapes of words from these closely related Gbe languages.

Second, observe that the nonpunctual aspect preverbal marker in a particular sentence may express progressive aspect or habitual aspect, as illustrated in the glosses for 2. Nonpunctual is the name of this verb form in creole studies, which consists of a verb preceded by the nonpunctual marker. The social or dis- course context in which the sentence is uttered reveals which aspectual meaning is intended by the speaker. Keep in mind that it is not unusual for one verb form in a language to express either progressive aspect or habitual aspect, depending on the social or discourse context of utterance.

For example, the Spanish present tense indicative mood verb form does so in most dialects of Spanish: 11 Juan trabaja. For example, if you are talking about something that happened yesterday, you have to use the past tense form of the verb. Now look at the Haitian version in 12 more closely: 12 English: He talked with John yesterday.

In other words, it is not accompanied by any preverbal marker indicating TMA. In some cases, a speaker would use a preverbal marker in this sentence, but in most cases that speaker would not.

The point is that the Haitian verb does not have to be marked as past. One knows the speaker is referring to the past by the social or discourse context—what the speaker is talking about or has said before, as well as all kinds of other background information that the speaker and her or his hearers share.

The preverbal marker, te, is a type of past marker, but it is not obligatorily present in most instances; it is usually optional. They have secondary, much less frequent meanings too.

Linguists call te, in example 13 , an anterior marker rather than a past marker because it is a relative tense marker. Its use is usually optional, as noted. Most important, it marks a situation action, event, or state of affairs as anterior, in other words, as occurring at a time prior to that of another situation i.

There are nearly a dozen such preverbal markers in the entire Haitian Creole TMA system, making possible the nuanced expression of TMA meanings and relationships. Spears and Carole M. Berotte Joseph. It covers many sociolinguistic topics, such as bilingualism, diglossia, codeswitching, proverbs and other communicative genres, and language in education. It also has chapters devoted to literature in Haitian Creole and French as well as Haitian history. The references in its chapters provide further readings for more advanced study.

This book does not have in-depth discussions of phonological processes, mor- phology, syntax, and semantics. Problem Sets The following problems will teach you some basic points about Haitian gram- mar. It is of course also spoken outside of Haiti by those from this area.

The problems also deal with the Cape Haitian variety and that of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Phonology, Morphology, and Dialect Variation Port de Paix and Cape Haitian are roughly 20 miles from each other, and a differ- ent dialect is spoken in each city. Note: The Haitian grapheme does not represent the same sound as in French.

That French sound was changed when French words with this sound were incorporated into Haitian. Now note the data in Table The Cape Haitian data are based on Valdman Compare the phonemic representations of the words in the three Hai- tian dialects.

Which of the dialects are most alike?