Currently, Haiti is undergoing vital political, social, and linguistic reengineering. A new definition of national identity, one which takes into account the voices --silenced for too long-- of the non-elite strata of the population, is being actively negotiated. Central to ,the social construction of Haitian identity is the ongoing debate regarding the status and roles of Haitian Creole (Kreyol) and French. Placed within this larger sociopolitical context, this research is ethnographic and sociolinguistic, designed to examine the social construction of Haitian identity. Focusing on six Haitian teachers working in a rural primary school, the use of different registers in Kreyol both within and outside the formal setting of the classroom will be studied. Using the language socialization paradigm, studies will analyze how the language choices and language practices of teachers interacting both with students and their own children, and students interacting with peers, are shaped by local ideologies of linguistic variation and how they intersect with language ideologies held at the macrosociological level. In addition to contributing an anthropological perspective on how individuals assign meaning to their discursive practices, this research will offer a case study of educational language politics in a post-colonial nation of the Caribbean. It will also yield empirical data in the largely unexplored area of register variation in Kreyol. This project is funded jointly with the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
