Haitian Creole · Kreyòl Ayisyen

About Haitian Creole

Language family

French-lexifier Creole

Where it's spoken

Haiti

Speakers

roughly 10–12 million speakers

Haitian Creole took most of its vocabulary from 18th-century French but built an largely independent grammar shaped by the West African languages spoken by the enslaved people who created it on colonial plantations. It is mutually unintelligible with standard French despite the shared word stock, and is now, alongside French, an official language of Haiti and the primary language of daily life for nearly the whole population. It shares close structural similarities with other French-based Caribbean creoles, including Louisiana Creole and Antillean Creole.