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So there's some beautiful pieces
that goes, actually, it's huge.

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It's six volumes,
and it's called

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the Atlas of Haitian Creole.

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It's online, so I'd be happy to
share the reference with you.

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I mean, actually, it has maps.

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It also has recordings.

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You can actually go and
listen to the various dialects

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of Haitian creole.

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And what people have
found striking is

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the fact that, in
terms of variation,

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it's quite restricted, so
anywhere you are in Haiti,

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you can speak to someone
who speaks Creole.

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You can speak Creole.

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So there are some words that
are kind of-- shibboleth

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of seven regions,
but overall there

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is no issue with
misunderstanding.

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You know, Asians
understand each other

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when they speak creole
even though, at first, it

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might be a bit of
hesitation if you come

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from two different regions.

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And that atlas actually
documents that very well--

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that you have lots of lexico
idiosyncrasies across regions,

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but the grammar itself
is pretty much similar,

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which one might
think, it's surprising

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given that you have all
this influx of Africans

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in various language groups.

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You'd expect more variation,
but people have also

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argued, given the
fact that, if you

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look at the history of
Haiti, the country was

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for a long time pretty
isolated after independence.

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In fact, that's something
that we can talk about later.

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The European forces and
the American forces,

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even though Haiti helped the US
in terms of its independence,

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getting more territory--
like, I don't

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know if you've heard about
the Louisiana purchase which

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was caused because of
Napoleon losing Haiti,

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because of Haitian Revolution.

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But yet, the US quarantined
Haiti very quickly, why?

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Because Haitian was an example
of black liberty, which

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was a threat to the
world back then.

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Haiti was unthinkable
and unacceptable,

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so it had to be embargoed.

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And that embargo,
people have argued

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is what actually created this
isolation that, in turn, gave

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Haitian creole pretty
much it's uniformity,

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because there was little
traffic from outside to Haiti.

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For a long time, Haiti was
pretty much self-contained,

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and that helped the
language gel as, you know,

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a pretty uniform system.

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AUDIENCE: And was it
always uniform over time?

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MICHEL DEGRAFF: Well, over
time, the data is not so--

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we don't have enough
data to document

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that, whether over time, there
was more or less variation.

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Because what we have
is pretty fragmentary.

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We don't have lots and lots
of evidence about, say,

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18th century Haitian creole.

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We have some
archival data but not

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enough to be able to
compare what happened

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in different regions of the
country, but what we do have,

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going to the 17th,
18th century--

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you know, strike us as pretty
similar to the Haitian-spoken

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now.

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So there were French scholars
who were writing down

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what they would hear.

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They were writing down a
variety of Haitian creole

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from the 18th, 19th century,
and I can still read those text.

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Of course, they were written
with French autography,

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and maybe that's
another confound.

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They were probably imposing
their French onto the creole

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that they were transcribing,
but if you read that creole back

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then, the structures are pretty
similar to the creole of today,

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which also is striking
as compared to English,

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which has evolved much faster.