My projects

I think I’ve gone a while since I discussed why I’m actually here in French Guiana, so I’m going to describe the two projects I’m carrying out down here. The first is the dissertation project. For the dissertation project I’m looking at two very similar languages, Haitian and Guianese French Creoles. These languages both emerged during the time of French colonization of the New World when the African slaves of different language backgrounds interacted with each other and the French colonists, most of whom spoke a regional variety of French (quite different themselves from today’s modern French, and even from the standard of the time). If we didn’t know their history, we would not hesitate to call them dialects of a single French Creole spoken throughout the Atlantic. Their history suggests that they could have emerged independently of one another. In the last 50 years, Haitians have started coming to French Guiana in droves, to the point that now, 11% of Cayenne— the capital city and my temporary hometown—is Haitian. The dissertation project itself considers how Haitian Creole changes in contact with the local creole, Guianese; for example, I’ll be looking for words that don’t exist in Haiti, as well as at word order differences. To do this, I will look for speakers of Haitian Creole to be interviewed in two separate and consecutive interviews by a Guianese person and a Haitian person, respectively (also TBD). I will then find someone to transcribe the interviews for me (again, TBD), though this is something I could try to do myself if I don’t find anyone in time.

The second project is what I call the dictionary project. Guianese French Creole has been neglected by linguists in recent years. The last really good grammar was in 1972, and even that was fairly incomplete by today’s standards. There is a dictionary, but it’s very amateurish. For example, if you look at the word bat in English, you’ll probably find at least two entries, one for the animal and one for the inanimate object (and possibly one for the verb to bat, as in to bat one’s eyes). This dictionary would lump these two totally unrelated words together. So, with the financial assistance of my boss, I purchased a dictionary making program, so that I could make bilingual dictionaries for the language. Here are a couple of screenshots.



The first is the basic screen I work with. I put in a word in Guianese French Creole on the left, and I can add different senses of the word, translations for any language I want (I’ve chosen French, English, and Portuguese), the pronunciation, the etymology, and examples. When I’ve done that, I can just hit ‘Reverse’ and it creates the French equivalent for the bilingual dictionary. I can also adjust it so that it creates an English bilingual dictionary and a Portuguese one too.




In the second photo, I can expand the Creole side of the dictionary to get a better look at the words. You’ll see I’ve also added illustrations, including a picture that I took of a fish that had just been caught from the ocean. With this bigger view, you can see that the dictionary is a bit busy and hard to read. This is why it probably makes sense to release separate dictionaries for each language, rather than a single quadrilingual dictionary.

Part of the dictionary project is also a grammar project, in which I try to find the details of the language that have been overlooked. This includes things like when do you change the basic word order of a sentence or of its smaller parts like the subject or the predicate; it also includes things like how you form new words, where stress goes on a word, and when certain tenses require you to use certain words (e.g. in English you can’t say *I have praying, you have to say I have been praying). This is why I like to have conversation partners. They help me figure out what’s permitted and what’s not.

Anyhow, I realized in the last post that I’d talked a lot about the projects without ever explaining them, so I wanted to put it out there.