Background

Language Family: Creole / French based

Speakers of Haitian Creole reside in a multitude of places, including, but not limited to, Haiti, Canada, the United States, France, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the Bahamas.

Phonology

Consonants

/ɥ/ is a widely debated phoneme in Haitian Creole, as it only appears in succession with /i/ and can appear in free variation with /w/ (Krämer 2016, 67; Pindziak 2012, 3–4). I have chosen to treat it as a variant of /w/ and not include it in the phoneme inventory.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t d			k ɡ
Fricatives	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ		ɣ	h
Nasals	m	n			ŋ
Approximants	w	l		j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

Haitian Creole makes a distinction between oral and nasal vowels. Nasal vowels are orthographically represented with a following ⟨n⟩ (Faraclas et al. 2010, 97).
- Where a nasal vowel is followed by /n/, it is represented orthographically by two ⟨n⟩s (e.g. ⟨ann⟩ = /ãn/).
The grave accent (`) on vowels is used to indicate non-nasality of vowels when followed by ⟨n⟩ (Faraclas et al. 2010, 101).
- E.g. ⟨àn⟩ = /an/
/an/, /en/, /on/, and /un/ also appear as vowel-consonant sequences when followed by a vowel.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u ũ
High-Mid	e		o õ
Low-Mid	ɛ ɛ̃		ɔ
Low		a ã

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
b	/b/
d	/d/
e	/e/
è	/ɛ/
f	/f/
g	/ɡ/
h	/h/
i	/i/
j	/ʒ/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
ò	/ɔ/
p	/p/
r	/ɣ/
s	/s/
t	/t/
v	/v/
w	/w/
y	/j/
z	/z/
Digraph
ch	/ʃ/
ng	/ŋ/
ou	/u/
ui	/wi/

Lenition Rules

/ʒ/ becomes /j/ word-finally (Gurevich 2004, 112).

Misc. Rules

/j/ deletes word-finally following /i/ (Gurevich 2004, 112).

References

Faraclas, Nicholas, Arthur Spears, Elizabeth Barrows, and Mayra Cortes Piñeiro. 2010. “Orthography.” The Haitian Creole Language: History, Structure, Use and Education. New York: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 83–106.

Gurevich, Naomi. 2004. Lenition and Contrast. Routledge.

Krämer, Philipp. 2016. “Haitian Creole. Structure, Variation, Status, Origin. Albert Valdman (2015) Sheffield and Bristol, CT, Equinox ISBN 978-1845533885. Pp. 494.” Sociolinguistic Studies 11 (1). Equinox Publishing: 225–35. doi:10.1558/sols.31957.

Pindziak, Charles J. 2012. “Haitian Creole Phonology: Summary and Analysis.”

Haitian Creole

Justin Bai