The Ecology of Language Evolution in Latin America : A Haitian Postscript toward

While reading the preceding chapters in this volume, on Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America, I kept trading two distinct hats on my bald head: one for the theoretical linguist interested in the cognitive aspects of language contact and language evolution, the other for the MIT professor challenged by social injustice in language policy and education in my native Haiti and other Creole-speaking communities. These communities, like many others in the world, including the United States, still suff er from insidious colonial and neocolonial imperialist prejudices and practices. By the time I fi nished those chapters, I realized that the two hats are fundamentally made of the same material. As a theoretical linguist, I was fascinated by the contributors’ insightful illustrations of the complexity of language contact in Latin America— complexity in sociohistorical, ecological, and linguistic-structural dimensions. As a Haitian and a Haitian Creole–speaking linguist, I was curious as to how language shift, language change, language endangerment, and (meta-)linguistic correlates of social hierarchies in Iberian America may help us better understand related phenomena in the Caribbean, and vice versa. I’ve used the phrases Latin America and Iberian America with some trepidation, as I realize that the chapters to which I am responding have focused exclusively on areas of Latin America that were colonized by the Spanish or the Portuguese, leaving aside Latin American territories that were or are still under the control of France. Now consider my native Haiti, where both French and a French-derived Creole are spoken; Haitian Creole is spoken by virtually everyone there, and French by a small minority, no more than 10 percent (Dejean 2006). Taking the Latin in Latin America in its linguistic genealogical sense, we can then consider Haiti at least as “Latin” as Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, and so forth. Those who still subscribe to the classic dogma that Creoles derive from pidgins and therefore fall outside the scope of the comparative method and its associated Stammbaum (“family tree”) model for language change