Creole

About the Creole guides

A creole is a language that grew out of contact between speakers of different languages, and there are dozens of them around the world. Most guides in this category are about Haitian Creole (Kreyòl ayisyen), which is based largely on French and has about 9.6 million speakers. It is an official language of Haiti together with French and is widely spoken in Haitian communities in the United States, Canada and the Dominican Republic. Some guides mention other creoles, such as Louisiana Creole, Mauritian Creole and Cape Verdean Creole, which are separate languages. Jamaican Patois, an English-based creole, has its own Jamaican category.

Haitian Creole is written much as it sounds. è is the e in "bed" and ò the o in "for". The spellings an, en and on stand for nasal vowels, as in bonjou (good morning). It is polite to greet people with bonjou or bonswa (good evening) before anything else, and to add souple (please) and mèsi (thank you).

Main language hereHaitian Creole (Kreyòl ayisyen)
FamilyFrench-based creole
Speakersabout 9.6 million (2007)
Official inHaiti, together with French
ScriptLatin alphabet
Codesht (ISO 639-1), hat (ISO 639-3)

Speaker number: Nationalencyklopedin (2007), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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