Wikibooks Kreyol

Chapter 1	Prep work
Chapter 2	First weeks
Chapter 3	Beginning Kreyol, part 1
Chapter 4	Beginning Kreyol, part 2
Chapter 5	Intermediate Kreyol
Chapter 6	Advanced Kreyol readings
Appendices	Tables, links, and other resources

- this page is 75% complete

Kreyòl was predominantly an oral tradition long before there were any official recognition of the language as a whole, or a common writing system. This shows through in the orthography of the language, from the presentation of the alphabet to the more-or-less literal representation of sounds by their letters. Kreyòl is a fairly new language, and that along with its strong tendency to be "written as it sounds", leads to a fairly fluid language: ie, the spelling of words can be suggestive of the authors accent and may not lead to a match in a dictionary for what is really a common word.

Graphemes

A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O	P	R	S	T	U	V	W	Y	Z
a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o	p	r	s	t	u	v	w	y	z

Kreyol uses a set of latin characters to write its letters. It is important to note that the graphemes are not the alphabet of the language: there is a large number of digraphs and some of the graphemes only occur in digraphs (for example, h is never capitalized, as it only occurs in the letter Ch).

Diacritics

Grave accent

The grave accent is not really a diacritic, as it differentiates completely different vowels (e and è, for example). It is included for completeness.

Acute accent

The acute accent --probably denotes syllabic stress.

Double dot

The diaeresis (trema)

Circumflex

The circumflex is used to show a long vowel.

Punctuation

Apostrophe

Apostrophes are used between a verb and a pronoun in its short form (as a direct object): l'ale, l'gen (he/she has), but not after l in yo wè l (they saw him/her).

Hyphen

Hyphens are used to avoid ambiguity with nouns seperated from their determiners. bagay-la (the thing), is fine but unnecessary, while poul-nan kakaye (the hen is crowing) is better than poul nan kakaye (the hens in the process of crowing).

Alphabet

Each letter in the alphabet tends to have a one-to-one corrospondence with its sound. Like some other langauges (eg, Hindi), the alphabet is not presented as a single line of symbols for memorization, but rather it is divided analyitcally into consonants, vowels, semivowels (vowel-consonants), and nasal vowels.

Consonants

The pure consonants (Konsòn) and semivowels (Vwayèl-konsòn) taken as a whole are treated together as consonants.

**Konsòn yo**
b	ch	d	f	g	j	k	l	m	n	ng	p	r	s	t	v	z
`[`b`]`	`[`ʃ`]`	`[`d`]`	`[`f`]`	`[`g`]`	`[`ʒ`]`	`[`k`]`	`[`l`]`	`[`m`]`	`[`n`]`	`[`ŋ`]`	`[`p`]`	`[`ʁ`]`	`[`s`]`	`[`t`]`	`[`v`]`	`[`z`]`


ui	w	y
`[`ɥi`]`	`[`w`]`	`[`j`]`

Vowels

The pure vowels (Vwayèl bouch) and nasal vowels (Vwayèl bouch-nen) are taken together as the vowels.

**Vwayèl yo**
a	e	è	i	o	ò	ou
`[`a`]`	`[`e`]`	`[`ɛ`]`	`[`i`]`	`[`o`]`	`[`ɔ`]`	`[`u`]`


an	en	on	oun
[ɐ̃]	[ɛ̃]	[ɔ̃]	[un]

- despite the fact that /un/ combines two sounds, it is counted as a single letter. There is some support for considering oun as a nasal U (close back rounded vowel) sound, /ũ/, but this appears to be a minority view.

Prep work

Select readings	general information on Kreyol, its phonetics, and Haitian culture
Orthography	the written language
Phonetics	spoken Kreyol