Haitian Creole emerged from mingling French dialects with African languages.

Evidence

Moreau wrote of the “African become colonial” who took on “a way of life that can neither resemble that which they had in their place of origin or differ from it absolutely.” One of the enduring cultural legacies of the process of encounter and transformation that took place in the cauldron of the colony is Haitian Creole. In parallel with the different creoles that developed in other colonial societies, this language emerged through the mingling of dialects of French with African languages. It was forged over several generations by many speakers: early French settlers and their slaves, free people of color, domestic and urban slaves, adult Africans brought to plantations during the height of the sugar boom, and especially children born into slavery in Saint-Domingue. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 159

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the specific genesis of creole languages through colonial encounter—broadly the creolization concept.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing knowledge of creolization as a cultural process, and to how languages form through colonial mixing in other Caribbean societies. — connects to: A majority of Haiti’s revolutionaries were African-born slaves.
• SEED: The ‘African become colonial’ idiom—a people neither able to resemble their origins nor differ from them—is a powerful frame for an essay on identity formation in diaspora.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 159