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7. Trinidad’s French Creole Linguistic and Cultural

Heritage: Documentation and Revitalisation Issues

Chapter · June 2015

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3000.2642

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Trinidad’s French Creole Linguistic
and Cultural Heritage:
Documentation and Revitalization Issues
Jo-Anne S. Ferreira

Introduction
Trinidadian French Creole (as it is known to linguists, hereafter TFC) or Patois
(as it is known to its modern speakers) is a language that remains at the heart
of many aspects of Trinidad’s cultural heritage and cultural expressions. With a
vocabulary deriving mostly from French and a grammatical system of its own,
French Creole is a language that has left a strong imprint on the vocabulary and
expressions of Trinidadian English Creole (TEC or Dialect). The variety of French
Creole spoken in Trinidad is almost identical to those of Martinique, Grenada and
Venezuela; similar to the French Creole language varieties spoken in St Lucia,
Dominica, Guadeloupe, Marie-Galante and Les Saintes; less similar to those
varieties in Haiti, French Guiana, Brazil, and Louisiana,USA and further away
still from those in the Indian Ocean (cf Goodman 1964 and Graham 1981).
Moribund but not dead, Trinidadian French Creole is an endangered heritage
language which is central to the formation of a distinctively Trinidadian culture.
Despite the fact that TFC has long been considered practically obsolescent by a
number of scholars (Sealey and Aquing 1983, Solomon 1993, Winer 1993, Ferreira
1997, 2001 and 2009, Parkvall 2003, Hazaël-Massieux 2011, inter alia), Trinidad
continues to be part of Créolophonie and la Créolité (see le Dû and Brun-Trigaud
2011 and Montray Kréyol), a loose community of over nine million speakers in the
Americas alone. Although a language with a primarily oral heritage, the heritage
has not only been restricted to oral traditions. A wide range and number of written
texts reveal a rich literary heritage, and reflect and preserve a dynamic past and
that can bolster a struggling present and uncertain future. TFC was the dominant
language influence in domains such as Carnival, folklore, flora, fauna and folk
medicine. The culture which makes Trinidad distinctive from other parts of the
English-official Caribbean is one whose language has been TFC.
Although Trinidad was under Spanish control for some 300 years, from 1498
up to the period 1797–1803, and officially British from 1797, the island was socially
and culturally colonized by the French from 1783. This came about because of
the proclamation of the second Cedula de Población that allowed Catholic settlers
112 » Caribbean Dynamics

and their enslaved workers as well as free coloureds entry into Trinidad. French
citizens and others (including some Irish settlers) came in their droves, soon
outnumbering the Spanish. With the French came the French and French Creole
languages. For some four decades after the arrival of the French, the French
language was used for official purposes, until 1823 (Gamble 1866, 17), Governor
Ralph Woodford having ruled in 1814 that English should be introduced into the
law courts. Advertisements and correspondence in French, however, continued
to appear in the English-dominated newspapers of the mid to late nineteenth
century. By 1851, English was introduced via primary schools, which marked the
beginning of the end of French, Patois and other languages in Trinidad.
Of the many languages used to varying degrees in Trinidad in the nineteenth
century, numbering more than 20, TFC was the dominant and most widespread
language. Called ‘creole French’ and ‘negro French’ by writers such as Day (1852,
212, 318), it was ‘the medium of thought’ of most of the ‘Creoles’, and was the
language ‘spoken most widely, the lower orders scarcely using any other, though
they can nearly all of them speak English’ (Gamble 1866, 39). Gamble also noted
that it was

the language which the African and the Coolie, and the stranger in
general, learns first, and of course, for the simple reason that he hears
it most frequently spoken. Its vituperative epithets are numerous and
forcible; and…the best known, because the most frequently in use.

Written in the second half of the nineteenth century, Gamble’s comments also
hold true for the early twentieth century, as modern informants of French, African,
Indian, Portuguese, Chinese and Syrian-Lebanese and other ancestry continue
to confirm. In spite of the nineteenth century name of ‘negro French’, this is a
language crossed all ethnic, social and racial barriers. What these informants of
a variety of backgrounds have in common is forebears over the age of 80, all of
whom recall a bygone era when the language was common to the majority of
Trinidadians, even including immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
In 1983, Sealey and Aquing wrote the following of the late twentieth century:

But of the non-English related linguistic survivals, Chinese is but one

example. Sizeable proportions of the population speak Trinidadian
French Creole – locally called Patois – as well as [an] East Indian (Indo-
Aryan) language, and a smaller number speak Trinidadian Spanish.
These are all dying languages spoken spontaneously and frequently only
by elderly persons in specific parts of the island.

Those researchers diagnosed TFC as a ‘dying language’, one that is ‘spoken

frequently and spontaneously only by elderly people (at least 50 years old) in
Trinidad’s French Creole Linguistic and Cultural Heritage » 113

villages in the valleys of the northern range...though, as Buscher notes…it is

possible to find speakers of TFC in all walks of life outside of these areas’ (1983,
9), and several overseas.
Twenty years later, in a 2002 paper comparing the linguistic vitality of
Grenadian, Trinidadian and American (Louisiannais) French Creoles, Ferreira
and Holbrook concluded that TFC ‘has been dying or struggling to survive for
a long time, since there are no young native speakers’, but that ‘there is still the
potential for at least limited reverse language shift (RLS), or language revival or
revitalization of TFC, not just in Paramin, but across the country’. Their claim that
TFC in Trinidad was ‘dead’, echoing the reports of other scholars, was possibly a
hasty one, but now one that must be challenged following fieldwork by Hodge and
Ferreira (2009–2014), which has found that Patois is spoken by a greater number
of people, in a greater number of villages and by a wider range of age groups than
commonly held.
This chapter discusses some of the issues of language documentation and
revitalization for this endangered language, and the usefulness of written French
Creole textual records in both processes, since ‘the aim of a language documentation
[…] is to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of
a given speech community’ (Himmelman 1998,166). Language documentation, as
Himmelman describes it, is ‘a lasting, multipurpose record of a language’ whose
‘net should be cast as widely as possible; that is, a language documentation should
strive to include as many and as varied records as practically feasible, covering
all aspects of the set of inter-related phenomena commonly called a language’
(Himmelmann 2006, 1–2).
One of the first steps in language documentation is the assessment of
resources. A formal assessment of the written language corpus reveals that most
of the extant TFC written records represent a wide range of genres (original and
translated narratives, tales, songs, proverbs and riddles, recorded and collected
since the start of the nineteenth century). They have not been widely circulated
outside publications, often difficult to access, and which were generally produced
for members of academic and other circles among whom TFC is at best a second
language.
Quoting extensively from a UNESCO document,

A language that can no longer be maintained, perpetuated, or revitalized

still merits the most complete documentation possible. This is because
each language embodies unique cultural and ecological knowledge in
it. It is also because languages are diverse. Documentation of such a
language is important for several reasons: 1) it enriches the human
intellectual property, 2) it presents a cultural perspective that may be
new to our current knowledge, and 3) the process of documentation
often helps the language resource person to re-activate the linguistic and
cultural knowledge (UNESCO 2003).
114 » Caribbean Dynamics

The process of multimedia documentation for TFC includes the identification

of historical and current textual records and the creation of new oral records,
namely, ongoing recording and transcription.

Extant Written Sources

Building on the recent launch of Vini Chanté an Patwa: Come Sing in Patois—
Patois Songs of Trinidad and Tobago (Blizzard and Hodge, comp. 2009), a
forthcoming collection of TFC texts (Ferreira and Grant) aims to document the
literary heritage of TFC and to dispel the notion that TFC is and has been purely
an oral language or restricted to the work of J.J. Thomas (cf. Hazaël-Massieux
2008). The collection uses a cross- and multi-disciplinary approach, including
linguistic, literary and ethnographic analyses. The purpose of the work is twofold:
to document and catalogue existing authentic texts as well as to make available
tools and sources appropriate for language revitalization. The work makes TFC
literary culture available to a series of wider audiences, most importantly to those
people who have grown up with this language as part of their cultural heritage, and
aims to formally support informal language preservation efforts currently under
way mostly in online social networks. The collection draws on texts, all annotated
by the editors, ranging from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and
presented in their original and varied (often French-based or even English-based)
orthographic transcription(s). The editors also propose to re-transcribe selected
texts into the modern standardized orthography existing for Lesser Antillean
French Creole. The collection accompanies the ongoing process of recording,
transcription and creation of modern texts, and will be a source book for scholars
of linguistics attempting to understand changes that have taken place, and above
all, for individuals and communities hoping to revitalize the language of their
forebears.
The range of extant written sources includes the following:
1. Grammars (Thomas 1869 and 1870, Scott 2011 and in progress);
2. Dictionaries (Aub-Buscher forthcoming, and general dictionaries such as
Winer 2009 with over 1,300 items of TFC origin) and word lists (Ryan
1985, and general word lists and popular dictionaries such as Ottley 1965,
1971, Baptiste 1993, Mendes 2003, Penard 1928, Ryan 1985 inter alia);1
3. Folktales and stories (Clews Parsons 1933, Casimir 1977, Mendez and
Pierre 2009);
4. Proverbs and Riddles (Thomas 1869, Hearn 1885, Clews-Parsons 1943, de
Verteuil 1978, Inniss 1910 and Pierre 1999 and other works);
5. Poems (de Verteuil 1978, 1986, 2007, 2008, 2010);
Trinidad’s French Creole Linguistic and Cultural Heritage » 115

6. Translations (Thomas 1869);

7. Newspapers (Port of Spain Gazette, Trinidad Chronicle);
8. Academic writings (Aub-Buscher 1968, 1969 and 1989, Baksh-Soodeen
1994, Bryan 1974, Carr 1956, Corne 1999, Goodman 1958, Hancock 1985,
Jourdain 1954, Pastner 1987, Penard 1980, Ransau 1992 and 1994, and
Taylor 1977); and several other unpublished conference papers (cf Grant
2010) and student projects;
9. Internet sources, such as Facebook, a wiki (Ferreira et al.), and two blogs
(Henry and Hadden).
At the time of his death in 1890, Thomas was working on a second edition of
his groundbreaking 1869 grammar, to be called Gramme Creyol: Being the Theory
and Grammar of Creole Grammar. Vidale notes that ‘it was to include an entirely
new system of spelling, an historical and philological survey, more proverbs and
examples of Creole from Haiti and New Orleans, Martinique and Mauritius’, but
he was never able to complete it (see also Cudjoe 2003 for a study of John Jacob
Thomas).
De Verteuil notes that ‘it was the(se) smallholders rather than the labouring
class, which emerged with emancipation, who were repositories of a considerable
oral French Patois culture’, further confirming that ‘it would be unrealistic [...]
to distinguish too rigidly between the upper-class French and the lower-class
Patois. The planters spoke (and sung) Patois, and some of the poor people could
understand French’ (1978,12; see also Munro 2009 and Ferreira and Hodge 2012).

Oral Sources
Based on fieldwork by Hodge and Ferreira between 2009 and 2014, including
20 recorded interviews with 35 people in 12 villages, representing 20 hours, an
initial assessment of the current ethnolinguistic vitality of TFC in Trinidad reveals
the following. Although the language was spoken island-wide for well almost
150 years (‘from 1783 to as recently as the 1930s’, as Sealey and Aquing note), it
has been associated mostly with rural areas that are relatively difficult to access
because of the terrain or because of the distance from urban centres or both.
While situated only five miles north-west of Port of Spain, as the crow flies, and
suburban areas such as lower Maraval and Petit Valley (both along the Morne Coco
Road in opposite directions), mountainous Paramin has become the bastion of
TFC. There are other villages such as Blanchisseuse, with some 20 speakers (and
others scattered in Maracas and Las Cuevas), Cameron with 10 speakers, Lopinot
with five speakers, Moruga with five speakers, and several others, such as Arima,
Santa Cruz, Valencia, Flannagin Town, Gran Couva, Mamoral, Toco, St. Joseph
and Pt Cumana.2 With the exception of Santa Flora and Moruga in the south, and
116 » Caribbean Dynamics

possibly Mayaro in the east, most of the villages where TFC speakers reside today
are found in the Northern Range, in traditional, mountainous, relatively isolated,
cocoa-growing areas.
The range of oral sources available comes from speakers from these areas.
Oral sources also include ritualized genres such as songs (calypsos, folk songs
and hymns), as recorded by Lomax, and Lomax with Elder and Marchand 1962
(including the Rose of Shannon3 Singers/Blanchisseuse Community Centre), the
Montanos’ Patois People are Alive, Olive Walke’s La Petite Musicale 2001, Paramin
Folk Choir 2004, Howell 2003, and Blizzard and Hodge 2009, interviews and
recordings of stories (Hodge and Ferreira 2009–14), transcriptions of stories
(Casimir 1977), as well as documentaries.
In Paramin, there are now over 4,000 current residents in the village
(according to the 1990 census, there were 3,957 residents). In a 2001 interview
with Richard Mendez, then primary school teacher and currently acting principal
of the primary school4 and also census officer for over 20 years, Mendez estimated
that approximately 30 per cent of Paramin residents were TFC speakers, of varying
degrees of competence. Mendez, born in 1959, learned the language as an adult
through assistance from good friends and neighbours, and speaks it fluently
enough to represent the country at a storytelling fair at ‘Fanmi... Pwan Tiban-La,
Sizé!’ at the Kréyòl an Mouvman Creole Month. He became literate in TFC in
2001. He confirmed that the use of TFC, even in Paramin, was mainly restricted
to private use, among those over 50 in informal get-togethers, and that only one
primary school child in his care had learnt TFC as a mother tongue.
TFC-speaking individuals and descendants of TFC speakers born in Paramin
and the other villages are now scattered all over Trinidad, and some have migrated
to Canada, the US, the UK and elsewhere. Mendez noted that while most
community members would easily say they were proud of TFC, nostalgic attitudes
dominated. It is the tertiary-educated of Paramin, whether resident there or not,
who maintain the most positive language attitudes towards TFC.
In Paramin, the language is strongly associated with issues of identity and what
it means to be a Paraminian, in that residents perceive that they have a unique,
shared cultural identity with others in their community. Paramin’s family5 and
social networks remain strong and traditional, the perception being that marriages
remain largely endogamous, in a community that is 90 per cent Roman Catholic.
The village has a number of active associations, including the Paramin Development
Committee, the Paramin Cultural Organisation, the Village Council, Paraminiños
parang band, Blue Devil bands and more. The village is still home to cultural
events that are closely associated with the language. Some of these events include
the annual Dimanche Gras (pre-Carnival) Patois mass, other masses with Patois
songs (including the Christmas crèche songs), traditional rites and rituals such as
wakes during which bongo songs are sung in TFC, storytellers6 representing the
Trinidad’s French Creole Linguistic and Cultural Heritage » 117

community and country at festivals in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Venezuela,

and language and literacy classes in TFC for adults (Theresa Morilla Montano7 in
the 1990s, UWI in 2001 and sporadic and intermittent local efforts), and in the
primary school.8
Because of these visible and tangible expressions of the language, and
opportunities to witness the language in use at the individual and community level,
even if seasonal, Paramin has become the de facto capital of linguistic tourism
for TFC in the country, with researchers of various levels (CAPE Communication
Studies, BA projects, MA theses9 and PhDs in Linguistics and Ethnomusicology),
mostly from outside of the community, but also from within, regularly conducting
fieldwork there. The village has also attracted a number of film and documentary
makers, including both students and professionals (see Cadiz-Topp and de Verteuil
2004 and Morris and Vialva 2009).
All native and still fluent TFC speakers are bilingual, the oldest born in 1905
(now almost 107), and the youngest born in 1980 (now 32 years old), both male.
In 1982, three decades ago, researchers such as Dopson-Morris, and Sealey and
Aquing noted that the average TFC speaker was ‘elderly’ and 50 years of age
(Sealey and Aquing 1982, 9), referring also to ‘an unwritten ‘rite of passage’, a
sign of maturity, such that so-called semi-speakers, once they pass the age of 40,
begin speaking TFC much more often than they did before’. According to Dopson-
Morris, ‘members below the age of 20 are monolingual TE speakers’. Sealey and
Aquing remind the reader that Dopson-Morris’s BA study is

a study of the self-reported language usage of attitudes of ten (10)

speakers of TFC in one of the few remaining TFC/TE bilingual
communities in Trinidad. The methodology and sample size limit the
representativeness and validity of the results but it is the most recent
and only sociolinguistic study of a TFC/TE bilingual community) (1983,
n7).

This means that the youngest speakers alive today were children under 10 years
of age, almost 30 years ago, and that the frequent diagnosis of the low linguistic
vitality of TFC depended on accounts from those willing to share, and on secondary
research, and not on primary fieldwork among a wider range of individuals, as
noted by Sealey and Aquing themselves: that ‘all these examples are instances of
reported language usage and for any meaningful conclusions to be drawn empirical
studies over a period of time will have to be carried out’.

Linguistic Expansion
A standard orthography already exists for Lesser Antillean French Creole
(Bernabé 2001). As it was originally developed for St Lucia, Dominica and the
French Caribbean, through UWI and UAG collaboration, linguistic expansion
 118 » Caribbean Dynamics

for TFC does not include any new codification, but promotion of either one of
two orthographies for use in various domains (standard GEREC-1 or standard
GEREC-2). The issue for TFC is publicity, and advising would-be users of the
language that an adequate and valid orthography already exists. Because of the
lack of publicity, and lack of awareness even of the Dictionary of the English/Creole
of Trinidad and Tobago (DE/CTT, Winer 2009), Anglicized or French names
are used for TFC words in trademarks, calypsos, and other cultural arena. One
possibility for standardization is the establishment of a national Patois Council,
in conjunction with the Ministry of the Arts and Multiculturalism and their
Remember When Institute. Such a Council would be the reference point for the
rewriting and republishing of old books and song compilations, and for giving
advice on new productions. New works have benefitted from contact with UWI
sources and advice on orthography, all of them using the recommended standard.
These include novels as Besson’s Voice in the Govi, and books such as de Verteuil’s
Trinidad’s French Legacy (but not the earlier Trinidad’s French Verse 1850–1900 and
others), the Blizzard and Hodge Patois Songbook 2009 (but not Howell 2003),
and Eugene-Wafe (2014). Such a Council would function like a language academy
and can also give advice on pronunciation of TFC words for new songs, radio
programmes and other published audio-visual media.
Because TFC in Trinidad has been and still is closely associated with rural life,
it has a richly developed lexicon in the areas of flora and fauna, and it is lexicon
from these linguistic domains that have most heavily contributed the more widely
spoken English and English Creoles. For example, in the area of fauna, there
are 274 common names of birds of French and TFC origin, 20 mammals, 29
insects, 83 fish, 30 snakes, and in the area of flora, there are 276 plants and trees
with common names of French and TFC origin, and a variety of other natural
phenomena (Winer 2009). A number of these words of French and TFC origin
have been obsolete for a long time and are unknown to even many modern
speakers of TFC.
Linguistic expansion includes language development and language use in
domains not necessarily traditionally occupied by the language in question.
Discussion on social networking sites such as Facebook have focused on what
sources to use, namely, whether or not to borrow from French and adapt the
phonology or morphology to TFC, borrow from another French-lexicon Creole
such as Haitian, borrow from English and other languages, or use compounding
and other word formation processes in TFC using existing TFC words. Each
choice represents different theoretical and ideological positions, and the debate
will continue for some time.
Predictably, in most areas of urban life, speakers tend to code-mix and borrow
heavily from English. According to Amery (2009, 146), ‘No matter how large the
stockpile of recorded utterances, sooner or later language learners must take the
Trinidad’s French Creole Linguistic and Cultural Heritage » 119

plunge and formulate expressions for themselves’. This appears to be the case
in one online community, Annou Palé Patwa, created by the author, which has
attracted a young native speaker from Trinidad, Marvel Alves Henry, currently
resident in the US. He is in his 20s, and has been keen to develop new vocabulary,
using morphological and lexical resources from within the language, and some
borrowing from Haitian and Martiniquan. He also authors a teaching blog and
gives advice to other bloggers from Trinidad, such as Paul Hadden and others.
A number of language learning materials are already available but concentrate
on St Lucian French Creole, and French-French Creole bilingual materials for
Martinique and other French Caribbean territories, and Haiti. Younger generations
already accustomed to smart phones could be attracted to TFC language learning
apps designed especially for learners, and with reference to written and oral sources
already available in TFC, including those written sources to be republished using
the standard modern orthography.

Revitalization or Reclamation?
Broadly speaking, the national language community consists of fluent native
speakers and language custodians, as well as those who identify with the language
(including supportive outsiders and ‘sympathetic post-users’ as Mohan (1979, 42)
puts it). In practice, use of the language tends to be and family- and village-based.
Both revitalization and reclamation require concerted and extensive community
efforts. Revitalization involves rallying individual fluent native speakers and
others of varying fluency, even though there may be significant language shift
and loss at the individual and community level. In the case of reclamation, fluent
native speakers no longer exist or are inaccessible, and more radical language
planning would have to be involved. At the time of writing, TFC has enough native
speakers to make revitalization possible, at least at community levels, if not at the
national level. The issues here are not numbers of native speakers, though they
are an increasing minority, but larger issues such as national language planning,
including the recognition of heritage languages, changing language attitudes,
introducing supportive legislation and multilingual and multicultural educational
policies, developing and maintaining links with similar communities such as
Grenada and Venezuela, and of course, the engagement of theoretical and applied
linguists and the academy, in general.
Most teaching programmes are geared towards adults and have been delivered
by both native language (L1) and (second language (L2) teachers, with two attempts
to teach the basic TFC to the children of Paramin and some in Maraval, in addition
to ongoing adult classes in Tunapuna and at The University of the West Indies, St
Augustine. Teachers have found that adult students have no difficulties with TFC
grammar, once they are shown direct parallels between TFC and TEC (cf. Solomon
1993).
120 » Caribbean Dynamics

Conclusion
Contrary to widespread belief and secondary reports, although TFC has
remained hidden from public and even national life, the language is still alive.
There is increasing concern and interest in language revival and revitalization,
not only in traditional communities, but among descendants of TFC speakers no
longer tied to specific villages, and known to each other in online communities.
Given the rich and varied range of extant written and oral sources, still available
to the researcher and to the language learner, language revitalization is a real
possibility, requiring effective management as well as support from academic,
corporate and public sectors (Crystal 2002, Grenoble and Whaley 2005, Levine
and Leavitt).

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 Trinidad’s French Creole Linguistic and Cultural Heritage » 125

Notes
1. Unlike St Lucia, for example, TFC words that have become fully integrated into
TEC lexicon are not seen as foreign or a different language – they are merely
seen as ‘Trini’.
2. A number of villages have Patois-influenced names, indicating the reach of
Patois in the past. Pronunciations of several place names have been influenced
by Patois across the country, regardless of a cocoa-growing history. Some of
these include well known ones such as Gasparee (Gaspar Grande), Icaque
(Icacos), Lalin (La Lune, originally La Luna), Piti (from any name including Petit
or Petite, and sometimes actually written Piti, as in Piti Morne in Paramin),
the pronunciation of San Juan as /sã wã/, Sipawee (Siparia ), as well as those
known mainly to Patois speakers, Arime (Arima), Òpò (Port of Spain), Maywo
(Mayaro), and others such as Güiria (Lawil).
3. Rose of Shannon is mosy likely Rose of Sharon.
4. The Paramin RC Primary School opened in 1951.
5. Family names closely associated with Paramin include Arieatas, Bompart,
Caprieta, Constantine, Eugene, Felician, Felix, Fournillier, Letren, Mendez,
Pierre, Romain, Romany, Sanoir and others.
6. The use of expressions such as ‘Tim Tim’ and ‘Crick, Crack’ hark back to days
when storytelling was predominantly in Patois.
7. Jouvert Queen, Minstrel and Patois Folksinger for over 60 years until her death
at age 84 in 2001.
8. One kindergarten in Maraval, whose teacher is from Paramin, has been
teaching the children useful expressions and phrases.
9. UWI, Mona (Mass Communication), Westminster (Interpreting), UAG
(Traductologie), and others.

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