The Kreyol-Spanish Divide: The Linguistic Image of Haiti in The Dominican Republic

FAIN: FT-59446-12

Juan R. Valdez
Stanford University (Stanford, CA 94305-2004)

I will study the role that the representation of linguistic differences between Haiti and the Dominican Republic played in the Dominican state's plan for remapping and controlling the border region during the 1930s and 1940s. Based on a corpus of philological texts representative of discourse on language and Haitian-Dominican relations, I will analyze the linguistic generalizations that serve to emphasize differences between Dominicans and Haitians, particularly in the border region. Special attention will be given to the institutional aspects that link these texts to their wider social context. Analyzing these texts in their social and political contexts will provide a critical understanding of how the prevalent ideas regarding linguistic practices along the border were first conceived and advanced. My work sheds light on the interdependence of the two countries and challenges some of the most basic sociolinguistic presuppositions of the status quo.

Associated Products

Representing and regimenting languages in a transnational setting: The case of the Haitian-Dominican border (Article)
Title: Representing and regimenting languages in a transnational setting: The case of the Haitian-Dominican border
Author: Juan R. Valdez
Abstract: My analysis focuses on linguistic representations in order to shed light on the political, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries of the two nation-states that share the island of Hispaniola. In the context of the 20th century, Dominican politicians and philologists converged, creating a concentrated network of schools with Spanish as the language of instruction, prohibiting the use of Haitian Creole (Kreyòl), renaming numerous places from French or Kreyòl to Spanish, and producing a corpus of texts which described and represented the Dominican linguistic landscape proper. Literacy practices and speech practices were engaged for the purpose of Hispanizing border communities. I approach the sociopolitical transformation of this region by analyzing the representations of speech practices and the related linguistic policies of the Dominican state which targeted bilingual and multicultural communities in the 1930s and 1940s. To these interrelated issues, I apply the analytical tools from research on linguistic discourse and language ideologies (Arnoux and del Valle 2010; Irvine and Gal 2000; Woolard 2008) and insights from border studies (Wilson and Donnan 2012; Houtum and Naerssen 2002). My guiding question is whether, in the case of the Dominican-Haitian border in the 20th century, linguistic difference was represented in metalinguistic discourse in order to create a Dominican identity particularly through dissimilarity.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/special-issue-the-transnational-politics-of-language-in-hispaniola-yspayola/oclc/911135286&referer=brief_results
Secondary URL: https://www.academia.edu/19526072/Representing_and_regimenting_languages_in_a_transnational_setting_The_case_of_the_Haitian-Dominican_border
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: International Journal of the Sociology of Language
Publisher: Mouton De Gruyter

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