The Origins of Linguistic Power Structures

Yana Ferguson is a rising junior at MIT with an intended major in the physical sciences. The class really made me think very differently about the world, she says. Every week, someone in the class is in charge of leading a discussion based on the assigned reading for that week. So my running theme was always to make my classmates understand my world so that when we discussed things, they would be able to see why and how I said things, understood things that we did.

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We first interviewed Professor Michel DeGraff back in season 1; he now returns for another episode, diving deeper into issues of culture and identity. He talks about his childhood in Haiti, where he was punished at school for speaking his own mother tongue, and where he was taught by his teachers and even his parents that Kreyòl was not “a real language.” After doing early work in natural language processing that led him to question widespread assumptions about language, Prof. DeGraff shifted his academic focus to linguistics. He now begins each iteration of his course 24.908 Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities by asking his students to write linguistic autobiographies that describe the languages they grew up speaking and examine their own attitudes about language. In addition to discussing that course, he talks in this episode about his efforts to draw attention to language’s role in perpetuating imbalances of power. As an added bonus, we hear from two students from 24.908, discussing how Prof. DeGraff helped cultivate trust in the classroom, and how that trust freed the students to enrich each other’s understanding of the world by sharing personal experiences and insights.

*English Translation of Prof. Michel DeGraff’s Kreyòl Statement:

So, my fellow countrymen,

There's something that is very VERY important to understand:

we must understand the origins of prejudices against Kreyòl.

We must also remember that Dessalines said, so clearly,

that everyone is human. And he also knew that,

if everyone is human, then every language is a perfectly normal language.

So Kreyòl, too, is a perfectly normal language.

That's why he said, since before 1804,

that Kreyòl is our own language,

so we don't need to always look for other languages to speak.

Yes, we must remember, if we did not have Kreyòl as a language,