(no subject)

[camwyn]

Hey, if anyone here is familiar with Creole from personal experience- how similar are its sounds to Academie French or Quebecois? I ask because I had a taxi ride yesterday and the driver had to take a phone call, and he asked the person on the other end if they spoke Creole- but the rest of the time he was talking with them, I was hearing words that sounded way more familiar in terms of phoneme than they should've. Like, the level of familiarity I get when I hear someone speaking Latin American-derived Spanish and I automatically start trying to translate based on overlap with Italian. I don't recall hearing the same level of sounds-at-the-front-of-the-palate that I usually associate with French, either. It was a little weird.

For reference, I have no Spanish classes in my background, a handful of French classes, and a fifth-grade homeroom teacher who tried to teach us French almost entirely by speaking means rather than written means. I have lived in the NYC/NJ area most of my life and heard several varieties of Spanish spoken, as well as Brazilian Portuguese, and while I do not understand them I can at least tell the difference between spoken Castilian and the Spanish that I'm used to. most of my spoken French exposure comes from watching Au Service De La France with the subtitles on, plus a couple of movies. I don't know what Caribbean languages/dialects sound like, or how many Creole variations there are; I'm assuming someone in this part of the US who just uses the word 'Creole' means Haitian Creole.

Comments

[shati]

I'm not very familiar, and I don't think there's any way to quantify similarity, but I do understand a lot of individual words in Haitian Creole from familiarity with French (and more rarely from Spanish or English). My understanding is some speakers will also speak in ways more influenced by/similar to French than others, but I don't think it's surprising to understand some anyway.

The sounds of Haitian Creole don't remind me of Quebecois specifically much, though (FWIW). Louisiana French yes, but that's cheating.