Forthcoming: A grammar of 18th century Haitian Creole: A description of Ducoeurjoly’s Haitian Creole (1802)

S.J. Ducœurjoly (1744–ca. 1818) is a French author who spent 20 years of his life in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, as a planter, most likely between 1770 and 1790. He gained fluency in the local creole. In his two-volume book on Saint-Domingue, published in Paris in 1802, he included five dialogues, all in creole, between enslaved Africans, settlers, shipbuilders, plantation owners, skilled workers and ship captains. The current book is a detailed and comprehensive grammatical description of his Haitian Creole, exclusively based on the dialogues. It is the first grammar of a historical variety of Haitian Creole. The dialogues have been deemed a reliable source of the language at the time, as it is in line with other historical sources of the period, and with current Haitian dialectology. The grammar covers the lexicon, parts of speech, phonology, morphology, noun phrases, verb phrases, simple clauses and clause combining, as well as lists of prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions. The 500 example sentences are all glossed with French and English translations, and precise references to the speaking turns in the corpus. The dialogues themselves, in Creole and French, are added as appendices.