“Yo no hablo haitiano, hablo patuá”: The Construction and Enregisterment of Linguistic Difference in Haitian Dominican Migration Contexts

Abstract

This qualitative case study analyzes how inhabitants of transnational communities in rural Dominican Republic, known as bateyes, construct linguistic diversity arising from the coexistence of Spanish and Haitian Creole within the context of migration dynamics. The research was conducted in August 2022 with 11 bilingual Spanish-Creole inhabitants of 12 bateyes in the Dominican Republic. The data were analyzed using discourse analysis and linguistic ideology theories. Special attention was given to registers (i. e. named forms of Spanish and Haitian Creole ideologically linked to specific kinds of speakers and communicative contexts) that exist within the batey, and how these were evaluated by speakers. The findings reveal a contrast between how batey residents construct linguistic diversity and how academic and folk metalinguistic discourse see it. The latter describe a Haitianized register of Spanish associated with Haitian-born and Haitian-descended speakers, as opposed to the “pure” Spanish of Dominicans without ties to Haiti, while also mentioning a vague Dominicanized Creole. Batey inhabitants, on the other hand, perceive ethnic variation in Spanish as irrelevant and emphasize a specific Creole register known as patuá which is attributed to second-generation immigrants and seen as a deficient form of Haitian Creole. These results suggest that while participants challenge negative attitudes toward Haitian Creole prevalent in the country, they, nonetheless, uphold ideologies that devalue migrant varieties in favor of the native standard. This is the first study to provide insights into how batey inhabitants perceive and ideologically enregister linguistic differences in their transnational setting.