Michel DeGraff is Professor of Linguistics at MIT and director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. He’s also a founding member of Haiti’s Haitian Creole Academy. Prof. DeGraff’s research has deepened our understanding of the history and structures of Creole languages, especially his native Haitian Creole (“Kreyòl”). These languages have often been, mistakenly, described as “exceptional,” “lesser” or “deficient,” and they have been, by and large, excluded from the education of Creole speakers—to the detriment of these disenfranchised communities. DeGraff’s linguistic analyses and his projects on Kreyòl-based STEM education have now shown that these Creole languages, such as Kreyòl, are fundamentally on a par with non-Creole languages in terms of historical development, grammatical structures and expressive capacity. His research projects bear on social justice as well, on a global scale. In DeGraff’s vision, Creole languages and other so-called “local” languages constitute a necessary ingredient for universally accessible quality education, sustainable development, equal opportunity and dignified citizenship for their speakers—a position that is often undermined by theoretical claims and national policies that contribute to the marginalization of these languages, especially in education and administration.
Michel Frederic DeGraff
