Haitian Creole is a language based on French, with a large part of its vocabulary directly borrowed from Old French. While Haitian Creole uses its own spelling, a good knowledge of French vocabulary will help learners remember words in Haitian Creole. With a little bit of practice, remembering the spelling of words will become easy relatively quickly. That’s because Haitian Creole is a phonetic language.
Every sound in Haitian Creole corresponds to one letter or group of letters, and the pronunciation never changes. Therefore, if you know how a word is pronounced and know which sound corresponds to which letter, you will write it down correctly. This is one great advantage that learners of Haitian Creole can use to learn words quickly and easily. All this information will come in handy because, in this article, we will explain how numbers work in Haitian Creole.
French words, Haitian Creole spelling
If you know how to count in French, you’re already halfway there. Phonetically, Haitian Creole numbers follow the French structure very closely. The numbers from zero to sixteen should be learned by heart because they’re used as building blocks for higher numbers. The first numbers you’ll learn in Haitian Creole, starting with zero, are the following: zewo, en, de, twa, kat, senk, sis, sèt, uit, nèf, dis, onz, douz, trèz, katòz, kenz, sèz.
Notice how similar the words are to their French counterparts: zéro, un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix. Moreover, keep in mind that French is not a highly phonetic language, as it uses many silent letters. Haitian Creole can be viewed as a phonetic spelling of the French words, and every letter in Haitian Creole is pronounced.
Numbers as compounds words in Haitian Creole
Most languages use compound words to express higher numbers. This means you don’t have to remember the word for every single number because you can express numbers through different combinations of the exact words. For example, counting from twenty to twenty-nine in English is as simple as adding the numbers from one to nine at the end of the word “twenty”.
The same concept also applies to French, and therefore, to Haitian Creole. The words for seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen are a simple combination of “ten” and “seven”, “eight”, or “nine”, respectively: disèt, dizwit, disnèf. Note that in some instances, spelling might be adapted to suit the pronunciation. Take a look at another example using the base word “ven” (twenty): venteyen, vende, ventwa, venkat, vensenk, vensis. It’s pretty simple to make out which number is what when you know each component of the word.
Practice Haitian Creole numbers with our online tutors!
Learning numbers in Haitian Creole is super simple, but being able to use them quickly and efficiently in everyday conversations takes a lot of practice. This is a common problem with many languages because numbers are usually written with numerals. When we read a foreign language text, we read the words in front of us in the foreign language, but figures such as “38”, “193”, or “2097” we tend to read in the most readily accessible language to us, usually our native language. Our brains are pretty lazy when given the opportunity, and this is why even highly proficient language learners still struggle with big numbers late in their learning journey.
Things are even trickier for French and Haitian Creole because they sometimes have very counter-intuitive ways of counting numbers. Take the example of the numbers seventy through seventy-nine. The number “swasandisnèf” (seventy-nine) is actually a combination of the numbers sixty, ten, and nine. But don’t worry, you don’t have to fry your brain trying to cram everything in. Our Creole Tutors can help you practice your numbers in a fun, interactive way. With a $5 first lesson, you’ll be on your way to mastering Haitian Creole numbers in no time!