Towards a bilingual Haitian Creole-French/French-Haitian Creole dictionary aimed at school pupils

This article describes a project aiming to produce the first bilingual Haitian Creole-French/French-Haitian Creole dictionary aimed for school pupils. It opens with an inventory of the major bilingual dictionaries of French-based creoles. Next, it reviews the level of standardization attained by Haitian Creole and then discusses basic methodological issues in bilingual lexicography, namely the delimitation of the nomenclature, the classification of phonological variants, and the selection of illustrative examples. It concludes with a demonstration of the use of computer technology in lexicography and describes a computerized lexical data base for Haitian Creole from which can be generated various types of bilingual dictionaries and, eventually if such a need is felt by the Haitian Creole speaking community, of a monolingual dictionary Or for that language.