On 20 January 2026, Brittle Paper published an essay by Patrice Nganang, “How Do You Say Email in Your Mother Tongue?” Following the publication, Nganang received a letter from Professor Georges Fouron, who had a response to the essay. We have received permission to publish the letter, along with Nganang’s response.

From Georges Fouron to Patrice Nganang:

I have read your essay closely and I truly enjoyed it. However, one of the questions that came to my mind in doing so is the status and nature of languages through the years. The same way it happened to the other languages of the world, our native languages evolve as the state of the world in which they exist also evolve. Their original formulations, therefore, change also. I have seen it happen to my native language: Haitian Kreyol. It began to change when the Americans occupied the country between 1915-1934. Before that, between 1804 and 1915, when the Haitian Revolution happened, it did not change much because the world community placed a “cordon sanitaire” around the country, preventing significant contacts with the world of that period.

However, during the occupation, the Americans brought many English words with them, which quickly became part of the native language’s vocabulary, especially as many Protestant missionaries tried to convert the Haitians to their faith; they were the first ones to translate the Bible into Haitian Kreyol, an endeavor the Catholic Church never considered because they had successfully convinced the Haitians that their true language was French. Then, during the US occupation of the country, as the Americans encouraged Haitians to migrate to their outposts in the Caribbean, namely to Cuba and the Dominican Republic, to work in their sugar plantations, the returning migrants brought Spanish words that were also included into the language’s vocabulary. With the great Haitian global out migration that happened during the Duvalier dictatorship, the language continued to be transformed. Finally, as globalization entered the fray, the language continued to adapt to it as well. However, I need to point out that the language’s grammar did not change significantly during these encounters.

At times, communication with the sedentary population and  visiting or returning immigrants are encumbered by the creolization of English and Spanish words. I remember vividly an encounter I had with a member of my family who was relating to me a frightening encounter he had with a representative of the dictatorship during one of my visits there. Instead of telling me that “mwen the pe anpil,” (I was really frightened) he said instead “mwen frikat.”  As I looked confused, not fully understanding what he meant to say since the word “frikat” was nor part of my vocabulary, he accused me of forgetting my native tongue. As I insisted, telling him, “I don’t understand what you mean,” he repeated: “frikat” a number of times. Finally, exasperated, he blurted out in Haitian Kreyol, of course: you are living in the US and you speak English fluently and you are telling me that you do not understand what “frikat” means. Finally, as I insisted, telling him that I had no idea what I meant to say, he finally blurted in Haitian Kreyol “mwne te pe anpil.” That was only then that I understood what meant to say: “freak out.” The term had been creolized.

Therefore, I think it is normal for languages to evolve as their speakers connect with speakers of other languages and as they [the languages] are affected by the contact of a constantly changing world environment. If they do not or cannot, they will fall into disuse and probably will die.

Along the lines of this point, during my research endeavors within the Haitian diaspora, I have observed the same phenomenon that you relate about your daughter’s communicative practices. To wit, many Haitian youths, because of peer pressure, refuse to speak Haitian Kreyol, although they understand it. In the long term, Haitian Kreyol’s presence in the diaspora may decrease significantly. However, it will not disappear completely because Haitians continue to migrate to countries around the world, and as they bring with them the dominant language they speak, Haitian Kreyol, its survival is somewhat guaranteed in these places.

From Patrice Nganang to Georges Fouron:

Ah, Georges

Your email response to my essay is truly historical. Because of that, it brought me to some thinking I would phrase around the question: Why did White people not invent Pidgin? A silly question, when you hear it, for the quick answer would be: French, Spanish, are derivation, thus, pidgin forms of Latin. And there resides the issue: one of domination. Now before I become too convoluted, let me remember this: in Medumba, my mother tongue, the oldest linguistic borrowing is ndollar, the pidgnized form for dollar. The ndolla stands for a totally devaluated currency and is vernacularly the equivalent of the lowest amount of FrancsCfa, the local currency. So, in my mother tongue, when someone means to say he is broke, he says, me ke’ ghe mba ta’ ndolla. Translation: ‘I don’t even have a dollar.’ To ask for little cash, one says, Fa ndolla bo me. ‘Give me two dollars.’ The translation would involve a quick mental conversion, for how much FrancsCfa is a ndolla worth? The dollar count stops at ten dollars – there is no sentence that involves eleven ndolla. And that is valid for all the Bamileke languages of which Medumba is just one.

Now, this ndolla of my mother tongue is not the US dollar – it is its ancestor, the 16th Century global currency of Spain and Portugal, and thus, the currency with which Black slaves were bought and sold. It was devalued with the banning of slavery around the 19th Century, but in fact, it had already been replaced by the guinea with the end of Spain’s global domination. In Haitian Creole, one of if not the oldest and most established form of Creole, I am told, guine, or guinen, stands for Black – in fact, for West Africa, the old Guinea – neg guine. Commerce is the fastest way through which language evolves, and it is also the most important way through which people enter in contact with one another, that we know. If it is easy to establish that the global commerce that involved Black people was triangular, the dollar would be at the center of it. You see, its survival in my mother tongue drags Medumba into the triangular slave trade. But it also does something else – it establishes a word, ndolla as probably the very first linguistic borrowing that Bamileke people did. There are many other ones that came with it or later, for sure – obeye, ngalum, gainsi, etc. But what those words also tell us, and that is why I mention ndolla, is a history of domination.

Creole is a form of the Latin creare, to generate – but it is applied to the language of Black people. To my question, instead of ‘creolization’, I would therefore say domination: Black people invent pidgin, and its historical descendent, Creole, because of domination, a domination that hasn’t ended yet. What the word ndolla was in the 16th Century, is the word email in the 21st. The word ndolla of our ancestors is the word dashboard for us, the word streaming, the word podcast. By way of saying that because Black people were and are still dominated in the Western world economy, we are the ones inventing pidgin. Not Europeans. When European people were dominated by the Roman Empire, they did invent their own form of pidgin they now call French, Italian, Spanish, English, etc., as derivations from Latin. Similarly, Kiswahili is a derivation from Arabic, because the people of the Eastern Coast of Africa suffered under the domination of Arabic-speaking Muslim people. Dominated people invent languages. But as we know and see today, AI also generates. And since it is so, why can’t it then generate African languages in our stead?

I flesh out some ruminations provoked by a walk in the snow after reading your email, clearly, but also by the work done around Scale Boy with the curators of the ten African languages the app carries. It is a work that made me realize that African languages face the same problems, but each face them in isolation. An Igbo doesn’t know that a Kikuyu says email for electronic mail. A Fulani, that in Twi the word for podcast is also podcast. And all still must find a word for credit card. See? In 2026 we all are truly not far away from the ndolla problem. Our languages are monads, because we do not share our experiences of domination with each other in a trans-linguistic manner but talk about it in English. What I mean to say is that there is no African metalanguage: a language digital technology could use; a language coding could use. Africa 2.0 has the number of smartphones needed to read and write but lacks a language that would transform the literature produced into a true AI player. This task ahead of us is already far away from creolization. But because it is still a task of word generation, it is a task for wordsmiths – for writers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Santiago Avila Caro on Unsplash