For International Creole Day on Wednesday, October 28, The Haitian Times republished an opinion piece by language advocate Marleen Julien on the place of Haitian Creole in the digital age.

Haitian Creole became one of Haiti's two official languages in 1987, Julien notes, yet standard French still dominates formal settings such as finance and law. The language is spoken by about 12 million people worldwide and is the third most common language in Florida.

Online, Kreyòl appears in Google Translate's language menu, though it struggles with complex or specialized text, and Facebook's interface is fully available in the language. In New York, a 2022 language access law requires state publications to be translated into 12 languages, including Haitian Creole, and the Haitian Creole Academy leads work to standardize spelling and grammar.

Demand for Creole language services grew after the 2010 earthquake and with immigration to the United States, writes Julien, who runs the consulting firm Creole Solutions. Because there is little Creole training data, she says, artificial intelligence alone cannot yet produce fully accurate translations, so teams in the U.S. and Haiti work together, and she urges every Haitian to help keep the language alive.