By Maya Earls

On an overcast Monday, nine students offered a cheerful, “Bonjou” as they passed their professor. Each student found a chair around a long wooden table and opened his or her textbook to the previous night’s assignments. From the outside, the Haitian Creole class appeared like any other college course. However, with this fall being the first time New York University (NYU) offered the language, every class meeting was an experiment.

“I have a general structure and a general timeline of what I want my students to learn,” said Wynnie Lamour, NYU’s adjunct Creole instructor, “But things shift as you go from day to day.”

By Joyann Jeffrey

For Christelle Hyppolite, learning to speak Creole connects her with a heritage she never quite understood.

At home I felt disconnected with my relatives, the 23-year-old says. Not being able to speak Creole had an isolating effect on me. So, in an effort to connect to her family and culture through language, Hyppolite enrolled in the Haitian Creole Language Institute of New York, an educational facility dedicated to teaching others Haitian Creole in the Two Moon Art and House Café in downtown Brooklyn.