Valdman begins with a novelist's attempt to render the Creole spoken on the northern plain around 1800 and shows that what reaches the page is essentially today's standard language in antique spelling. The gap can be measured, because a handful of colonial sources survive: travellers' transcriptions, the song Lisette quitte la plaine in two versions, official proclamations, and a planter's guide with dialogues and a glossary.

Possession is the clearest marker. Saint-Domingue Creole regularly linked noun and pronoun with an intervening a, a construction still heard in the north of Haiti but absent from the Port-au-Prince standard. Northern speech also keeps final r and front rounded vowels, holding on to forms the standard has shed.

Other differences are harder to place, notably the loss of a distinct subject pronoun. Valdman doubts the claim that field labourers preserved African languages or spoke a separate gros creole, while conceding the written record cannot settle it.