Rival pictures of kreyòl, and what was at stake in fixing its spelling. Schieffelin and Doucet treat the standardization of an orthography as a symbolic decision rather than a technical one.

Educated Haitians describe the language as something they hold in common with everyone else in the country, and it has long served as a durable marker of Haitian identity. Its image, though, is fought over in several arenas at once, and the terms speakers use to label varieties of spoken kreyòl carry ideological weight of their own.

Tying those metalinguistic labels to the spelling disputes, the authors read the whole argument as nationalist discourse about Haitianness — about what counts as authentic and legitimate, and therefore about the part language plays in forming a national identity.