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"The percentage of people who speak French fluently is about 5%, and 100% speak Creole," says Chris Low. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote It's like a toddler who is forced to start walking with a blindfold” End Quote Michel DeGraff Associate Professor of Linguistics at MIT "So it's really apartheid through language."

He argues that French should be taught in Haiti as a second-language - after children have learnt basic literacy skills in Creole. "Learning to first read and write in a foreign language is somewhat like a toddler who is forced to start walking with a blindfold, and the blindfold is never taken off," he told the BBC World Service.

No matter which indicators you pick, Haiti has an appalling record on education. One recent report rated it as the third worst place in the world, after Somalia and Eritrea, to go to school. Continue reading the main story A brief history of Haitian Creole It emerged towards the end of the 18th Century as slaves from Africa began mixing African languages with French Lots of the vocabulary comes from French, but the grammar is quite different Spelling was standardised in 1979 A law called the Bernard Reform was introduced in the early 1980s, designed to boost Creole in schools The 1987 constitution states that French and Creole are both official languages in Haiti It's estimated that about one-third of children never enrol at primary school, and only about one in 10 complete secondary school.