Jean Bernabé

Jean Bernabé (1942 in Le Lorrain, Martinique – 12 April 2017 in Fort-De-France, Martinique) was a writer and linguist.

Bernabé was a professor of language and culture at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane. He was an important figure in the créolité movement, having co-authored the seminal 1989 essay on the subject, Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), with Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant.

Although Bernabé's work lauds the Créole language, on which he has written seminal works, his literary creation is exclusively in the French language, to make it more accessible to international readers. However, he also had an influence on the emergence of modern literature in Créole.

Biography Bernabé studied Classics at the Sorbonne and in 1982, he defended his thesis in Linguistics on Antillean Créole titled Fondal Natal : Grammaire basilecticale approchée des Créoles guadeloupéen et martiniquais, which was published by Harmattan in 1983. From 1973, Bernabé worked at the Centre Universitaire des Antilles in Guadeloupe until it was moved to Martinique in 1982, at which point he returned to Martinique as well. In 1975, while still writing his thesis, he founded the Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches en Espaces créolophones (GEREC) in Guadeloupe. This later became GEREC-F, the F added to acknowledge the enduring francophone presence in antillean society and the coexistence of the two languages. In 1976, he founded the journal Espace Créole.

Bernabé was one of the founders of French creolistics and created the first modern phonemic orthography for Martinican and Guadeloupean Créole languages, as well as a lexicon compiling all French-based Créole languages.