Guadeloupean creole’s endonym is mispelled “Kwéyòl” instead of “Kréyòl”.

[manuvision]

As the title suggests, I was born in the French Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe. Our mother tongue (alongside French) is spelled “Kréyòl”. More precisely, the full and correct name is “Kréyòl gwadloup”, as Martinique has its own closely related but distinct language called “Kréyòl matinik.”

While these creoles are similar, they are not the same—just as Haitian Creole, though related, is also distinct. Each creole is unique and deserves its own proper classification rather than being grouped or redirected incorrectly.

At the moment, the data is inaccurate:
• Searching for Martinique does not list Creole as a language, only French.
• Martinican Creole incorrectly redirects to the Guadeloupe page.
These should be clearly separated and treated as distinct languages.

The number of speakers is also misleading. It appears to be based only on the current population living on the islands. While Guadeloupe has around 430,000 residents, there are millions of Guadeloupeans living worldwide, many of whom speak Guadeloupean Creole. A more realistic estimate would be 1M+ speakers at minimum. While exact numbers are difficult to verify, it is certainly far beyond 430k.

Another important issue: Guadeloupean Creole is often mishandled by online translation tools (e.g. Google Translate), which typically recognize only Haitian Creole. As a result, Guadeloupean Creole is poorly supported—or entirely absent—in major LLMs such as Gemini and others.

I have been actively working with the French government and with people at Google to help address this by contributing proper grammatical structures, literary texts, poems from local artists, and published works that can be used to train AI systems correctly. I gave a TEDx talk on this topic in 2023 and also recorded a MasterClass episode on AI ethics that touches on these issues.

If someone from Google is reading this, please feel free to reach out. My career has been focused on cultural heritage preservation, and language is a core part of that work. I would also be interested in contributing content related to Kalinago languages and non-oral/non-written languages, such as Carib and Taíno Caribbean petroglyphs, which are a crucial part of our erased pre-colonial culture following colonization and the transatlantic slave trade.

There is much more to say, but I’ll stop here for now.

References
• Contact: manuel.sainsily@gmail.com
• TEDx talk: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C07YmWcAI1p/?igsh=MXFlaGF2bmRpaHQxeA==
• MasterClass episode: https://www.masterclass.com/series/achieve-more-with-gen-ai/episodes/ethics-ai-and-the-future