Schibboleth, la langue comme arme de détection massive : 1937, le massacre des Haïtiens

In 1937, more than 30,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were massacred in a few days by the army and the Dominican police forces under the presidency of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. This genocide remains little known in modern world history. It remains marked with the seal of the language and its use as a tool to detect the origin of the speakers. Indeed, the Spanish language was used through the specific word "perejil" (parsley) to identify individuals unable to pronounce "correctly" this term. If any hesitation or failure to production a proper /r/ ("r" rolled) followed by a /x/ (jota), it was death with a machete or a knife for most of the time. The notion of shibboleth makes it possible to discuss this criminal use of the language. We shall examine the socio-historical contextualization of these events and then put into perspective the phonological and pragmatic dimensions of such a term with deadly ends.