The present article, focussing on creoles based on Romance languages, begins with a brief historical overview of existing lexicographic inventories. The second part of the contribution is dedicated to problems of creole lexicography which are partly the same as those encountered in the description of any other language. Certain specific problems of creole lexicography are due to the fact that creoles are oral languages which only recently began to develop a written code. For this reason lexicographic inventories are often meant to fix an orthography, and they reflect a stage of elaboration of technical and scientific terms which can either be borrowed from the base language or created by means of word formation from proper creole morphemes. These problems are discussed and illustrated by examples taken from recent publications.

Paradoxically, the implementation of the "Unicode" norm, which gives creators of graphic codes the possibility to use just any sign, makes it even more necessary to distinguish preliminary reflection and the decision to use a specific graphic code for languages which function without written forms. We therefore propose to make a distinction between the concepts of "graphiation" and "graphisation". The former encompasses all approaches to problems linked to assigning to a given language a written sign system wether based on social, economical, psychological and linguistic considerations. The latter includes technical solutions resulting from preliminary reflection. In other words, it is necessary to determine why one decides to create a written code for a language, prior to deciding on how it will or should be done.

Haitian society is characterized by a number of dichotomies which are manifested in law in the form of an unequal bilingualism and a particular form of bijuralism. The legal integration of the Nation implies that the law be expressed in creole and that customary standards should be taken into account in written law. These measures would enrich substantive law in Haiti, though complex to implement.

In the year 2001, the French government made the Creole languages of Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique and Reunion, one single "Regional Language of France". The main reason for this policy is educational and should led to results in creating one single teacher's assessment exam for that subject. Disregarding local differences, underestimating the complexity of the settling of regional linguistic norms, and blindly following the all Creole activist discourse, the French authorities launched a project that has had no significant positive results. This article leads to the conclusion that there is a need for a differentiating branch of linguistics and recommends the creation of normative commissions working in the field with a goal to implement efficient policies.

This article addresses the central issues faced by language planners in the development of a written norm for Haitian Creole: (1) selecting among geographical and sociolinguistic variants; (2) devising an autonomous, phonologically-based systematic spelling instead of an etymological one modeled on that of Standard French; (3) dealing with morphophonological alternations that are either free variants or that reflect stylistic differentiation. It does broach the issue of the preparation of a monolingual dictionary, the veritable capstone in the standardization process.