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.