Education There are six primary and secondary schools which welcome the pupils of both municipalities. There are two nursery schools, two primary schools, and two middle schools (colleges). High school and higher education requires the children to go to Guadeloupe, Martinique or France. Public health Terre-de-Haut has two general practitioners, two dentists, four physiotherapists. Terre-de-Bas has a general practitioner. The pharmacy is located on Terre-de-Haut. The fire brigades are equipped with equipment and vehicles adapted to fight against disasters and to carry assistance. Other care and specialities are located at Basse-Terre or Pointe-à-Pitre and in case of emergency, the fire brigade can call the helicopter of Sécurité Civile to come from Guadeloupe Languages The archipelago of les Saintes is mostly populated by the descendants of colonists from Brittany and Normandy, Poitou, Saintonge and Anjou, who are mostly from the first French families that lived on Saint Christopher and Nevis when it was a French colony. The population has the peculiarity of being primarily of European origin and speaking a variety of popular American French, with some terms of Old French. The French of France is the official language and taught in schools. Among the languages of the archipelago, the Creole or patois (dialect) of les Saintes, stemming from the interbreeding of the Europeans and from the Creole influence of the slaves brought into the archipelago, is the most practiced by far. Les Saintes Creole is a French-based creole language, and is included the category of the agglutinative languages. It differs from those of the neighbouring islands (Guadeloupe, Marie-Galante and Dominica) by its very Gallicised pronunciation. It is close to the Creole spoken on the eastern side of the island of Saint-Barthélemy. Certain phonemes of the French language (, , , and ) disappeared from the modern creole of Guadeloupe, Dominica and Martinique are found in this dialect. Contrary to other French Antilles creoles which have diverged from French, Les Saintes Creole is moving toward it, in particular by a hyper-correction of the pronunciation of [r], considered a sign of speaking well. This may be a legacy of the first colonists who considered, by phenomenon of diglossia, the dialect as a secondary language lower than French and tried hard to avoid pronouncing [r] in the Guadeloupean way [w]. There is a second variant of this dialect, caused by the isolated evolution of the groups on two different islands. Terre-de-Haut Island's dialect