[3] It is a string-based style played on the guitar, horn section, piano, and other string instruments unlike the accordion-based merengue, and is generally sung in Haitian Creole[4] and French, as well as in English and Spanish.
The term meringue, a whipped egg and sugar confection popular in eighteenth-century France, was adopted presumably because it captured the essence of the light nature of the dance where one gracefully shifts one's weight between feet in a very fluid movement, animating the final section of the Haitian kontradans.
Composers such as Occide Jeanty; his father, Occilius; Ludovic Lamothe; Justin Elie; Franck Lassègue; and Fernand Frangeul wrote méringue for solo piano and sometimes for small groups of wind instruments.
The formulaic insults of the Haitian Carnival méringue bore some similarity to the early calypso picong, or "stinging," style.
A notable exception is a song called, Choucoune or commonly known as "Ti Zwazo", an old méringue with lyrics by Haitian poet Oswald Durand.