The History of French in Louisiana

This chapter introduces the reader to Louisiana French. Four varieties of French are generally recognized by linguists: Colonial French, Plantation Society French, Louisiana Creole, and Louisiana Regional French (most commonly called Cajun French). The French of the Lafourche Basin is classified as Louisiana Regional French. The chapter outlines the similarities and differences between the three, and then focuses in particular on Louisiana Regional French, providing a historical outline of its development and a brief description of its features in comparison to Standard French. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the variation found in Louisiana French across the state. This sets the scene for the detailed description of the language as it is spoken in the Lafourche country, the language at the center of place-based identity in Terrebonne-Lafourche.

The Future of French in Louisiana

The vernacular variety of French historically spoken in south Louisiana, commonly known as Cajun French or to linguists as Louisiana Regional French (Klingler 2003), is the unique product of the contact between varieties of French spoken by the colonists, immigrants, and Acadian exiles who populated the region. The Acadian influence on this Louisiana dialect of French is reflected in its common name, ...

“Carrefour Louisiane”

The history of Louisiana French (LF) is closely related to Louisiana’s particular societal and linguistic ecosystem, characterized by a mixed society where new forms of societal organization emerged and were reflected in new forms of linguistic patterns and linguistic behavior. From the beginning, language contact has been of crucial importance for the emergence, evolution and gradual decline of Louisiana French (“Cajun French”). In colonial times, contact between related French lects resulted in the formation of a new variety of regional French in North America with its own features and its own evolutionary dynamics. The continuing contact with English, however, which takes place in an entirely different ecological frame, results in the ongoing attrition of the minority language. The first part of the article deals with early stages of dialect contact in Louisiana; it will be shown that from a diachronic point of view Louisiana French has to be seen as a product of language mixing and dialect leveling. In the second part two specific aspects of current English-French language contact will be discussed. Both aspects serve to illustrate particularities of the linguistic situation in Louisiana now and then as well as the importance of certain universal mechanisms of contact-induced language change.

Intergenerational pattern of interference and internally-motivated changes in Cajun French

We examine the variable use of locative prepositions in Cajun French, adding two dimensions to existing studies: real-time evidence, adding a diachronic descriptive perspective, and a methodological tool, measuring the degree of exposure to French (MDI). The goal of this paper is to determine the origins and the directions of language change within the system of locative prepositions. The majority of the interviews are taken from the Cajun French/English corpus, conducted by Dubois in 1997. Our results indicate that the restricted speakers use an array of innovative forms in all locative categories. Systemic and extralinguistic evidence show that some of these forms represent interference-induced innovations, while others are internally-motivated innovations stimulated in an indirect way by language contact. A model of change emerges where the older restricted speakers introduce changes that are gradually adopted by the following generations, regardless of the extent to which their linguistic ability in Cajun French is diminished.