French and Creole In Louisiana

The sustained presence of the French language in the Gulf South dates to the year 1699, when the French Canadian brothers Bienville and Iberville founded Fort Maurepas near present-day Biloxi, Mississippi, followed by Fort Louis de la Mobile in 1702 and New Orleans in 1718. The earliest European settlers, who were primarily from France and French Canada, but also from the German-speaking region of Alsace as well as from Germany and Switzerland, came into contact with American Indians speaking a variety of languages, including the trade pidgin known as Mobilian Jargon. The first shipment of enslaved Africans to Louisiana arrived in 1719, adding to the linguistic diversity of the colony. Approximately 5,000 Africans were brought to Louisiana between 1719 and 1743, the year the last slave ship arrived during the French period. The Spanish, who controlled the Louisiana colony from 1769 to 1800, resumed the slave trade to Louisiana as they greatly expanded the colonies plantation economy. Despite a Spanish administration and the arrival of some 2000 Spanish speakers from the Canary Islands in the late 1770s, Louisiana remained resolutely French in
character. Indeed, the French-speaking population was significantly augmented between 1764 and 1785 by the arrival of as many as 3000 Acadian exiles following their expulsion from their homeland by the British in 1755.

It is likely that the different varieties of French spoken by the many francophone groups who came to Louisiana during the eighteenth century—including settlers, administrators, soldiers, indentured servants, and prisoners—underwent a process of koìneization by which the most significant linguistic differences were leveled out, resulting in a new and unique variety of French widely shared among the colonists, many slaves, and some American Indians, and that served as the basis for what we know today as Louisiana (or “Cajun”) French. It was also in the course of the eighteenth century that contact between African slaves and francophone colonists gave rise to the Louisiana Creole language, which is first mentioned in the transcript of a slave trial from 1792, in which it is referred to by the Spanish word Criollo.

Having reverted briefly to French control in 1800, the Louisiana colony was sold to the young United States in 1803. Paradoxically, it was during the first decades of Louisiana’s American period that French language and culture reached their zenith, as French newspapers, literature, theater, and music flourished. It was at this time that what Michael Picone has dubbed “Plantation Society French”—a variety closely resembling modern Standard French—came to have a strong presence in Louisiana. The name reflects the fact that the presence of this language variety was made possible in large part by the wealth of the plantation economy based on sugar and cotton, which attracted continued immigration from France and other former French territories and also made it possible for wealthy Louisianans to educate their children in French and to maintain their ties with France through travel. The most significant francophone population to come to Louisiana’s shores in the nineteenth century were some 10,000 inhabitants of the former colony of Saint-Domingue—present-day Haiti—who, having left to escape the Haitian Revolution, made their way to Louisiana in 1809 and 1810 after several years spent in Cuba (though smaller numbers had already settled in Louisiana in the two previous decades). Approximately one third of this population consisted of whites, one third slaves, and one third free people of color. Their arrival significantly augmented both the French- and the Creole-speaking populations of Louisiana. Moreover, many of these former inhabitants of Saint-Domingue were highly educated and made major contributions to the cultural, economic, and political life of Louisiana, and of New Orleans, in particular. For example, Louisiana’s first French-language newspaper, Le Moniteur de la Louisiane, was founded by refugees from Saint-Domingue, as was the Collège d’Orléans. Among the notable literary achievements of the early nineteenth century were numerous French-language novels, including Mercier’s L’habitation Saint-Ybars, and Armand Lanusse’s famous collection of poems by Free People of Color, Les Cenelles, published in 1845. The economic devastation wrought by the Civil War would bring these cultural developments to an abrupt halt, sending French language and culture in Louisiana into rapid decline.

After the Civil War, immigration to Louisiana from France dwindled, and Louisiana francophones were unable to maintain the kind of regular contact with that country that had been possible in the ante-bellum period. The status of the French language declined as political and economic power came increasingly to be concentrated in the hands of Louisiana’s Anglophone population. French speakers either assimilated linguistically to “American” society or retreated into their close-knit circle of friends and family to preserve what was left of their culture. In 1916 education was made compulsory by the Louisiana constitution, and when in 1921 English was declared to be the only language of instruction in public schools, French-language education became limited to a few private schools. For the next two or three generations, children who grew up in exclusively French-speaking homes suffered difficulty in learning, as well as humiliation, when they arrived at school only to find that they could not speak or understand the language of instruction and that their native language was prohibited on the school grounds. To make matters worse, the particular variety of French they spoke was often denigrated as corrupt or “broken” French, or worse, as something less than a “real” language. Louisiana Creole was even more strongly stigmatized than Louisiana (Cajun) French. Internalizing such negative attitudes towards their language, and determined that their own children should not suffer as they had in school, many chose to teach them only English, such that French and Creole ceased to be transmitted in the home. Not surprisingly, the French and Creole languages tended to best be preserved in rural and poorer areas that featured tight-knit francophone communities and, often, limited access to education. For this reason, French and Creole have virtually disappeared as native languages among locally born New Orleanians, but often continue to be spoken among the elderly in rural areas and smaller towns and cities in south Louisiana.

By the 1960s, immigrant and minority groups in the United States were challenging the assimilationist ideology that had pressured them to give up the heritage languages and cultures that set them apart from English-speaking mainstream American society. Francophone Louisiana was not untouched by the wave of ethnic consciousness raising that swept the country, as many in Louisiana began to openly express pride in their French cultural and linguistic heritage and to work to preserve them. These efforts led in 1968 to the founding by the Louisiana legislature of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), whose mission it was “to do any and all things necessary to accomplish the development, utilization and preservation of the French language as found in the state of Louisiana for the cultural, economic and tourist benefit of the state.” Through a series of formal agreements, CODOFIL began bringing in teachers from France, Belgium, and Quebec to staff French classes in Louisiana’s schools. While this led to controversy over CODOFIL’s focus on Standard French rather than local varieties, the “Foreign Language Associate” program remains a mainstay of language preservation efforts today, especially in staffing the growing number of French immersion programs, which some see as the key to the preservation of the language in Louisiana. Also beginning in the 1960s and continuing until today, “Cajun” language and identity, once stigmatized and associated with poverty and ignorance, underwent a remarkable rehabilitation to become objects of pride. Politicians such as Edwin Edwards found it advantageous to identify themselves as Cajun, and the Cajun label was increasingly used to market food and music throughout the U.S. and abroad. Cajun music became immensely popular and remains today one of the principle domains for the use of French. While most efforts at promoting and preserving French language and culture beyond the domain of education were focused on the Cajun community, Creoles of color also began working for recognition. Early efforts, such as the founding of the “UnCajuns Committee,” took the form of a reaction against the intense focus on Cajun people and culture in southwest Louisiana, but subsequent Creole organizations chose not define themselves in opposition to Cajuns. These include C.R.E.O.L.E., Inc., the Louisiana Creole Heritage Center at Northwestern State University, and the Louisiana Creole Research Association (or LA Creole). Zydeco music, associated with the Creole of color community of southwest Louisiana, grew in popularity, though it is more often sung in English than is Cajun music, which tends to be sung in French.The French revival movement also gave rise to a new generation of writers, many of whom published their work in the landmark collection Cris sur le bayou, which appeared in 1980. The following year, Creole poet Sybil Kein published a collection of poetry in Louisiana Creole titled Gumbo People. In subsequent decades numerous collections of poetry and other writings in French and Creole have been published, often by younger writers. Some of these, such as Kirby Jambon’s L’Ecole gombo, have been published by Louisiana’s unique francophone press, Editions Tintamarre, which was founded by Dana Kress at Centenary College and focuses on publishing contemporary Louisiana authors as well as nineteenth-century Louisiana titles that are out of print.

Louisiana French—more commonly known as “Cajun” French—is the most widely spoken variety of French in the state today. As we saw in Chapter One, this language likely had its origins the in contact among speakers of different varieties of French who arrived in Louisiana from different French-speaking regions, including Quebec, Acadia, and various provinces of France. Since the Louisiana Purchase, and especially in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has been heavily influenced by English in its pronunciation, its grammar, and, especially, its lexicon. While many who speak the language consider themselves Cajuns, it is also spoken by others—including Creoles of color, white Creoles, and American Indians—who do not identify themselves as Cajuns. The close association of the term “Cajun” with one particular ethnic group makes its use problematic in reference to a language variety spoken by several different ethnic groups. The term “Louisiana French” is preferred here because it is ethnically neutral and therefore better suited to refer to a language that is not exclusive to Cajuns.

A few of the hallmark features that distinguish Louisiana French from Standard French include:

– An “r” that is apical rather than dorsal—i.e., that is articulated with the tip of the tongue rather than the back of the tongue—and is pronounced something like the “d” in the word cider.

– First and second person plural pronouns that take the forms nous-autres ‘we/us’ and vous-autres ‘you’ (pl.) as opposed to Standard French nous and vous.

– A third person plural subject pronoun (‘they’) that frequently takes the forms ça, eux-autres, or eusse as opposed to Standard French ils or ells.

– Progressive aspect expressed by être (‘to be’) + après (lit., ‘after’) + the infinitive, a structure unknown in Standard French but that corresponds to the English progressive to be V+ing: Jesuis après manger ‘I am eating’ (cf. Standard French Je mange or Je suis en train de manger).

– Verb paradigms that, thanks in part to the pronouns nous-autres, vous-autres, and eux-autres/eusse/ça, which tend to take verbs conjugated in the third person singular, are simplified compared to those of Standard French, as illustrated by the conjugation of boire ‘to drink’; note that regardless of spelling—bois or boit—the verb in Louisiana French is pronounced the same in all persons (/bwɑ/), whereas there are three different oral realizations of the verb in Standard French:

Je bois nous buvons je bois nous-autres boit

Tu bois vous buvez tu bois vous-autres boit

Il/elle/on boit ils/elles boivent il/elle/on boit eux-autres/eusse/ça boit

– A great number of words that are either not found in Standard French or have a different form or meaning in that variety; some of these, such as asteur ‘now’ (cf. maintenant), amarrer ‘to tie’ (cf. lier), and tirer ‘to milk (a cow)’, are found in other dialects of French, while others, such as boscoyo ‘cypress knee’ and zydeco ‘Zydeco music’, are particular to Louisiana.