Language Attrition in Louisiana Creole French

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LANGUAGE ATTRITION IN LOUISIANA CREOLE FRENCH 10 language reflects the level of education they have received. Speakers‟ access to higher levels of education and employment is restricted or permitted based on their competence in the H language. The H language generally has also been studied more extensively. As one example in the contemporary period, diglossia exists in the Arab world. The H language, Modern Standard Arabic, is used as a lingua franca and must be acquired through schooling; there are no native speakers. Instead, people in the Arab world grow up speaking a colloquial, dialectal variant of Arabic that is strongly associated with the geographic region in which they live. They may even speak another Afro-Asiatic language at home. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) derives from Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur„an. Because of this association with the religious text, MSA receives significant social prestige. Speaking the L language in situations that require the H language may cause the speaker to not be understood and also to be “ridiculed” by others (Romaine 1994, 47). For both of these reasons, speakers of the H and L languages associate upward class movement and the maintenance of their respect and status with their competence in and correct usage of the H language. Just as in Arabic, diglossia has contributed to the formation of LCF. It was interactions between the L languages (the African languages of the slaves) and H languages (French and later English) that resulted in the creation of LCF to mediate communication between these different L and H language speakers.
LANGUAGE ATTRITION IN LOUISIANA CREOLE FRENCH 11 This same competition between the L language LCF and the H languages French and English is also contributing to LCF‟s decline. III. Pidgins and Creoles A pidgin is a contact language that developed to facilitate communication between speakers of different languages. Pidgins are frequently used in the marketplace or in military settings, and no one is a native speaker of pidgin languages. Between these two languages, a pidgin‟s vocabulary typically comes from the superstrate, or lexifier, language, whose speakers typically are of higher social prestige; however, the grammar is thought to reflect characteristics of the substrate language, that spoken by the group with less social prestige. As a new generation is born into this pidgin-speaking environment, a population of native speakers is created, the structure and vocabulary of the pidgin grows to accommodate interactions beyond the marketplace, and the language may evolve from a pidgin to a creole. The word „creole‟ in the United States has many different meanings but one origin: the Portuguese word criar, which means „to raise, to bring up.‟ Although today‟s colloquial meaning of creole is associated with the mixing of African, French, and Spanish cultures in Louisiana, the word originally referred to people of European or African ancestry who were born in the New World. It is from this idea of language contact that the linguistic term creole arose to describe new languages that arise from pidgins after a period of intense contact among speakers of different languages. Creoles are thus characterized by the existence of native speakers whereas the pidgin from
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Language Attrition in Louisiana Creole French

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