Language Attrition in Louisiana Creole French

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LANGUAGE ATTRITION IN LOUISIANA CREOLE FRENCH 16 V. Disambiguation of terms It is important to note at this point that, although the words Cajun and Creole are sometimes used synonymously in contemporary American English, these terms represent two very different cultures and languages. Plantation Society French (a term used instead of Colonial French by Klingler and Picone) was the variant closest to the standard French spoken in France (2003 and 1998, respectively). It was spoken by colonists who had immigrated to Louisiana directly from that country. Cajun French, however, is a broad category of lects whose main linguistic source was the Acadian French spoken by immigrants who came to Louisiana from France‟s Canadian territories (although some speakers of Cajun French descend directly from France) (Klingler 2003, xxix). Speakers of Cajun French were overwhelmingly white. LCF‟s speakers were almost exclusively African slaves and their descendants (although there are and were a small number of white speakers of LCF). Thus, in this era, Plantation Society French (PSF) was situated at the top of the hierarchy and had the most prestige, followed by Cajun French (CF), and then Louisiana Creole, the most stigmatized of these languages. Although many of these free people of color could and did pass for white during the colonial period, in recent years, “many „Creoles‟ 1 have made a conscious decision to integrate themselves into [B]lack America”; however, they 1 The ethnic term Creole also has many meanings. During the colonial period, people who self-identified as Creole were solely of European descent. This usage of Creole to describe those of European ancestry was replaced by the term being used to describe Louisiana’s free people of color and later the descendants of African slaves. For the purposes of this thesis, the ethnic term Creole denotes a group of people of African descent. For more information about the terms Creole and Louisiana Creole as ethnicities, please see Melancon 2000, Hirsch and Logsdon 1992, and Hall 1992.
LANGUAGE ATTRITION IN LOUISIANA CREOLE FRENCH 17 still “retain a keen sense of their unique heritage, which they express by proudly calling themselves Creoles and vigorously rejecting the appellation „African American‟” (Klingler 2003, 16). LCF, the language spoken by this ethnically Creole population of African descent, is “not a variety of French but a separate language” (Valdman 1997, 3). Most modern linguists (such as Valdman 1997) avoid describing Louisiana‟s francophone varieties in terms of how they differ from the French lexifier because doing so does not accurately describe the francophone situation in the state and “violates the fundamental principle of structural linguistics [which states that] any speech variety forms a self-contained system” (Valdman 1997, 6). However, it is also important to note some differences between LCF and Standard French to demonstrate their disparate identities. In LCF, for example, the definite article la is postposed after the noun; in Standard French, however, the definite article comes before the noun. Also, la is not used the same way as the definite articles of English and French because “its meaning is intermediate between that of the definite article and the demonstrative adjective of these languages” (Valdman and Klingler 1997 in Valdman 1997, 117). Additionally, LCF, like French Guyana (Cayenne) Creole and other “conservative” Frenchlexifier creoles, “shows a three-way distinction between a subject set, a preposed possessive set (or possessive determiners), and a postposed set
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Language Attrition in Louisiana Creole French

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