How to Speak Louisianais

This is a beginner’s primer in louisianais, the native French of the Grand Duchy of Louisiane. It assumes you read a little French already, because almost everyone who comes to louisianais does, and because the fastest way to learn it is to be told exactly where it departs from the French you were taught.

There is no warning to give you before the first word, which distinguishes this primer from the one for Wisconsindeutsch. Louisianais was never suppressed, never hidden, and never made dangerous to admit to. Nobody in Acadiana will size you up before deciding whether you are safe to speak in front of. You will be helped enthusiastically, corrected cheerfully, fed immediately, and told at length that your accent is charming, which is not a compliment but is not an insult either.

A note on the spelling

Louisianais has no agreed spelling. This is not a gap waiting to be filled by somebody tidy; it is the language’s own central argument, and it has defeated the Language Office, the Ministry and four generations of academics.

This primer writes louisianais in conservative French orthography: après, asteur, cher, spelled as French words even where the sound has travelled a long way from the spelling. That choice is made for legibility and for no other reason, and it is not a standard and should not be quoted as one. A speaker from Vermilion parish may write the same sentence four different ways in one letter and be wrong none of the times.

You should know what the argument is about, because you will hear it. Codification has foundered, repeatedly, on five questions that nobody has been willing to settle: whether the standard should be raised from the cadien of Acadiana or the older French of the river and the city; whether an English word taken into the language keeps its English spelling or is refrenchified on the page; whether to write the silent letters that no speaker pronounces; whether any standard at all would flatten the parishes into one another; and, underneath all four, whether a norm handed down from La Nouvelle-Orléans would be accepted anywhere that mattered. The honest answer to the last one has always been no, and everybody involved knows it.

So the language remains spoken, and the page remains contested, and the two facts hold each other up. You can learn to speak louisianais from this primer. You cannot learn to spell it, because nobody can.

The one rule that matters

If you learn one thing about louisianais, learn après.

To be in the middle of doing something, louisianais uses être après plus the infinitive. Not en train de, which is what you were taught and which will be understood and will mark you instantly as somebody who learned French in a classroom.

Je suis après manger. I am eating, right now.
Il est après travailler dans le jardin. He is out working in the garden.
Quoi tu es après faire? What are you doing?
On est après attendre. We are waiting.

This is the spine of the language. English has a continuous tense and standard French does not, and louisianais, sitting where it sits, built one and uses it constantly. Once you have après in your mouth you will find that a third of what you want to say in a day runs through it, and once you have heard it you will hear it in every conversation on the radio.

Get this one thing right and a great deal is forgiven. Get it wrong and everything else you say will be correct and none of it will sound like louisianais.

The grammar you were told you would lose

Here is the surprise, and it is the reason louisianais confuses people who arrive expecting a battered patois.

The grammar is conservative. In several places it is more conservative than the French of France. If you learned French properly, most of what you learned is not merely usable here but required, and the corners you were hoping to cut are the corners louisianais keeps.

Gender is solid. Every noun has one and speakers do not fumble it. There is no drift toward a default masculine and no polite tolerance of getting it wrong. Whatever you may have heard about minority languages simplifying under pressure, this one did not.

The subjunctive is alive. It follows the triggers you learned, in ordinary speech, from ordinary people, without any sense of formality. Il faut que tu viennes. Je veux qu’il fasse ça asteur. A speaker who has not been to school past fourteen will use it correctly all day.

Ne is often kept. This is the one that startles visitors most, because in Quebec and in casual France the ne has largely gone. In louisianais it survives in a good deal of ordinary speech. Je ne sais pas. Il ne vient pas. You will also hear it dropped, and dropping it is unremarkable, but keeping it is not a formality here and does not sound stiff.

Être and avoir split as you were taught. Je suis allé, j’ai mangé. The auxiliaries did not collapse into one.

The one-word future survives. J’irai demain is alive alongside je vas aller demain, and both are ordinary. The simple future has not been driven out into writing the way it has elsewhere.

Tu and vous is a live distinction and is observed carefully. Vous to an older person, to a priest, to a stranger, and to your godparents if the relationship is formal, which it often is. This is not decorative. Using tu to an elderly woman you have just met is a real mistake and will be noticed by everyone in the room, kindly, and mentioned later.

The reason for all of this is the whole history of the Grand Duchy in one sentence: louisianais was never driven out of school, church and public life, so the machinery that keeps a grammar intact was never dismantled. What it lost, it lost at home rather than in public, and that is a different kind of loss with different symptoms.

The pronouns

Three departures, all of them easy.

On does the work of we. As the subject of the verb, it is on, with a singular verb. On va manger. On est après attendre.

Nous-autres is the emphatic. When you need to stress it, or set your side against another, you reach for nous-autres. Nous-autres, on fait pas ça comme ça. Us, we don’t do it that way.

Vous-autres is the everyday plural you. Vous exists and is used, particularly in its polite singular sense, but for addressing a group the ordinary word is vous-autres. Vous-autres, vous venez?

The sound

The grammar stayed. The sound went over to America, and this is the pair of facts that makes louisianais what it is.

The r has softened toward the English r. Not the rolled front r of the old countryside, and not the scraped uvular r of Paris. Something in between and much closer to the r in river. This single consonant does more than anything else to place a speaker, and it is the reason a Parisian hears louisianais as archaic and thoroughly anglicised in the same breath.

If you are coming from standard French, this is the hardest thing on the page, because you must unlearn a sound you worked to acquire.

Oi is mwe, not mwa. Moi is mwe. Toi is twe. Droit, froid, avoir all follow. This is the older North American vowel, preserved here after France moved on, and it is the single most reliable marker of the language after the r.

There is no affrication. If you know Quebec French you will be waiting for tu to come out as tsu and dire as dzire. It does not happen. Louisianais and Quebec are cousins that made different choices, and this is one of the cleanest lines between them.

The nasal vowels are roughly as in France. No surprises. Do not exaggerate them; visitors trying to sound authentic often do, and it is the tell of somebody performing.

The accent that results is strong, distinctive and instantly placeable, and it survives into English. A Louisianais who has not spoken French since childhood, and there are a great many, still speaks English in a way that anybody in the Realm can identify within a sentence.

Your first words

Allô, or mais allô, on arriving. The mais is not a contradiction, it is a running-start, and it opens a great many sentences that have nothing to argue with.
Ouais for yes in ordinary talk. Oui is not wrong, merely more careful than most moments require.
Non, plainly.
Asteur for now. It is a badge word, worn cheerfully. Asteur is à cette heure worn down by three hundred years, it is older French rather than broken French, and using it correctly is the fastest way to signal that you know what you are dealing with.
Cher, said to nearly anybody. See below, because it deserves its own paragraph.
À tantôt on leaving.

À tantôt wants care. It means see you shortly, and it is the ordinary farewell, and it is not a goodbye. You say it to somebody you expect to see again this week, this evening, or in ten minutes.

For a departure that is final, the word is adieu. It means what it says. It is used at a wake, at an emigration, at the end of a long illness, and almost nowhere else. Do not use adieu casually. A visitor who says it breezily on leaving a kitchen will produce a silence, and then a very gentle correction, and the story will outlive the visit.

Cher

Cher is the most useful word in the language and the one outsiders get wrong most often.

It is a term of address, applied to almost anyone: a child, a friend, a stranger at a counter, a man of sixty by a woman of thirty, a customer, a nurse’s patient. It is not romantic, not condescending, and not gendered in practice the way the grammar would suggest. It survives fully into English, and a Louisianais speaking English to a stranger from up the river will still say cher without noticing.

What outsiders do is over-use it, self-consciously, in the belief that it is a piece of local colour. It is not colour; it is punctuation. Say it when it is natural and leave it alone when it is not. The surest sign you are using it right is that nobody remarks on it.

People, and what you call them

Kinship carries further here than in France, and the words are worth learning before the vocabulary of anything else, because you will need them within an hour of arriving.

Nonc for uncle. Not oncle, though oncle is understood.
Tante for aunt, and, importantly, tante for any older woman with whom you have any standing at all. A friend of your mother’s is tante. This is not childish; adults use it.
Pépère and mémère for grandfather and grandmother, and these are the ordinary words, not affectations.
‘Tit and ‘tite before a name, the worn-down petit. ‘Tit Jean. It marks affection and, often, permanence: a man of fifty may still be ‘Tit Pierre to everyone who has known him since he was small.
Cousin covers a much wider field than in France. Second cousins, third cousins, the children of godparents, and people whose exact relation nobody can reconstruct are all cousin, and asking for the precise degree is slightly rude.

Parrain and marraine, godfather and godmother, are the ones a visitor underestimates. In Louisiane these are not ceremonial. A godparent is a second parent with real obligations: money in a bad year, a place to live, a word put in, an opinion about a marriage that will actually be listened to. The relationship is named, public and lifelong, and it is one of the last things in many families still conducted in French after the ordinary conversation has gone over to English.

The water

Louisianais has a working vocabulary for water that no other French possesses, because no other French had this water to describe. These are not poetic words. They are the words a man uses to tell another man where to put a boat.

La prairie tremblante, the trembling prairie: floating marsh, thick enough to walk on and not thick enough to trust.
La chénière, an oak ridge standing above the marsh, dry land in a wet country and therefore where people live.
La traînasse, a narrow channel cut through marsh by hand or by long use, a trapper’s road.
La batture, the land between the levee and the river, which belongs to the river whenever the river wants it.

These four have passed out of the language and into the state. The Grand Duchy’s own surveys, maps and coastal legislation use them, untranslated, because there are no other words that mean the same thing and the Ministry gave up trying to invent any. It is the one clear case of the language supplying the administration rather than the other way round.

For the loss of the coast itself, the language does something a visitor should notice. It does not use a noun. The Language Office has coined a proper technical term for coastal land loss, and it appears in documents, and nobody on the coast says it.

What they say is a verb, and the verb has a subject. L’eau prend. The water is taking. L’eau a pris la maison de mon nonc. The water took my uncle’s house. The phrasing gives the water agency and gives the land no defence, and it is the ordinary way to describe the process among people it is happening to.

The weather

There are two registers and you must know which room you are in.

On the water, the language is precise and technical. Wind, tide, direction, timing, the state of the pass, how long you have. This is a vocabulary built by people whose lives depend on it being unambiguous, and it is used flatly and without decoration.

In the house, it turns superstitious. A storm that is coming is not named plainly, is referred to obliquely, and is not discussed at length in front of children or the very old. Speaking about it too directly is felt, not quite seriously and not quite as a joke, to be inviting it. A visitor who wants to talk through the forecast in detail at the kitchen table will find the subject changed twice and then changed again.

Neither register is the truer one. The same man does both, on the same day, and moves between them at the door.

Borrowing

Louisianais borrows enormously and digests everything it borrows, which is the opposite of what people expect from a language under pressure.

English words come in wholesale and become French. They take a gender, they take French endings, and if they are verbs they are conjugated as ordinary French verbs of the first group without apology. A borrowed verb is not a foreign body sitting in the sentence; it is a louisianais verb that happens to have arrived recently. This is a sign of health rather than decay: a language that could not do this would simply switch to English at the difficult word.

Spanish left a real deposit, from the decades of Spanish administration in the later eighteenth century, mostly in words for land, stock and trade, and most speakers have no idea which words those are.

Numbers are mixed, and this is the one place the language gives way. Counting is French. But money, dates, telephone numbers and anything read off a form tend to come out in English even in an otherwise entirely French conversation, because the paperwork of life is in English and the numbers arrived attached to it.

As for gaps, there are none in principle. The Language Office coins words for whatever the language lacks, publishes them, and is largely ignored. The coinages are correct, well-formed and unused, and the Office is aware of this and continues, on the reasonable ground that the alternative is to stop.

Names, and being teased

Teasing is the heart of louisianais sociability and it is affectionate rather than cruel. If you are being teased you are being included, and the moment to worry is when it stops.

Its chief instrument is the nickname, and the nicknames are for life. They attach in childhood, they are rarely flattering, they describe an incident or a defect or an unfortunate resemblance, and they follow a man into middle age, into office, and onto his headstone. Whole parishes contain adults whose legal names are not in daily use by anybody.

You do not choose your own. You do not object to the one you are given. Objecting guarantees it sticks.

Swearing, by contrast, is mild. Louisianais never developed the ecclesiastical profanity of Quebec, and what strong language it has now is mostly borrowed from English, used in English, and not felt to belong to the French at all. A visitor braced for something ferocious will be disappointed, and an older speaker asked directly about swearing in French will usually say there is not much to tell.

At the table, and at the dance

The food words are the ones that survive longest, in the mouths of people who have lost everything else, and they are the ones you will need first.

Most of them have gone into American English intact and you may know them already: gumbo, boudin, étouffée, couche-couche. Knowing them is not the same as knowing what to do with them in a French sentence, and the sentence is where visitors come apart. These are ordinary nouns with ordinary genders, not exotic items to be produced with emphasis. Say them the way you would say bread.

Two habits at the table are worth copying.

The first is that you are fed before you are asked. Refusing outright is not a neutral act, and the correct move if you genuinely cannot eat is not non merci but a promise to eat later, which everyone understands to be a formality and which everyone accepts.

The second is that cooking is discussed in serious technical detail by everybody present, at length, with disagreement, in a register closer to the boat than to the kitchen table anywhere else. A visitor who treats this as small talk and offers a compliment instead of an opinion will find the conversation politely routed around them.

Then there is the fais do-do, the country dance, which is the language’s largest public gathering and the one place where a whole room is speaking louisianais at once. The name means, roughly, go to sleep: what you said to the small children so the adults could dance. Nobody thinks of the etymology any more, and a visitor who explains it at the dance will be the only person present who has raised the subject.

Music is where you should do your listening. It is the one register still generating new louisianais, the songs are repetitive by design, and a learner who wants an hour of the language at natural speed with the words repeated will get more from a Saturday radio programme than from any recording made for teaching.

Which language for which room

Nobody in the Grand Duchy speaks only one language, and the switching is not random. It runs by topic, and once you know the rule you can predict which language a sentence will arrive in before it does.

French is the house. Family, food, weather, the dead, the church, teasing, the water, anything to do with land that has been in the family. These are the domains that were never conducted in English and where an English word still feels like an intrusion.

English is money and machines. Work, banking, insurance, government paperwork, engines, medicine, anything with a form attached. This is not a judgement about English; it is simply where those things were learned.

The result is a conversation that changes language at the subject rather than at the sentence, sometimes several times in a minute, with nobody noticing they have done it. A visitor asking a bilingual speaker why they switched will usually be met with genuine puzzlement, because from the inside it does not feel like switching at all.

There is one consequence worth knowing before you try to use French where it does not belong. If you conduct your banking in louisianais you will be understood, and answered, and the answer will be slower and more careful than it needs to be, because the person answering is translating a vocabulary they learned in English. It is a courtesy you are imposing. Most learners do it once.

The other French

You will occasionally meet a French in the Grand Duchy that is not cadien and is not what this primer teaches: older, more formal, closer to the French of France in vocabulary though not in accent, and spoken with an evident sense of its own correctness.

This is the French of the river and the city, the old colonial and city variety, and as a household language it is effectively finished. Where it survives is in institutions: the courts, the notaries and the liturgy. The Code is drafted in a formal legal French descended from it, the notarial profession maintains it as a working instrument, and a good deal of what is said from the altar belongs to it.

So the Grand Duchy has one French that lives in the mouth and another that lives in the professions, and the second is the one that gets written. If you find yourself reading a Louisiane statute and understanding it perfectly on the strength of school French, that is why, and it tells you nothing about whether you could follow a conversation in Vermilion parish.

Speakers of cadien are, on the whole, not deferential about this. Asked what they find hardest about standard French, most will say the vocabulary, that the everyday words are simply different ones, and will decline the invitation to describe their own French as the deviation.

What gives you away

Say comment ça plume? and you will find out where you stand.

It means, literally, how is it plucking, and it means how are you, and it is the greeting that most reliably marks a real speaker. Mais, comment ça plume?

The trap is not the question. Outsiders learn the question quickly, produce it triumphantly, and then get the answer wrong, because the expected reply is not an enthusiastic one. Louisianais answers this question modestly. Things are going along. Things are going gently. Things could be worse. A visitor who has practised the phrase will deliver it and then respond to it in kind with something bright and emphatic, and the mismatch is instant and unmistakable.

The other thing that places you is what you call people who are not from here. Les Anglais is the ordinary term for English speakers. It is not hostile, and it is never quite neutral either, and it is used without heat by people who have English-speaking relatives. For the rest of the Realm there is ceux d’en haut, those from up above, meaning upriver and by extension anywhere north of the Grand Duchy, which is everywhere.

Neither term is an insult. Both quietly assume a centre, and the centre is here.

The part you cannot learn from a page

The commonest kind of louisianais speaker in the Grand Duchy today does not speak louisianais.

They understand it completely and answer in English. This is the ordinary shape of the language’s decline: comprehension outlives production by a generation, and a household can contain a grandmother speaking French, a mother who answers her in English, and a child who follows perhaps half of it. Every survey that tries to count speakers runs aground on this, because the honest answer to whether such a person speaks louisianais is both.

What such families keep, when they keep anything, is a short list: the food words, the kinship words, a handful of curses, the accent, and the prayers.

Which is why the language’s own frontier now runs through the wake. The prayers at a wake are still said in louisianais in a great many parishes. The talk around them increasingly is not, and each time a wake goes over entirely to English somebody present notices and remarks on it, and the remark is itself now a small tradition.

The one domain where the language is still being made rather than merely kept is music. New songs are written in louisianais every year, which is more than can be said for new prose, and singers who cannot hold a conversation in the language can sing it perfectly, having learned it the way anyone learns a song.

The rosary

A primer should end with something a learner will actually hear, so here is the thing most often said aloud in louisianais in the Grand Duchy in any given week.

The religious register is not the ordinary language. It is markedly older French, learned by heart in childhood and often not fully parsed by the people saying it, and it uses vous to God where the same speaker uses tu to almost everyone else alive. The responses come back overlapping, faster than the leader, in a room with too many people in it.

Le chapelet

Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce, le Seigneur est avec vous.

Vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes, et Jésus, le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni.

Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous, pauvres pécheurs,

asteur et à l’heure de notre mort. Ainsi soit-il.

As said at a wake, Vermilion parish. The leader's line first, the room's response in italics.

Note the last line, because it is the whole language in four words. The prayer is old and formal and carries vous to the Mother of God, and sitting in the middle of it, unremarked, doing ordinary work, is asteur.

Nobody put it there to make a point. It is simply the word for now.

Trivia

In-Universe The one construction to learn first is etre apres plus the infinitive, for being in the middle of doing something. Standard French has no continuous tense and English does, and louisianais, sitting where it sits, built one.
In-Universe Louisianais grammar is conservative and in places more conservative than the French of France. Gender is solid, the subjunctive is alive in ordinary speech, the auxiliaries have not collapsed, the one-word future survives, and ne is often kept. The language was never driven out of school and church, so the machinery that keeps a grammar intact was never dismantled.
In-Universe A tantot means see you shortly and is the ordinary farewell. Adieu means what it says and is kept for wakes, emigrations and the end of long illnesses. A visitor who says adieu on leaving a kitchen will produce a silence.
In-Universe The greeting comment ca plume, how is it plucking, is the reliable test of a real speaker. Outsiders learn the question easily and then answer it too brightly. The expected reply is modest.
In-Universe For the loss of the coast the language uses a verb rather than a noun, and gives the verb a subject. L eau prend, the water is taking. The Language Office coined a proper technical term for coastal land loss and nobody on the coast says it.
In-Universe Four louisianais words for water and ground, prairie tremblante, cheniere, trainasse and batture, have passed into the Grand Duchy's official surveys and coastal legislation untranslated, because no other words mean the same thing. It is the one clear case of the language supplying the administration rather than the reverse.
In-Universe Nicknames attach in childhood, are rarely flattering, and last for life. Whole parishes contain adults whose legal names nobody uses. Objecting to the one you are given guarantees it sticks.
In-Universe The commonest louisianais speaker today understands the language completely and answers in English. Comprehension outlives production by about a generation, which is why every attempt to count speakers runs aground.
In-Universe New songs are written in louisianais every year and new prose very largely is not. Singers who cannot hold a conversation in the language can sing it perfectly, having learned it the way anyone learns a song.
Design Louisianais and Wisconsindeutsch independently made the same substitution: both gave up their inherited r for something close to the American one. The Wisconsin primer opens on that r as its one rule. This primer cannot, so it opens on apres instead, and the shared consonant is left as a coincidence for the reader to notice.
Design This primer spells louisianais in conservative French orthography purely so that it can be read. Canon holds that the language has no agreed standard and that the question is deliberately unresolved, so the page states its own convention and disclaims it rather than quietly inventing a norm.