Louisianais

Le louisianais, or le français louisianais, is the native French of the United Kingdom of America’s Grand Duchy of Louisiane: a variety of North American French descended from the French of the colonial period and of the Acadian resettlement, spoken chiefly in Acadiana and the southern and bayou parishes. Its most vital form is the heartland speech of Acadiana, français cadien, or Cajun French, and the two names are often used as if they meant the same thing. It is one of the two officially protected minority tongues of the Realm, alongside Wisconsindeutsch, and the only one that is co-official rather than merely permitted: French shares official standing with English throughout the Grand Duchy, guaranteed under the Acts of Admission.

By the ordinary measures of official standing, louisianais is the best-protected French in the Union. It is a constitutional language, written into the Acts of Admission as a protected domain. The courts will hear a resident in it, the schools will teach in it, the Grand-Duc is its sworn patron, and a ministry and a household office exist to keep it. By the measures that decide whether a language lives, it is among the most endangered tongues in the Realm. It is transmitted at home in fewer families with each generation, its fluent speakers are older than the population around them, and its heartland is physically disappearing beneath the Gulf.

The distance between those two facts is the central subject of any account of the language, and it turns on a distinction the Acts do not draw. The Acts guarantee French. It does not say which French, and in practice the French that the state can supply, examine, and staff is the international standard of France and the wider Francophonie rather than the louisianais of the parishes. A resident’s right to be served in French is met by a civil servant who learned the language in a classroom; a child’s immersion schooling is conducted in the French of Paris or Québec; the civil Code is drafted in a formal, international legal French. The guarantee is honoured, and the tongue it was assumed to protect is not the tongue being carried forward. A language with every institutional advantage is nonetheless in decline, and the reasons are set out below.

Classification and name

Louisianais is a variety of North American French, a branch of the language that also includes the French of Canada and of Acadia. It grew from two roots that met in the Grand Duchy: the French of the early colony, planted along the river and at La Nouvelle-Orléans, and the French of the Acadians expelled from their Maritime homeland in the eighteenth century and resettled in the southern prairies and bayous. Over two centuries in the Gulf these merged and were reshaped by Spanish administration, by Indigenous and African neighbours, and above all by a long and continuous contact with English, into a French that a visitor from France can follow with effort and will find at once archaic and full of loanwords.

The endonym is le louisianais. The name is partly the work of the institutions that protect the language, which needed a single heading under which to gather several local Frenches, and it is not the word most speakers reach for first. A speaker is more likely to say simply that they speak français, or to name the local way of speaking, and in Acadiana that is cadien. The cover term and the heartland term are therefore not quite equivalent: louisianais is the whole, and cadien is its living core. The article uses louisianais for the variety as a whole and cadien for the Acadiana form in particular.

Louisianais must be distinguished from Louisiana Creole, whose own name for itself is Kouri-Vini. Creole is not a variety of louisianais but a separate language: a French-lexified creole with its own grammar, its own history, and its own community, historically associated with the Creoles of colour of the river parishes and the city. The two share a great deal of vocabulary, are constantly confused by outsiders, and are firmly told apart by their speakers, and whether Kouri-Vini is best understood as a kind of French or as a language in its own right is disputed in terms that reach into questions of race, class, and who was once permitted to be called French. Kouri-Vini is more endangered still, and it is treated separately, as its own tongue.

Distribution and speakers

Louisianais is a southern language within the Grand Duchy, and its geography is uneven. Its heartland is Acadiana, the belt of southern and south-western parishes settled by the Acadians, where cadien is still transmitted in some families and heard in the dance hall, the church, and the boat landing. The bayou and coastal parishes carry it too, thinned by out-migration and by the loss of the land itself. Along the river and in the older quarters of La Nouvelle-Orléans an urban and colonial French once flourished; it survives now mostly in the memory of the old and in the institutions, the capital having become in daily life an English-speaking city with a French frame. In the north the language is effectively absent. North Louisiane is Protestant and Anglo-Scots in character, and it does not speak French; the heir to the Grand Duchy is styled Prince de Natchitoches for the oldest French settlement in the territory, a title that binds the dynasty to a northern region that no longer speaks the tongue the title honours.

Numbers are soft, because the surveys must decide what counts as a speaker, and the answers range from those who use louisianais daily to those who keep only a few phrases and the songs. By the Grand Duchy’s own reckoning fewer than half a million residents, out of a population of some four and a half million, speak it with fluency, and most of them are past middle age. Home transmission, the ordinary passing of a language from parent to child, was largely interrupted around the middle of the twentieth century, and it has not recovered. The young who have French have for the most part the French of the classroom. Between the fluent old and the school-taught young sits a wide band of semi-speakers, who understand more than they will say and say more than they will write.

History

French settlement in Louisiane dates from the founding of the colony in the late seventeenth century and the establishment of La Nouvelle-Orléans in 1718. The Spanish administration of the later eighteenth century governed in Spanish and left durable marks on law and landholding, but did not displace French from daily life, and the French surface closed over the Spanish one. The event that made the southern parishes French in the way they are still was the Grand Dérangement, the expulsion of the Acadians from their Maritime homeland beginning in 1755, and their slow resettlement across the prairies and bayous of southern Louisiane, where they built the culture that became Cajun. For much of the nineteenth century French was an ordinary public language of the territory, spoken in the market and the courthouse as well as the home.

The decisive point of this history is one that did not happen. No act ever wrote English-only public schooling into the constitution of Louisiane. Louisiane entered the Union as a French-language, civil-law grand duchy with French co-official under the Acts from the start; there was no English-only schooling, no punishment of French-speaking children, and no policy of eradication. The language was protected rather than proscribed.

And it declined anyway. This is the fact that any honest account has to hold. Protection prevented suppression; it did not prevent attrition. English was the language of the wider Union, of the market and the army and the screen and the professions, and the young drifted toward it as the young drift toward the larger language everywhere. When the state at last moved in earnest to shore French up, the French it could supply in quantity was the international standard, teachable and staffable, and not the louisianais of the parishes. So the language followed a gentler version of the curve that minority languages follow everywhere, worn down by prestige and economics rather than by the strap, and pressed from a second direction by the very revival meant to save it. The protection of the Acts is real, and it was not enough, and part of what it was not enough against was the imported French that its own institutions carried in.

Sound, grammar, and vocabulary

Louisianais keeps a good deal of French that Metropolitan French has shed. It preserves older forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with the maritime and rural vocabulary the Acadians brought, and it has taken in words from Spanish, from Indigenous and African neighbours, and above all from English. The compound pronouns nous-autres, vous-autres, and eux-autres do the work of we, you, and they; asteur, from a cette heure, means now; espérer can mean to wait as well as to hope; a car is un char. English borrowings are constant and are made French in the mouth, and code-switching between the two languages within a single sentence is ordinary and passes without remark.

Much of the most characteristic vocabulary belongs to the table, the water, and the feast. Gumbo, boudin, étouffée, and couche-couche name the food; fais do-do is a country dance; lagniappe, taken through the French of the city from the Spanish, is a little something given over and above what was owed; cher and chère, softened in the saying to something near sha, are terms of affection laid on friend and stranger alike. The sound of the language is its own, in the quality of the vowels and the r and the run of the sentence, and it places a speaker to the parish more finely than any word does.

The relationship with the French of France is one of strained mutual recognition. A Parisian follows louisianais as archaic, rustic, and heavily anglicised; a louisianais speaker finds the French of the classroom pinched and foreign, correct in a way that belongs to somewhere else. Neither judgement is neutral, and the gap between them is the daily texture of the language question described below.

Varieties

Within louisianais the principal division is between the cadien of Acadiana and the older colonial French of the river and the city. Cadien is the vital form, the one still transmitted in some homes and the one outsiders mean when they say Cajun French. The colonial or plantation French of the Mississippi corridor and of old La Nouvelle-Orléans, once the more prestigious, is now the more nearly gone, surviving in the speech of the old and in family memory. Beyond that broad split the language varies from parish to parish in vocabulary and sound, in the ordinary way of a tongue carried by communities rather than by a capital.

The boundary that matters most, and that is most often mistaken, is the one with Louisiana Creole, or Kouri-Vini. Creole is a distinct language and not a dialect of louisianais: it has its own grammar and its own line of descent, and it belongs historically to the Creole communities, and particularly the Creoles of colour, of the river parishes and the city. Louisianais and Kouri-Vini overlap heavily in words, which is why outsiders run them together, and they are held firmly apart by those who speak them. The classification is contested, and the contest is not only linguistic: it carries the long question of who in Louisiane was counted as French and who was not. Kouri-Vini is treated in its own article, as a language of its own deserves.

Louisianais and standard French

The Acts protect the French language without naming a variety, and in practice three different Frenches run through the Grand Duchy. There is louisianais, the native tongue. There is the formal written French of the Code, the courts, and legislation, an international-standard legal French built for precision. And there is the Metropolitan and international French of the schools and the exchange programmes.

The line between them falls between the mouth and the page. The government of the Grand Duchy speaks louisianais. Ministers address the Chambre des Députés in it, committee hearings and parish consultations are held in it, public statements and broadcast announcements are made in it, and an official who cannot follow it in a parish hall is at a disadvantage that no rule imposes and everybody understands. This is settled practice rather than a written requirement, and it is one of the few points on which the Ministry, the Language Office and the parishes have never disagreed.

What the state writes is another matter entirely. The Code, the judgments, the statutes, the regulations and the forms are drafted in formal legal French, and they are drafted that way for the reason given below: louisianais has no agreed spelling, and an instrument that a notary must file cannot be written in a language whose page is contested. The schools teach the third French for a related reason, that it can be examined, translated and taught in bulk by teachers who can be trained in quantity.

The consequence is narrower than it once was and has not gone away. A resident is spoken to by the state in louisianais and written to by it in a French that is not louisianais, so the language-access right is met in the native tongue at the counter and in an international standard on the paper that follows. And the immersion school to which a family sends its child in the hope of keeping the family’s French still teaches a French the child’s grandmother finds foreign.

This is the mechanism behind what the Grand Duchy’s own officials call language hollowing, and the spoken practice of government has altered its shape without ending it. French holds firm on the signage, the letterhead and the ceremony, and thins out of the home, and the state’s adoption of louisianais for its own speech has not reversed that, because the transmission of a language is decided in households and classrooms rather than in ministerial audiences.

The Language Office’s own position, stated in successive reports and contested by nobody in government, is that a state which speaks louisianais and schools in standard French has moved the hollowing rather than cured it. What the practice has unquestionably done is raise the language’s standing: a tongue that ministers use in public is not a kitchen language, and the parishes noticed. Whether prestige without transmission is worth having is argued in the Grand Duchy in the same terms every few years, and the argument has not been settled.

The absence of a settled written standard is the language’s own central unresolved question, and not a mere gap waiting to be filled. Attempts to fix louisianais on the page have stalled, again and again, on which form to raise up: the cadien of Acadiana, an older colonial French, or a compromise tilted toward the international norm that would be the easiest to teach and the most pleasing to France, and that many speakers regard as surrender dressed as rescue. The Language Office, the Ministry, and the academics disagree, and no body holds the authority, or is willing to spend it, to impose a norm the parishes would refuse. Louisianais therefore remains very largely an oral language with a contested and inconsistent page, and that in turn makes it hard to teach, hard to print, and easy to replace in the classroom with a French that already has a spelling.

Music and worship

There is one domain in which louisianais is not in retreat, and it is music. Cajun music and zydeco are sung in it, zydeco partly in Kouri-Vini, and the dance hall, the Saturday radio programme, and the festival carry the language to people who no longer speak it at the table. A song holds a tongue where conversation lets it go, and there are many in the Grand Duchy who cannot sustain a conversation in louisianais yet know the words of the standards by heart. What the schools cannot reliably hand down, the bands do, without a syllabus and without a grant.

Worship is the other reservoir. The Catholic parishes carry French in their processions, their hymns, and their older devotions, and the calendar of feast days, of All Saints and of Mardi Gras, is a French-inflected public time that the whole Grand Duchy keeps whether or not it speaks the language. Music and worship are cultural rather than governmental, transmitted by desire rather than by requirement, and that is very largely why they hold the language where the state’s programmes struggle to.

Education

Immersion schooling is the state’s principal instrument for the language, and it is genuine: a child may be taught across the curriculum in French from an early age. Its central irony is that the immersion is conducted in international French, because that is the French that can be standardised, examined, and staffed, with teachers drawn in part from France, Belgium, and Québec. The programmes therefore produce young people fluent in a French that is not louisianais, and sometimes unable to follow the speech of their own grandparents. The Realm’s general schooling requirement of two years of French is met in Louisiane without effort, and met in the standard.

The contradiction is understood inside the system, and there are efforts to answer it. Some programmes now bring louisianais-speaking elders into the classroom as tradition-bearers, to supply by presence what the certified teachers cannot supply by training, an arrangement that is in effect an admission that the credentialed French and the inherited French are two different things. Whether the native tongue can be carried forward by a schooling built, of necessity, around the imported one is the open practical question of the Grand Duchy’s language policy.

Media and print

On the air the language is comparatively strong. The Crown broadcaster maintains a French-language service for the Grand Duchy, and Cajun-music radio is the great popular vector, the place where the largest number of people meet louisianais most days. On the page it is weak, and for the same reason as everything else: with no agreed spelling, a French press writes very largely in the standard, because the standard is what can be set in type and read across parishes, and genuinely louisianais writing is scarce and looks different from one author to the next. The result is a language robust in song and speech and thin in print, which is a durable condition for a tongue and a precarious one, since the written record is much of what allows a language to be taught to those who did not grow up in it.

Official status and institutions

French is co-official with English throughout the Grand Duchy, secured as one of the protected domains of the Acts of Admission, which the UKA Parliament has never legislated to alter. Several bodies keep it. The Ministry of Education and Language carries the training and teaching capacity and owns the problem of language hollowing. The Language Office of the Grand Ducal Household monitors official usage and advises on the language of ceremony and public instruments. The Committee on Education and Language in the Assemblée grand-ducale provides legislative oversight and investigates cases of hollowing. Over them the Grand-Duc stands as sworn patron of the linguistic patrimony, present at the ceremonies that make the state’s commitment visible.

What official standing secures is real and worth naming: signage, the right to be served and to be heard in court in French, schooling in the language, and a protected place in public ceremony. The one instrument aimed at louisianais in particular, rather than at French as a category, is the government’s own practice of speaking it, and that practice rests on custom rather than on any statute. What official standing does not secure is the thing that decides a language’s survival, which is daily transmission in the home, and there the apparatus remains aimed at French in general. That the Assemblée maintains a standing committee to investigate language hollowing is a measure of how frankly the failure is acknowledged: the Grand Duchy has built an organ whose task is to document the distance between the French it guarantees and the French it delivers.

France and the Francophonie

Louisiane’s French draws the attention of the wider French-speaking world. France offers cultural funding, teacher exchange, and a warm claim of kinship, and the broader Francophonie, Québec and Belgium among them, supplies teachers and materials. This is the language’s outward face, and it resembles the soft claim that Germany makes on Wisconsindeutsch, but it carries a sharper edge, because what France and the Francophonie chiefly supply is standard French. The generosity of the French-speaking world is thus itself one of the forces standardising louisianais out of its own schools, offering a ready and prestigious French to a Grand Duchy that cannot readily produce its own in writing.

The reigning house complicates the picture. The House of Orléans, the grand-ducal dynasty, speaks the Metropolitan French of France, and its French is the prestige French of the polity. The Grand Duchy therefore has a government that conducts its public business in louisianais and a dynasty that does not speak it, which is an arrangement nobody designed and nobody has proposed to correct. Ministers attending on the Grand-Duc are understood to change register at the door, and the household’s own Language Office is the body charged with advising on a ceremonial French that the household itself did not grow up speaking. Yet it is the house of a line that renounced the French throne now held by the Bonapartes, so the prestige French of Louisiane is, awkwardly, the French of a country ruled by the court’s rival, and the refusal of French legitimists abroad to accept the renunciation keeps the relationship with Paris tender. The kinship France extends is genuine and is never quite without weight, and Louisiane has learned to accept the teachers while watching the claim.

Endangerment and coastal land loss

The gravest threat to louisianais in the present is not a policy but a geography. Acadiana and the bayou and coastal parishes, the heartland in which the language is still handed down, are being physically erased by subsidence, coastal erosion, and the rising Gulf. As communities lose the ground they stand on and are moved inland, they scatter into English-speaking towns, and the dense, face-to-face community that carries a home language does not survive the scattering. The Grand Duchy treats relocation support as a constitutional obligation, but relocation is itself a solvent of the speech community: a people can be resettled and their language lost in the resettling.

So the tongue whose suppression the Acts prevented, and whose decline the schools could not reverse, meets last a pressure no ministry can legislate against. The language that was protected from the classroom and worn down by the market is now being drowned. Whether louisianais can outlast the loss of the land that carries it is the open question of its future.

Trivia

See also

• Le Grand-Duché de Louisiane, the civil-law grand duchy whose native French this is
• Daily Life in Louisiane, the wider culture of the river, the parish, and the coast
• Wisconsindeutsch, the Realm’s other protected minority tongue, and the deliberate contrast
• American English, the Realm’s national variety of English, against which louisianais holds its ground
• France, the Bonapartist empire whose Metropolitan French the schools import and whose throne the grand-ducal house renounced
• Louisiana Creole (Kouri-Vini), the distinct French-lexified creole of Louisiane, a forthcoming companion article