Categories: Identity, Language

Kouri-Vini emerged in early French Louisiana (1699-1762), and matured as a stable, widely spoken, native language by the Spanish period (1762-1803). Extant records demonstrate that it was spoken in those early years by some Louisiana Creole slaves, free persons of color, and whites.¹Kouri-Vini is a relatively recent endonym. At various stages, the language was referred to in different ways. I demonstrate the taxonomic trajectory of the language throughout the article. 

During the colonial period, it was distinct enough from French for locals and outsiders to view it as such, and to refer to it as the créole language of Louisiana. By the end of the 19th century, Louisiana Creole Francophones came to refer to Louisiana French as le créole because they no longer were French citizens, they identified more staunchly as Louisiana Creoles (in opposition to Américains), and the particular version of French they spoke was unique to Louisiana. So, both Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French were known by the same name – créole – from the 1800s onwards, and were written using French orthography during that period.²Note that the name of languages in French always begin with a minuscule letter. This is the case when the language is used (1) as a noun in a sentence, or/and (2) as an adjective. Example 1 in Louisiana French: Le français est un langage qu’on parle à l’entour icite. Example 2 in French: Ils parlent la langue française. In French (including Louisiana French), most adjectives must agree in gender and quantity with the nouns they describe. In Louisiana French, the more common term for language is un langage (masculin); in French it is une langue (feminine). The name of languages in English always begins with a majuscule letter: English, French, etc. French was the institutional language, so both Kouri-Vini and French were written at that time in French orthography. There are at least 3 sources that Kouri-Vini was spoken in the 18th century in Louisiana. The first in 1748, another in 1751-1762, and again in 1792. All three are discussed in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1995). Kouri-Vini continued to be recognized as such in the 19th century as well. See, for instance, Alfred Mercier, Étude sur la langue créole (1880, New Orleans), “Athénée,” Le Meschacébé, Convent, La., 17 July 1880, p 2. For Louisiana French being referred to as Creole, see Christophe Landry, “A Creole Melting Pot: the Politics of Language, Race, and Identity in southwest Louisiana, 1918-45, doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2016, pp. 89-91.

This shared linguistic identity makes it difficult for historians and other researchers today to determine which Creole language one was referencing. Without written or audio examples of the language discussed, it is impossible to know, and unwise to assume. 

In the 20th century, as identities began to shift as a result of education in American English, Louisiana Creoles came to identify the two languages as français in French, and as French in English. This is because they now qualified their Créolité with French. This progression was no mistake: it was a concerted effort among upwardly mobile Louisiana Creoles in early Jim Crow America to distance themselves from what colonial settlers – and those they influenced – came to define as “the human stain“: linkage to Africa. Part of what enabled Jim Crow to emerge, was the deep-seated belief in the postcolonial world that Africans and their “black” descendants in the colonies, were enfeebled heathens without culture, history, and intelligence.³I am aware that Créolité originally was used to discuss a literary movement spurred by the 1989 study Éloge de la créolité (“Praise of Creoleness”). I have owned and known the study since the early 2000s, and have communicated with a couple of the authors (Patrick CHAMOISEAU and Raphaël CONFIANT) over the years. I repurposed Créolité in my work in order to speak to the quality of something/someone being Creole. The extent to which Créolité, as I see it, and créolité for CHAMOISEAU et al., coincide, will be explored in a separate article.

In Anglophone North America, “French” – like “Spanish” and “Portuguese” – had long been racially questionable due to public mixing with Indians and Africans. After Reconstruction dissolved, Louisiana Creoles, who were concerned about privileges in Anglo America, remedied this issue by stressing that French and Frenchmen were “European.” In so doing, they deliberately whitened the “Frenchness” in Francophone people and culture. But they knew that xenophobia raged in the Americas all around and within them, especially during the first half of the 20th century. Emphasizing Europeanness and indigeneity simultaneously offered the best assurance for inclusion in Teddy Roosevelt’s melting pot. Qualifying Creole with French – in English but not in French or Kouri-Vini – offered them just that. We still hear/see references to “French Creole” and “Creole French” today in scholarly, legal, and popular literature in English, but not in those two particular community languages.⁴See my doctoral thesis on the evolution of “French” qualifiers in the Louisiana Creole community. For concepts of French meaning nonwhite for Anglophone North Americans, consider Michèle LALONDE’s 1980 poem (in Québécois French) “Speak White.” There is also my cousin David VERMETTE’s A Distinct Alien Race: the Untold Story of Franco-Americans (Baraka Books, 2018), among others. Américains or Kénntek mixed too, especially during the earliest colonial decades. But by the time the American Revolution came, colonial authorities had outlawed miscegenation (“race” mixing), making it a crime. Mixing became socially objectionable as a result, but those same authorities and race-keepers maintained relationships with women of color or men of color in private. Miscegenation never stopped in Anglo America. In Creole Louisiana, it was not illegal to mix from 1684-1910. But mixed marriages were illegal in Louisiana from 1718-1868, and again from 1910 to 1954. The reconstructed state constitution of 1868 legalized mixed marriages and permitted the offspring of those marriages to inherit property brought over by their “white” parent. Despite these legal impediments, mixed unions was not only normative publicly, but also mixed marriages occurred in the state when they were expressly illegal in the state. Very different social traditions in Creole Louisiana and Anglo America with respect to mixing. For examples in Creole Louisiana, click here.

When Creolistics became a more popular sub-discipline in the field of linguistics, researchers dedicated more attention to these two particular Romance languages rooted in Louisiana. For years, linguists (mostly not from Louisiana) have viewed Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French as “French varieties” spoken in Louisiana. It makes sense: researchers are a product of their times and are often shackled by prevailing beliefs and ideologies. Rocking the boat too much can land researchers without inside informants, who are crucial as primary sources for academic work. Even today, the study of Kouri-Vini in linguistics falls under the rubric of “French.” There are two reasons for this. First, some linguists (and also some non-academics) view Kouri-Vini as an offspring/dialect of the French language. Second, that taxonomies for Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French – as discussed above – are so contentious that it’s easier to class the two as “French varieties spoken in Louisiana.”⁵There are enough present-day and past references to Kouri-Vini as a dialect of French by academics and non-academics to fill a football stadium. A couple examples or discussions include: a) Storyville New Orleans b) J.L. DILLARD’s essay on Louisiana Folklife’s website, c) Charles BIENVENU’s 1933 masters thesis at LSU, “The Negro-French Dialect of St. Martin Parish,” and d) especially Alcée FORTIER in his 1884 article, “the French Language of Louisiana and the Negro-French Dialect.” For reference to “Louisiana French varieties” in the academy, see for instance, Nathalie Dajko and Shana Walton, eds., Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019), and Jeffrey Reaser, et al., Language Varieties in the New South: Contemporary Perspectives on Change and Variation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). You can also find more on the terminology on Dajko’s employee page at Tulane University.

The big question is: are Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French dialects of French? For me, both are sister languages, and they both are also sister languages of French, Québécois, Acadian, Missouri French, Bourbonnais, Normand, Wallon, and many others.

Here’s why. All languages/human speech forms exist on an intelligibility continuum. All natural human languages are composites, with lexical and grammatical roots from all over the place. Some of these languages share more vocabulary, some less. Where shared vocabulary is extensive, mutual intelligibility increases. For example, the English “thank you” is “thank ye” in Scots, “dank u” or “dank je” in Dutch, “danke” in German, “takk” in Norwegian and “shkoyekh” in Yiddish. English, Scots, Dutch, German, Norwegian and Yiddish are all Germanic languages. Within the Germanic language family, English is closest to Scots, then Dutch, and furthest probably from Yiddish.

The intelligibility continuum leads some to assume that because languages within families are related, that Yiddish-speakers have no excuse for not understanding English, or that Mexicans can relocate to and live in Italy with no problem. Ummm, no. Languages, including the meaning of words and expressions, as well as accent, are always changing/evolving to take on new meanings and sounds. Reconnoiter in English is not the same as reconnaître (= to recognize) in French, despite reconnoiter descending from the French word reconnaître. Shar in Kouri-Vini is a car/automobile, whereas char in French is an army tank. Escritorio in Spanish is “desk” and escritório in Portuguese is “office.” Courrir in French means “to run” and kouri in Kouri-Vini means “to go.” If an Hispanophone asked an Italian for a cazo (saucepan), the Italian may offer a very different kind of cazzo. A Hebrew-speaker cannot deliver a speech on diplomacy in Hebrew to Arab-speakers or Somali-speakers. A Kouri-Vini-speaker likewise cannot do the same to a Reunion Island Creole-speaking audience. All are examples of words in related languages that share a common word ancestor. They are but a few of the many examples why it is wrong to assume that people who speak related languages can communicate efficiently and precisely. These are the limitations of relatedness (sister languages) versus full mutual intelligibility (different forms of the same language).⁶The classification of English is a great example why some folks view distinctions between and among languages as arbitrary. English has an extensive vocabulary (some say 40-50%) directly from French, because England was a colony of Frenchmen for about half a century. French was the language of prestige, government, and high culture during that period. More on that here. Both the English reconnoiter, and the modern French reconnaître, descend from a single forebear, the Old French “reconoistre.” More on that etymology here.

Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French exist on this kind of continuum. They share the overwhelming majority of their lexicon/vocabulary, and sometimes there is grammatical overlap at linguistic crossroads in Louisiana. That grammatical proximity ultimately depends on extensive historic contact between the two language groups in Louisiana. Where Kouri-Vini has predominated, its structure differs from areas where only Louisiana French has predominated, even while the two share vocabulary with the same roots and meaning. So, an Avoyelles Parish Francophone, with no prior exposure to Kouri-Vini, will not fully comprehend a Kouri-Vini-speaker who asks “Komen ç’apé kouri” (How’s it going?).

Where Kouri-Vini is spoken in Louisiana, French has always been an institutional language. Kouri-Vini-speakers pray in French, not in Kouri-Vini. Judicial and legal proceedings in parishes where Kouri-Vini is spoken were historically conducted in French, not in Kouri-Vini. This means that the Kouri-Vini-speaker will understand the Avoyelles Parish Francophone with no problem.

Due to their origins, it seems logical for people to assert that Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French are derivatives or dialects of “real French.” Logic can sometimes mislead us, though. When we think of “real French” or “French” today, we think of the modern standard France French, the one people learn in Alliances Françaises, in Bescherelle conjugation guides, in schools at all levels all over the world. This standard “French” (the term I use throughout this article for “standard French”) was not the common spoken language in France when Louisiana was being populated by Francophones in the 18th and 19th centuries. France would not see commoners all learning to read, write, and speak in this way until French statesman Jules Ferry made grade school education obligatory in France in 1881/1882.

Before then, France was a collection of ethnicities with their own languages and different variations of those languages. A short list of the Romance regional languages in pre-Ferry-Law metropolitan France could include Angevin, Bourbonais, Francoprovençal, Normand, Picard, and Wallon. They all derive from some form of Latin, and are closer related to one another, than they are to Iberian, Italic, Rhaeto or Romano Romance languages. Beyond metropolitan France, in the colonies, new languages emerged as well, like Louisiana French, Kouri-Vini, Québécois, Acadian, Dominican Creole, and Seychelles Creole. See Infographic 1.⁷Wallonie was part of France at various stages in history. Today, it is within Belgium.

Institutionalizing RICHELIEU’s French in 1882 transformed France’s regional languages, and also repressed and discouraged continued use of them. Somehow, some of these regional languages weathered the storm and are still spoken in some places. Within this time capsule, those languages evolved within each region in parallel with their sister languages in Canada, Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Haiti, and so on. None of them are derivatives of French. French is a sister language to all of them, with its own evolutionary path.⁸I am aware that much of what is now taught as standard French grammar, existed long before Ferry’s laws of 1881/1882. Socioeconomic climbers had access to grammar guides like Ambrosius Haude and Johann Carl Spener, Grammaire françoise dans un gout nouveau … (Akademie der Wissenschaften privilegirten Buchhändlern, 1747), which is a bilingual French-German grammar book, published in Germany for learners of French. Virtually all of the rules therein are recognizable to anyone with knowledge of book French today. Article 75-1 of the revised French constitution, in 2008, recognized the value of France’s regional heritage languages. This has enabled communities to relearn and institutionalize to a certain extent these languages. See Breton, Occitan and Basque, for example.

Interestingly enough, Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French inherited a lot from France’s pre-revolutionary regional languages. Louisiana’s foundational Francophone population has roots all over eastern, central, southern, and western France. The first Europeans to permanently settle in the Attakapas District (Bayou Tèche Country) in the 1740s-1760s, came from Grenoble and Lyon, a region of southeastern France, and from Flanders, present-day Belgium. At the Pointe-Coupée Post, many had been born in Canada (an older name for Quebec and environs). They all arrived with their particular vernacular (see Infographic 1), and some, like governmental, military and religious officials, undoubtedly knew their regional language(s) in addition to French. How else would they administrate, do business with, and rent land to peasants from the region?⁹André MASSE, Gabriel FUSÉLIER de la Claire, Jean Antoine Bernard DAUTERIVE, Jean BÉRARD, Antoine BONIN dit Dauphiné, Antoine PATIN dit Bélair, Jacques Joseph SORREL, Étienne ROMAN, and others, all were born in neighboring Lyon and Grenoble and surrounding towns. The GRÉVENBERT brothers were the children of a Fleming and a Louisiana Creole from New Orleans. At Pointe-Coupée, early inhabitants include Jean Baptiste BALQUET and Nicolas DEGRANDE de la Mothe, both born in La Rochelle, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France; Louis BORDÉLON and François CHEVAL were born in the Normandie region of France; Albert DÉCUIRE was from Macon in the Hainaut region of southern Belgium; Pierre DUROCHER dit Castillon from Paris; Étienne GOSSERAND from Montauban, Occitanie; Louis GREMILLION from Le Mans in the Loire; and plenty from Quebec, like Pierre CLERMONT, Joseph DE LA MIRANDE, Antoine DOZAT, Joseph JOFFRION, Claude JUNOT/JUNEAU, Joseph LAFLEUR, Pierre LEDOUX, et al.

Angevin, Bourbonnais, Normand and Poitevin possibly had the greatest lexical influence on Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French. The first permanent settlers of the Attakapas came overwhelmingly from the Francoprovençal-speaking region, but successive waves of French laborers from Anjou, Bourbon, Normandie and Poitou soon followed. From them, we get drèt in lieu of droit, asteur for maintenant, avoir été instead of être allé(e)(s), the “ær” sound instead of “èr” (e.g. mær vs. mère), and much more.¹⁰In fact, there is a lot that Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French inherited from Angevin, Bourbonnais, Normand and Poitevin. Here are a few more: au soir/à soir, barrer (verb), boucanner (verb), catin, icite, itou, and zieu, rather than ce soir, fermer/fermer à clé, fûmer, poupée, ici, aussi, and œil. In Kouri-Vini, these are spelled and pronounced: aswa, oswa, baré, boukanné/boukònné, katin/katènn, isit, and zyé. Some Louisiana Francophones use the latter forms, some use both. The first are very common in southwest Louisiana. There’s also the rolled/velar R as opposed to the guttural one.

Francoprovençal, a regional language historically spoken in the area that encompasses Lyon and Grenoble, survived in various forms in Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French, also, particularly in subject pronouns and phonology. Its subject pronouns are dze, te, llu, no, vo or vou-z-atre, and leur  for I, you, he/she/it, we, yall and they. The 1st person plural no and 2nd person plural vou-z-atre survived in Kouri-Vini as no and vouzòt. Where French uses the letter Z and J, Francoprovençal uses a J and Z: onze (11) = onje, douze (12) = douje, manger (to eat) = mèzi / minzhë. This Z was once common in Kouri-Vini populations in Louisiana, and survived in some Louisiana French-speaking populations, also. Kouri-Vini speakers will immediately notice the contracted indefinite articles in Francoprovençal, like di or dè. These are often agglutinated to nouns in Kouri-Vini (e.g. dibwa, dilé, dilo, dékònn, défig). Unlike in Francoprovençal, these agglutinations are permanent fixtures with the noun, so dibwa represents a single word meaning “tree.”¹¹There’s also: the prepositions a, dè, pè, en, avoué, d’atò and su/dussù for à, de, pour, en, avec, avec + un, and sur. The “su” and “dussù” for “sur” are normative in Louisiana French (sus/dessus) and in Kouri-Vini (si/dési). As mentioned, the Attakapas Post’s founding permanent population before the post was established in 1765 came from a Francoprovençal-speaking region. Some were literate, others, like Antoine Bonin dit Dauphiné, were not. Those literate knew book French (e.g. Gabriel Fusélier de la Claire), and some of the illiterate ones likely also knew book French to some degree. They undoubtedly spoke amongst themselves in Francoprovençal, or a blended form of the latter with French, as people use different registers at work and at home today. For prepositions, subject pronouns and contracted indefinite articles in Kouri-Vini, see the Memrise course. The use of Z in lieu of J in Kouri-Vini and in Louisiana French are known to linguists, and that phenomenon exists in Missouri French, Reunion Islander Creole, and elsewhere. Linguistic Anthropoligists Nathalie DAJKO and Katie CARMICHAEL‘s work will get your feet wet on the topic. Sources for Francoprovençal from Région Autonomne Vallée d’Aoste’s website. I am well aware of the contention regarding classification of Anjou, et al., as languages. Many people refer to them as dialects, vernaculars, and patois. I personally choose to refer to them as languages because they are sufficiently distinct enough for Francophones and Creolophones to have to learn their grammatical, lexical and phonological forms to communicate efficiently and precisely.

Despite this lexical inheritance in Kouri-Vini and Louisiana French from pre-revolutionary regional languages of France, I do not consider the two Louisiana languages to be dialects of the regional ones in France. To those who argue the opposite, I ask: can you go to a lecture in Holland conducted in Dutch and understand everything? If you are a native American English-speaker without having ever heard Dutch, Scots, or Jamaican Patois, can you fully understand them? Probably not. For me, that makes them sister languages that evolved in situ, rather than dialects descending from a single language parent. The sister languages in Infographic 1 are also sister languages to all other Romance Languages (I include all Creole languages with roots in France, Spain, and Portugal). And they all descend from sister languages spoken throughout the western Roman empire before Romance Languages existed.

– Christophe Landry