Categories: Identity, Language

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s our community began to transform over the longue durée, but especially after World War I, new nomenclature materialized to describe our Louisiana Creole people, culture, and identity. In other words, the older, historic self-identity and cultural label–Creole–experienced a few transformations as the culture and people transformed.

Here are 3 examples to better illustrate the use of the historic identifier, Creole. On May 1st 1827, several New Orleanians appeared before Mayor Louis-Philippe, Comte de Roffignac. On that day, François Valentin Sr. consented to his 15-year-old son–”François Valentin Jr., free young man of color, a New Orleans Creole”–entering into an apprentice agreement with Érasme Le Goaster, another Creole New Orleanian.¹Indenture of Francois Valentin Jr. with Erasme Legoaster sponsored by Francois Valentin, Volume 4, Number 187, 1827 May 1; New Orleans Office of the Mayor; imaged in “Free People of Color in Louisiana,” Louisiana State University Libraries, Free People of Color in Louisiana (http://www.louisianadigitallibrary.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p16313coll51/id/38024/rec/1), original in Indentures, François Valentin Jr. to Érasme Legoaster, 1 May 1827, volume 4, number 187, New Orleans (La.) Office of the Mayor. Indentures, 1809-1843. Louisiana Division/City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, http://nutrias.org/~nopl/inv/neh/nehaa.htm#indentures. Transcription and translation by C. Landry, 21 April 2016.

The Alexandria Louisiana Democrat lectured its readers in its June 29th 1887 edition on the distinctions between Americans and Louisiana Creoles; in this case the elite and bourgeois Creoles. Among them, the paper noted:

Young girls are not allowed to go into society without being accompanied by their mothers, or some other married lady, as chaperon–one of the many Creole customs that has generally been adopted by the American residents of New Orleans.²“Charming Creoles,” The Louisiana Democrat, 29 June 1887, p. 4.

In August 1906, the New Orleans Picayune enthusiastically wrote “[h]urrah for Dave Pelletier [of Lafayette, La.], a Creole proper of ‘La Belle Louisiana’. To this, the Lafayette Advertiser proudly boasted that “[h]e takes a stock of his Creole language and it gets him anything he goes after.”³“The Drummers Ticket,” Lafayette Advertiser, 22 Aug 1906, p. 1.

There are mounds of additional examples and we would spend years sifting through them all. But the point made here is that Creole, used as an ethnic identity, cultural, and linguistic term, is a term that Latin Louisiana people have agreed to use to define themselves, to define things they do. Local fauna and flora are exceptional here, but became enmeshed in Creole culture, so it makes sense that Creoles came to refer to those things as “créole”, too (e.g. Creole sugar cane, tomatoes, etc.). Creole has historically also been used, as we have just seen in the Alexandria paper, by outsiders to refer to Louisiana Creoles and their culture, too.

Historically, Louisiana Creoles have referred to the Louisiana Creole language as Creole and as French. However, speakers of Louisiana French on Bayou Teche coined an endonym (term created by members of a community) worthy of praise. To mark the difference between French and Creole languages, at an unknown point in time, but certainly by the mid 20th century, Louisiana Francophones along Bayou Teche came to refer to Louisiana Creole as “Kouri-Vini.” The term comes from the way in which Louisiana Creolophones (Creole-speakers) say “I went, you came” (Mo kourí, to viní), which in Louisiana French are J’ai été and J’ai venu. The term stuck and is widely used in southwest Louisiana, but virtually unheard of in the rest of the state.

I’ve long bristled at the use of “French Creole” and “Creole French” for 2 reasons. First, I am never quite certain which language one is referring to. Is it French, or is it Creole? Almost always, though exceptions exist, those using either of those terms do not speak either of those 2 languages. So, it is impossible to query them to figure out exactly which language they are referring to. Every month, Hollywood casting directors or random agency representatives contact me to translate or offer coaching in “French Creole” or in “Creole French.” When I ask which language they had in mind–French, or Creole–they almost always reply “I am unsure.”

Which leads to my second point, which is the very widespread idea that Creole and French are synonymous, or are the same language, with Creole being the “ghetto” or “slang” version of French, without real linguistic rules/phenomena. In this mindset, anything goes, depending on the speaker, rather than the language. There are no real rules. Some assimilated Creoles strongly believe in this. Two years ago, a monolingual English-speaking Lafayetter accused me of imposing rules onto Louisiana Creole that “are much more fluid than [I] teach,” for example. The context behind the comment is that one Francophone Creole was learning Louisiana Creole, and rejected using Creole grammar and words on occasion. We found it disruptive and disrespectful. So, we removed him from the dedicated learning space. His friend wrote this to me as a way to scold me for having put my foot down. Anything goes. At least that is what many wish to believe.

“French Creole” can be found and heard everywhere in the US in English to refer to both Louisiana Creole and Louisiana French, even in authoritative publications like Ethnologue, and in thousands of articles and books. However, “French Creole” and “Creole French” only really exist in scant traces in French and in Creole in Louisiana. Speakers say one, or the other, but rarely both.

So, in 2014, I petitioned SIL, which manages global identifiers for names of languages, to change the way it named Louisiana’s Creole language from “French Creole” to “Louisiana Creole.” The language is not French. It is not Haitian. The only place it is from is Louisiana. Linguists, such as Prof. Emeritus Albert Valdman, and Dr. Thomas Klingler at Tulane University, supported the petition, as did a long list of other leading specialists of the language and activists. SIL approved that change in December 2014. And we are very happy with it.

And yet, Louisiana Creole is not without issues of its own. For instance, many Louisiana Francophones refer to Louisiana French with the historic term, créole. They have good reason to do so, because for our community, since the earliest colonial days, créole/Créole has always signified that which is Latin-cultured and native to Louisiana. So, the variety of French spoken only in Louisiana would necessarily make it créole. It is a product of Louisiana in the way it is spoken.

Another recurring issue comes from the pan-Creole movement. Readers probably are unaware of this movement. It is not very uniform, and comes in many forms from different regions of the globe. One is with the IOCP (International Organisation of Creole People), which is based in Australia among Indian Ocean Creoles. Thanks to these separate pan-Creole movements, and to popular publications like Kreol International Magazine, based in London, the Creole world is beginning to (re)discover itself. The awareness has many positives, chief among them renewed contact, collaborations, language promotion, and distance from the highly racialized styling that English-speaking Louisiana Creoles cling to so fervently. The not-so positive aspect of pan-Créolité is that it encourages the idea that “Creole is Creole,” that linguistically, Louisiana Creolophones should adhere to Haitian orthography and linguistic patterns, since Haiti remains the only nation in the world where Creole has been made a national language, used in all aspects of life. It of course does not help that since the 1970s, linguists studying Louisiana Creole, as well as a few social scientists, use Haitian orthography to write about Louisiana Creole.

To remedy these two annoyances, I began to look to Kouri-Vini, a term that Louisiana Creole people created to refer to a Louisiana phenomenon, the Creole language. It is wise of us to do so. Think about it. Using a language of prestige, like French, when you hear the word, do you immediately think: “broken Latin?” Do you even think Latin, at all? Probably not. Centuries ago, before Francophones asserted themselves as French-speakers, folks used to call it “vulgar Latin.” But probably at few moments since the founding of the Académie française, has anyone recycled the idea that French is “vulgar Latin.” By claiming to speak French, their language, a language derived in part from Latin, but a linguistic phenomenon in its own right, backed by Richelieu’s 1635 Académie française, Frenchmen anchored themselves to their land by endonyms such as “French” and in so doing demand that people see them, and their language, as French, rather than Latin and vulgar Latin.

Endonyms are therefore powerful unifiers, if not for outsiders initially, then clearly for community members. The tendency of outsiders hoping to (even attempting to) redefine and relabel identities are ever present. We see this in the reclamation of local names or historic identities in the independence of colonies like Haiti, Myanmar, and Pakistan. The first generation, or so, may struggle to adjust to the new or renewed term, but subsequent generations, provided they rally behind the endonym, come to identify with it exclusively, and if they are inclined to language activism, demand that outsiders refer to it in the same way.

For these reasons, I encourage Louisiana Creole people to transition from the English term all together, and to simply use Kouri-Vini at all times, in all languages. People all over the internet are already following suit. They understand the rationale and support it 100%. So, seems that we’re well on our way finally stand up and not only say who we are, but also what we speak, without caring what outsiders think. The way it should be. In fancy terms, it is called self-determination and affirmation, and are, and should be, sources of immense pride.

Long life to Kouri-Vini!

– Christophe Landry