Late this afternoon, I received wonderful news from SIL International, which oversees global identifiers and names of languages spoken throughout the world. Scholars and other entities rely on SIL’s identifiers in scholastic and governmental publications.

Last month, I petitioned SIL to change the way that it recorded Louisiana’s Creole language, from Louisiana Creole French, to simply Louisiana Creole. In the petition, I noted the many issues surrounding the French superstrate qualifier, and pointed out that the term “Louisiana Creole French” has been imposed on the population by outsiders, which makes it pejorative.

To bolster the application, I solicited the support of Dr. Albert Valdman, Rudy Professor Emeritus of French & Italian and Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington; Dr. Ingrid Neumann-Holzshuh, Professor of Sprach-, Literatur-, and Kulturwissenschaften at the Universität Regensburg; Dr. Thomas Klingler, Associate Professor of French & Italian at Tulane University; Dr. Kevin Rottet, Associate Professor of French Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington; Dr. Andrew Jolivette, Associate Professor and Chair of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University; Dr. Carolyn M. Dunn, Associate Vice President of Institutional Diversity and Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Central Michigan University; Darryl Barthe of the American History Department at Sussex University, and Oliver Mayeux, from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. All of the aforementioned individuals are scholars of Louisiana Creole language and/or people.

Through their support, and a voluminous list of citations on scholastic studies on the Louisiana Creole language, SIL’s Registrar, Melinda Lyons, notified me today that the organization has approved the petition, and that the changes reflecting the name change will be made in January 2015 on their site, as well as in the 18th edition of Ethnologue’s Catalogue of World Languages.

The implications are huge. First, Louisiana Creole will no longer be recorded with the French qualifier (which suggests to some that the language is a dialect of French) in an official capacity. Second, this will assist community members in identifying projects that will aid in the revitalization efforts of the language, separate from Louisiana French.

The ISO 639-3 identifier for Louisiana Creole is LOU.