Categories: Identity, Language

Louisiana French (LF), more commonly referred to since the 1970s as “Cajun French,” is seasoned with all kinds of neat lexical ingredients: its vocabulary hails from all regions of pre-revolutionary France, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Illinois, Missouri, the Great Lakes, Saint-Domingue, Lebanon, Syria, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Francophone Africa and French Polynesia.

The appellation Cajun is misleading. The intonation, cadence, and folklore of LF are different from those of Acadia in Canada. Further, LF is spoken throughout Louisiana, from the northwestern parishes along the Red and Cane Rivers to the moss-draped cypress swamps of Plaquemines Parish, and slow-moving bayous of the interior hinterland, by entire communities whose ancestors did not come from Acadia, at all. These Louisiana Creoles found themselves re-identified after 1970, and their new identities were shaped by essentialized ideas that reshaped the entire nation.

On the heels of the erosion of Jim Crow laws and culture, ethnic movements swept the United States, in which people came to re-articulate their identities based on the narratives they themselves rewrote about communities they considered their own. These Ethnic Pride movements gave us the “ethnic” identities that are stock items in the U.S. today: Black, African American, Isleño (Louisiana), Atlantic Creoles, Latino, Hispanic, American Indian, Native American, Indegenous, ad inf.

Louisiana Creoles were not immune to Jim Crow’s shadow, or from the Ethnic Pride movements. Jim Crow had imposed essentialized and arbitrary racial caste positions on most of the nation, and the Ethnic Pride movements converted the painful memory of Jim Crow and slavery into ethnic identities people could be proud of. Unsurprisingly, some whitened Louisiana Creoles from the Lafayette area joined the identity movements and presented their own: Cajun.

Like Black and Latino, Cajun had been a socioeconomic and cultural slur, but not an identity. The paper trail suggests that Americans began using Cajun as a slur in English in the first half of the 19^th century, which seems to have been adopted in Louisiana languages, used synonymously and concomitantly with Cajun in English. However, in the 1970s, Cajunists re-appropriated the term, and labored (successfully) to make it an identity. There was a bit of a scuffle, but within 20 years, the new Cajun identity movement had absorbed all whitened Louisiana Creoles, claimed to be rooted in an essentialized sense of Francophonité (quality of speaking French), marginalization, and poverty, and vague notions of Acadia. Commodification of Cajunité sealed the deal, and all those who had opposed the term before 1980, now used it as a badge of honor.¹Jim Bradshaw, “When ‘Cajun’ was a fightin’ word,” Teche News, St. Martinville, La., 8 July 2010.

There were internal issues, though. The one most applicable to this post, has to do with the different dialects of Louisiana French. Early in the 1920s, James F. BROUSSARD, who taught at and served on different boards at LSU in Baton Rouge, supervised a large number of masters theses on the features of these different varieties of French spoken indigenously in Louisiana. In those days, elite, bourgeois, and socioeconomic climbing Louisiana Creoles, were most interested in appearing “real” French to Americans, because this distanced them superficially from their natural linguistic-cultural habitat, which included people of color with the same surnames, same French dialect, neighbors in Catholic churches and neighborhoods. Real French implied European, so studying the “eccentric” features of poor people French in Louisiana showed that mobile Louisiana Creoles were white Europeans looking at local flavor as outsiders. These Creoles (the poor and better off) still identified as Louisiana Creoles in the 1920s, so bourgeois Creoles  introduced the term “French Creole” (in English, but not in French) to describe what they spoke, based entirely on identity rather than linguistic distinctions. Everything else was considered “broken French” and “nigger French,” even if they spoke the same French. Linguistic features were unimportant; class and race were.²Christophe Landry, “A Creole Melting Post: the Politics of Language, Race and Identity in southwest Louisiana, 1918-45,” Ph.D. diss., University of Sussex, 2016; Jules O. Daigle, A Dictionary of the Cajun Language (1981, Swallow Publications, 1986).

By the 1980s, these issues had not been worked out, and it ultimately participated in the rise of the Cajun movement of the 1970s. Poor and working class Louisiana Creoles felt slighted, marginalized, and belittled by monied Creoles. Indeed, the latter had organizations like Athénée Louisianais and CODOFIL that excluded all poor and working class Louisiana Creoles from the various commemorations and celebrations they established. Athénée and CODOFIL wanted to show off how European local Louisiana Creoles were, or could be. Poor and working class Creoles came to reject this. The 1970s and early 80s represent the crucial turning point. The Francophone masses of Louisiana, who were poor and working class, dishonored CODOFIL’s work in establishing Francophone public schools in Creole spaces with European Francophone teachers, which in turn brought socieconomic cleavages to a boiling point. This schism created a serious impasse for the survival of French in Louisiana in any capacity. Cajun-identified Creoles diverged in identity and also began to apply their new identity to everything they do, including languages they spoke (both French and Kouri-Vini). French and Kouri-Vini each came with their own dialects, but it was not the language that mattered, it was the identity that authenticated the languages and people as homogenous. Cajunité had whitened Louisiana Creole culture and a good share of Louisiana Creole people who had no ties to Acadia genealogically or culturally. Creole French vanished as bourgeois Creoles Americanized or assimilated among their Cajun-identified brethren. These changes in identity and attitude left Kouri-Vini as implicitly black or colored.

Linguists and others concerned with linguistic features rather than identity, have since explored a number of different labels for French in Louisiana. The taxonomies were mostly based on presumed class and ancestral differences: Plantation Society French, Louisiana Regional French, Napoleonic French, Acadian French, and so on. Today, the preferred term among scholars is Louisiana French, but it is not at all uncommon to see references to Cajun French in scholastic work by Louisianians and by outsiders alike.³Michael Picone, “The Rise and Fall of Plantation Society French,”  (abstract) 2003, presented at the Creole Studies Conference: Creole Legacies, New Orleans, October 23-25, 2003. See also http://caneriver.tulane.edu/LanguagesLabels.html.

Linguistically, I argue that three distinctions are to be made in the varieties of French spoken in Louisiana, and that is along topographical lines. Vocabulary and intonations in languages are often region-specific because lifestyles change per region: agricultural prairies/provinces, waterways, and urban life. Each of these three topographies developed specific livelihoods (cultures), contact, and were not necessarily shared with other regions. I refer to all 3 collectively as Louisiana French, but dialectally see them as Urban Louisiana French, Fluvial Louisiana French, and Provincial Louisiana French.

These environmental differences have accounted for the regional vocabulary, folklore, folk medicine, music and vision we find in Louisiana today – which has absolutely no basis in “race.” Consequently, all people inhabiting each of these topographies speak the same, regardless of “ancestry” or “race.”

Urban Louisiana French (ULF)
Fluvial Louisiana French (FLF)
Provincial Louisiana French (PLF)

Purchase your copy of
The Dictionary of Louisiana French

 – Christophe Landry
Updated 18 Nov 2017