Categories: History, Identity, Language

Back in the early 20th century, before 1920, all Creole Parishes in Louisiana were overwhelmingly Francophone, Creolophone, or both. By Creole Parish, I mean those civil parishes where the French and Kouri-Vini languages, and Roman Catholicism, predominated.

In 1910, the Congress added column 17 on the federal decennial census which asked assistant census marshals to write “whether [inhabitants enumerated in each household is] able to speak English; or, if not, give language spoken.” This is the first decennial census in which a separate language column was provided, for assistant marshals to give the language spoken by each resident. Ernest GUILBEAU was one of the assistant marshals for Lafayette Parish. Specifically, he enumerated residents in Police Jury Ward 3, the area north of the town of Lafayette’s corporate limits, what is now the Northside, and area below Carencro and Duson, and to the east of Scott. In the 32 pages of residents he enumerated, he indicated that over 90% spoke “French” at home. Most pages were similar to page 6, where 99% of the BREAUx, MARTINs, FÉLIXs, MOUTONs, and HERPINs only spoke French.¹United States Federal Census, 1910, Louisiana, Lafayette Parish, Police Jury Ward 3.

Lead archivist for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Lee LEUMAS, shows in her work that this predominance of French was also present in the Roman Catholic churches in the Creole civil parishes throughout south Louisiana. She demonstrates, for instance, that in the Creole community’s Catholic churches before 1920, excluding New Orleans, over 90% of priests serving the community, came directly from France, Francophone Belgium, Switzerland, or Canada. Latin was the liturgical language, but the communal language of the churches, including homilies and confessions, was French. She expands on this inference in a recent publication with LSU professor Sylvie DUBOIS. ²Sylvie DuBois and Emilie Gagnet Leumas, Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720-1955: Linguistic Practices of the Catholic Church (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2018).

As I show in my doctoral thesis, the 1910s were a turning point in national and local history, in which Teddy ROOSEVELT’s “Melting Pot America” and the nativism and nationalism spawned by support for the Triple Entente in World War I delivered a conscious and enduring mortal blow to languages other than English spoken in the United States. French, Kouri-Vini, German, Spanish, Czech, and many other language communities felt the brunt of these social and political changes.

One consequence was compulsory schooling laws after World War I, and in Louisiana, in 1921, the state legislature mandated that the only language of instruction in Louisiana schools was English. Mandating school attendance is one thing, enforcing is another: many Louisiana Creoles, particularly those in rural areas, were able to escape Americanization for some time, because authorities lacked resources and manpower to enforce the law. Labor shortage was also a concern that state authorities understood all too well. Take children from the family’s farms, plantations, and share-cropping, and agricultural output would be adversely affected. Duty-free import of better quality sugar from the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the 1910s and early 1920s, and fickle Louisiana weather and crop diseases already threatened the Louisiana sugarcane industry. It was cheaper to have children work on family plots, than to import African Americans from surrounding civil parishes and states, because the latter had to be remunerated for their labor, however little that salary was.³Christophe Landry, A Creole Melting Pot: the Politics of Language, Race, and Identity in southwest Louisiana, 1918-1945, doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2016, pp. 62-101.

By World War II, this cultural, geographic isolation that Louisiana Creoles experienced before the war, came to an end. By then, mechanization solved labor shortage issues in the fields, the federal government drafted Louisiana Creole men (like all other able-bodied men in the country) by the thousands to go fight in France, and local Creoles had begun transitioning from agriculture to blue and white collar jobs in the petroleum, chemical, and defense industries. Americans had gone to Louisiana beginning in the 1780s, which accelerated after 1812, but now Americans were bringing Louisiana Creoles to America. English and American values were an inevitable outcome. ⁴Ibid.

These industrial and attitudinal eventualities impacted languages of the Louisiana Creole community front and center. The generation born between 1920 and 1950 were reared bilingually French or Kouri-Vini and English, for the first time in the community’s history. Many only spoke English but understood their heritage languages well, and when pressed, could mutter certain things in the languages. By 1970, most in the community spoke more English than local languages, but not without lacing their English heavily with Franco-Kouri-Vini stock words and phrases.

Shæ is one of those words. Most people spell it with English phonetics – “sha” – because this is the primary language they speak and learn in schools. Louisiana Creoles and their Cajun cousins sometimes also combine shæ with other words from English or words from French or Kouri-Vini, like “mais yeah, sha.” It only makes sense in southwest Louisiana, where the rise of such stockwords established the strongest roots, with the help of local institutions. Like Italian-identified Americans, and others, Louisiana Creoles and Cajuns cling to these stockwords and phrases not merely for fun; it is their badge of authenticity in a sea of Americans. It is a way to say although flag-waving Americans, we still are not the same as Anglos, Italians, Irish, Germans, et al. Cajun identity, more than Louisiana Creole identity, is inextricable from shæ and gardez donc, and most Cajuns and Louisiana Creoles are uninterested in rekindling their linguistic roots to be speakers of French or Kouri-Vini. The incessant struggles that CODOFIL has faced since 1968, in efforts to re-institutionalize French in Creole civil parishes, through French-only public schooling, is a great example of this reality. For some time, there was pushback from Cajuns to write “sha” in French orthography (cher), but eventually social media has helped popularize the spelling in French. I prefer to use the Kouri-Vini spelling, shæ, for two reasons: first, because French orthography does not have a letter, or diacritic/accent, to account for the short-A sound in “sha,” but Kouri-Vini does: the æ ligature. Cher, in French, everywhere outside of southwest Louisiana, is pronounced like the famous singer’s name, with a short-E sound. With the influx of non-Louisiana Francophones converging on Louisiana, and on Louisiana spaces online, “correcting” locals on pronunciation in their French dialects, always make for an awkward and unproductive confrontation.

This evolution interests me as a cultural historian of 20th century America. But there’s another aspect that interests me, which  is how stockwords like shæ exist in the psyche or memory of Cajuns and Louisiana Creoles. Indeed, the word shæ does exist in Louisiana’s French dialects (there are 2-3, and Acadian ancestry has nothing to do with it), and in Kouri-Vini’s two dialects,  also. It is an adjective, meaning “dear.” In French and Kouri-Vini, this adjective is not used alone: it must precede a noun, which it modifies. For example: ma chère mame, or mô shær mamm, my dear/loving mom. It can also follow a noun, in which case it means “expensive” (e.g. ça coûte cher, ça kout shær = that is expensive/that costs a lot of money). Francophones and Kouri-Viniophones do not use cher or shæ alone. In cher and shær the final R is pronounced, always. It is not when used alone in south Louisiana English – hence, shæ – the second reason I prefer the Kouri-Vini spelling over cher. Since most Cajuns and Louisiana Creoles no longer speak the community’s heritage languages, and have only had rudimentary French in grade school, they are unaware of this linguistic particularity. And aren’t interested, anyways.

As a language activist, and observer, it remains to be seen how heritage learners will reconcile this. Will they impose the south Louisiana English usage of shæ onto French and Kouri-Vini as they (re)learn the two languages? Will the south Louisiana English usage disappear as they come to speak the languages fluently? In the closed-access Kouri-Vini practice group I co-moderate on Facebook, we sometimes see heritage learners who are new to the group use shæ as it is used as a stockword in south Louisiana English. But the current trend, as far as I can tell, is for this usage to dwindle, and eventually vanish, after new members to the group become more fluent in Kouri-Vini. I am uncertain if this is conscious, or if becoming fluent in the language lends itself to disuse of shæ in the way that it is used in south Louisiana English. For my colleagues who teach provincial Louisiana French, or any French, I would be interested in hearing what you observe regarding use of shæ as a stockword by heritage learners in your classes or dedicated learning spaces online. My hunch is that there, too, as heritage learners become (more) fluent in French, that the use of shæ also dwindles. Let me know.

– Christophe Landry