The standardization process of Louisiana French: issues and outcomes

The main goal of this article is to give a general overview on the standardization process of the French language in Louisiana. After examining the sociolinguistic situation of Louisiana French and discussing the notion of “standard language”, following the definitions of Bagno (2011) and Milroy & Milroy (1999), we will try to understand what recovers the notion of “Standard French”. Thereafter, we will analyze how its introduction in Louisiana has triggered some issues on the linguistic norm to be used during the revitalization movement, which began in the 1960s, and how these debates influenced the French norm used nowadays in Louisiana.

The History of French in Louisiana

This chapter introduces the reader to Louisiana French. Four varieties of French are generally recognized by linguists: Colonial French, Plantation Society French, Louisiana Creole, and Louisiana Regional French (most commonly called Cajun French). The French of the Lafourche Basin is classified as Louisiana Regional French. The chapter outlines the similarities and differences between the three, and then focuses in particular on Louisiana Regional French, providing a historical outline of its development and a brief description of its features in comparison to Standard French. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the variation found in Louisiana French across the state. This sets the scene for the detailed description of the language as it is spoken in the Lafourche country, the language at the center of place-based identity in Terrebonne-Lafourche.

French on Shifting Ground

French on Shifting Ground introduces readers to the lower Lafourche Basin, Louisiana, where the land, a language, and a way of life are at risk due to climate change, environmental disaster, and coastal erosion. Louisiana French is endangered all around the state, but in the lower Lafourche Basin the shift to English is accompanied by the equally rapid disappearance of the land on which its speakers live. The book outlines the development of French in the region, highlighting the features that make it unique in the world, and including the first published description of the way it is spoken by the American Indian population. It then weaves together evidence from multiple lines of linguistic research, years of extensive participant observation, and personal narratives from the residents themselves to illustrate the ways in which language–in this case French–is as fundamental to the creation of place as is the physical landscape. It is a story at once scholarly and personal: the loss of the land and the concomitant loss of the language have implications for the scientific community as well as for the people whose cultures–and identities–are literally at stake.

Le système pronominal du français louisianais

This paper discusses the pronominal system of Louisiana French, a variety of French spoken mainly in the south-western part of Louisiana State. The analysis of data (Girard Lomheim, 2016) shows that although Louisiana French clitics share certain features with clitics from other informal varieties of French and dialects of French, they cannot be analysed along quite the same lines. They have reached a more advanced stage of grammaticalization. They are moving away from the status of syntactic argument towards the status of agreement marker. The fact that they are subject to strong phonetic erosion and have been gradually replaced by weak pronouns shows that they are coming closer to the ultimate stadium of their grammaticalization cycle (van Gelderen, 2011), the null stadium. The progressive reduction of the clitic paradigm is accompanied by the emergence of a new class of weak pronouns, which leads us to claim that the pronominal system of this vernacular is organized in three classes of pronouns: strong pronouns and two classes of deficient pronouns: weak pronouns and clitics in the terms of Cardinaletti et Starke (1994 and 1999). We claim that the difference between strong and weak pronouns should be addressed in terms of syntax and morphology whereas the difference between weak pronouns and clitics should be accounted for in terms of morphosyntax and phonology.

History and Variation in Louisiana French

This is an overview of the range of French spoken in Louisiana and the historical forces that created the francophone landscape we have today.

Language Death and Subject Expression: First-person-singular subjects in a declining dialect of Louisiana French

ABSTRACTLouisiana French is undergoing gradual language death. In such situations, it is common to find increased variability and rapid change, as speakers use the language less often and in fewer domains (Wolfram 2004; Palosaari and Campbell 2011). These processes have been observed in the pronominal system of Louisiana French (Rottet 1996; Girard 2013), with both phonological and morphological sources of variation leading to an exceptionally large inventory of first-person-singular forms in the French of the Pointe-Au-Chien Indians of Pointe-Aux-Chênes, Louisiana. Using data from a translation task, we examine the range of forms used by French speakers from this community varying in age and fluency. We note a sharp distinction in forms used by fluent versus non-fluent speakers, with the latter making use of the non-clitic formmon. To answer the question of whymonis so common amongst non-fluent speakers in this task, we apply insights from the field of second language acquisition, considering the systems of these non-fluent speakers as autonomous and systematic. We ultimately propose a potential interaction between the previously documented phonological and morphological patterns observed in this community, influencing in the forms observed.

Sociolinguistic research with endangered varieties: The case of Louisiana French

This article outlines the differences in goals, methods and results that variationist researchers may encounter when exploring and/or documenting a threatened language variety, and underscores special considerations and aspects of the research program that linguists must work to control for when working with endangered varieties of Western languages. In particular, it examines questions and strategies for dealing with sparse data for longitudinal studies; fewer speakers for stratified samples; the inverse relation between linguistic fluency and age; social network constraints in small speech communities; literacy-centric exercises in oral language communities; and larger project protocols designed for stable linguistic communities. Throughout the paper, the collection and analysis of Louisiana French liaison data from 1939, 1977, and 2010 provide an application of the proposed methods.

Language contact and contextual nasalization in Louisiana French

ABSTRACTThis paper examines variation in Louisiana French nasalized vowels across two time periods: 1977 and 2010–2011. Non-contrastive nasal vowels are typical of English, while contrastive nasal vowels are typical of French. Louisiana French is an endangered language variety. Instead of simplifying to a single type of vowel nasality, as might be expected in a situation of heavy language contact and language shift, Louisiana French maintains a system of phonetic and phonemic nasal vowels. Digitized interviews with 32 native speakers from lower Lafourche Parish provide 2801 data points for analysis. In contrast with previous assertions in the literature, quantitative analyses reveal that contextual nasalization operates almost exclusively within the domain of the word, not the syllable.