Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, September 10, 2003

French may keep local flavor, but it likely won’t be Creole

by Jim Bradshaw

The good news is that some forms of Louisiana French — even Cajun French — may have a chance for survival. The bad news is that Creole French, one of the most distinctive of those forms, will likely not be spoken here when the older folks who still use it are gone.

That’s the view of Tom Klingler, one of the most respected students of French as spoken in Louisiana, voiced in his new book, “If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That, The Creole Language of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana” (LSU Press, $75). You may remember that Klingler was a lead editor on a dictionary of the Louisiana Creole French tongue published several years ago.

Creole has been a part of Louisiana’s linguistic mix since the late 1700s, he points out.

“Originally the language of Africans and their offspring, as well as of smaller numbers of Indians and Europeans, in New Orleans and on the plantations of colonial Louisiana, Louisiana Creole was formerly spoken across a wide area extending north as far as ... Natchitoches and east along the Gulf coast as far as Mobile and possibly even Pensacola,” he writes.

Today, you hear it only in a few places: St. James and St. John the Baptist parishes on the Mississippi River, the area around False River in Pointe Coupee parish, and “an extensive area west of the Atchafalaya River Basin centered along the banks of Bayou Teche, especially in St. Martin Parish, and, to a lesser extent, the parishes of Lafayette and St. Landry.”

Klingler calls this area in Acadiana “the demographic center of Creole-speaking Louisiana.” He estimates that there may still be 50,000 people who still speak Louisiana Creole, but they are, quite literally, a dying breed.

The linguist points out that Creole “has long coexisted with two other French-related speech varieties, Cajun French and Plantation Society French (which was a regional variety that was very much akin to Standard French).

Plantation Society French is all but gone — Klingler found several 80- and 90-year-olds who could still speak it.

“To varying degrees, Creole, Cajun, and Plantation Society French have all been displaced by the most widely used language, English,” he reports, although “Cajun is still spoken by a sizable, but shrinking community of Louisianians.”

Most efforts to maintain the French language today are built around Standard French, he finds, so that even those Cajuns who are determined to hold onto their culture may find themselves speaking something closer to the French spoken in Paris rather than on Pecan Island.

“Speakers of Cajun and Creole who frequently come into contact with speakers of Standard French will likely play some role in this shift,” he says. “Perhaps more significant will be the growing number of young learners of Standard French who have never been speakers of Cajun or Creole.”

But, he says, there is room for a little optimism.

“The shift toward Standard French does not necessarily imply that Cajun will disappear altogether, of course. After all, a major accomplishment of the French revival movement has been to persuade speakers of Cajun to take pride in the language they were once taught to be ashamed of, and there is still a strong desire within the community to retain a specifically Cajun identity, of which

Cajun French is an important component.

“Particularly if the incorporation of elements of Cajun into the French curriculum ... now practiced on a limited scale, becomes more widespread, French in Louisiana can be expected at the very least to retain a distinctly local flavor,” he said.

But, it’s probably not going to be a Creole flavor, despite efforts by Klingler and others

to publicize, promote, and preserve it.

“It seems far less likely that Creole will be spoken in any recognizable form beyond the next two or three generations,” he said.

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