Louisiana Languages
Louisiana may be considered as a unique example of multicultural and multi-language coexistence. The extraordinary interaction occurred between dialects deserves, among US States, the name of “exotic sister”. To explain such a peculiarity we must remount to Louisiana’s historical background as well as geographical and economical aspects: a strategic position, touched by the Mississippi River and connecting the North States to Gulf of Mexico triggered the interest of many European Countries, especially during Colonialism.
Nowadays Louisiana is actually a bilingual State: English is the major spoken language, due to the enactment of the new constitution in 1921, which banned French from being spoken or learned at school. Only recently French has been reintroduced as an “administrative language”, after the creation of the CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) in 1968, aiming to “preserve and improve French language in Louisiana in its several varieties”.
“Several varieties” are the elected keywords for describing the linguistic reality we are trying to approach: according to the 2000 census, 90% of population speaks only English, almost 5% speaks French at home and 7% only French. Other minority languages are also spoken: Spanish reaches 2,5%, Vietnamese 0,6% and German 0,2%. Still can we find some Italian and native Indian languages.
All these languages have mixed up and influenced one another during centuries, at the same time or in different moments, modeling specific idioms.
We can approximately identify three main spoken languages, each one with its varieties: the first is the French branch that originated Cajun French and Colonial French, the second is the English one that developed respectively Cajun English and Yat and finally there is Louisiana Creole, which pertains to the family of French Creoles.
Cajun French derives purely from the Acadian language, originated from the French dialects of the Anjou and Poitou regions. Having Acadian developed autonomously, through the usage of people in the actual Canadian Maritime provinces and Maine, it reached South Louisiana after the British expulsion and deportation during the French and Indian War (1755-1763) and originated Cajun, or “Cadien” (if you prefer the French spelling), absorbing much from the Spanish, German, Portuguese and Haitian Creole vocabulary. Further on local Creole and Amerindian influence brought respectively to the shaping of two more general Cajun dialects: Prairie French and Bayou French.
Colonial French, even known as “Plantation Society French”, was spoken in lower Louisiana before the Cajun dialect arrival. It survived until 19th Century and has now nearly extinguished. It was used among French speaking people for economical purposes during the Grand Plantation Period to help keep contacts with France itself, with Caribbean colonies and to ensure and strengthen financial supremacy and cultural continuity to French speaking colonial families. For this reason Colonial French appears to be much conservative toward Referential French, while differing from it only in accent and use of some words.
Cajun English is the variety of English spoken by Cajun people; it first developed as the trading and economical language used by first Cajuns when dealing with English speakers. This dialect has nowadays almost vanished as a consequence of restrictions to the French spoken language imposed by 1921 Constitution. As French Cajun did, Cajun English absorbed much from ethnic groups living in the region, but its features are substantially influenced by French of which we can clearly find traces not only in lexicon but also in phonological phenomena such as vowel and consonant simplification or in the typical final word or phrase stress.
“Yat” or “New Orleans dialect” is the port city dialect spoken in the metropolitan area of New Orleans. The name comes from the expression “Where y’at?” which means ”How are you?”, uttered with that drawly accent that depends more on New Orleans being the port city that welcomed many Irish and Italian immigrants and less or not at all with its French, Spanish or African heritage. “Yat” seems to have a specific intonation that can vary much depending on the speaker’s geographical and social origin, so that it will be strongly heard among residents of the Ninth Ward, where it originated, while slightly perceived in suburban areas. Some of the most evident phonological phenomena in “Yat” are, for example, the dropping /r/ at the end of the word or, on the other side, the full rhotacization in the middle of the syllable, the splitting of some vowel and sonorization of interdental fricatives and finally an odd use of prepositions probably due to German influence.
Louisiana Creole probably arose along the plantations of the Mississippi River, in the South and Southwest Louisiana, during the late 18th Century. Linguists disagree on Louisiana Creole being autochthonous or developed from a pre-existing pidgin or creole brought from Africa or the Caribbean. What is sure is that, as it happened with Haitian Creole, Louisiana Creole was mostly a result of French colonialism and plantation slavery, i.e. the contact between maritime French or Colonial French and the African of the slaves from Senegambian Region, who spoke mande languages (bambara, malinke and soninke). The grammar of Louisiana Creole resembles that of the Haitian Creole (French influenced Creole) but, as a probable phenomena of decreolization, definite articles maintained a nearly standard form: le,la,les (pl.) and a, la (sing), often prevailing as enclitics. Louisiana Creole differs from French even for the lack of noun genders and verb conjugation: tenses are usually expressed by putting verbal markers before verbs (pronoun +té, sé, sa + verb).
Among minority languages we should not forget to mention the languages of Indians such as Koasati and Choctaw, which were strongly influenced by Pidgin English transmitted by Arizona Apaches. Indian groups also used Spanish, mixing it with the Mobilian Jargon of the Central Gulf Coast. Generally, Spanish has been little spoken in Louisiana and can be found only in the enclave of St. Bernard Parish, in the so called Isleño, a maritime variety from Canary Island, or in New Orleans where a Caribbean group has recently refreshed the previous 18th Century Spanish influence. Still in New Orleans is spoken a little Italian, but second generation Sicilians are not able to reproduce the native tongue of their predecessors anymore. German is used only by few older people, probably descendants from 19th Century settlers, and Vietnamese bears the effects of the contact with French varieties.
For an overview of our translation expertise, visit our media and marketing translation page.
Category: Foreign Language
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
