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Bonjour, hi! In the last episode of “Multilingual Countries” we visited Canada to learn about the languages spoken in their beautiful country. In this episode we’ll travel south, all the way down to the deep south! Today we’ll visit Louisiana to learn about another multilingual state.
There are actually two official languages in Louisiana! The first is obviously English (and more specifically, the American variant). The second, as many will guess from the state’s name, is French.
As the first colonist to claim the territory that extended from the mouth of the Mississippi to Quebec, René-Robert Cavelier gave Louisiana its name, calling it La Louisiane (the land of Louis) in honour of his uncle King Louis XIV, the Sun King.
This vast territory eventually gave rise to 15 different states, including Louisiana as we know it today.
COLONIAL HISTORY
First a French colony, it became the overseas territory of Great Britain with the signing of the Treaty of Paris following the Seven Years’ War. Then New Orleans became a Spanish colony.
It was during Spanish reign that many French-speaking inhabitants of what was then known as Acadia, i.e., present-day Nova Scotia in Canada, fled to the south-eastern area of Louisiana following the conquest of these territories by Great Britain, and were welcomed by the Spaniards.
After having fallen back into the hands of Napoleon’s France, this territory became of strategic importance for the then very young United States of America. It was in 1803 that President Thomas Jefferson commissioned attorney Robert R. Livingston to handle the purchase of New Orleans, a strategic port for South America, for 10 million dollars. Livingston instead managed to acquire the entire territory of then-Louisiana (about 2,200,000 square kilometres) for the modest amount of 15 million.
Since then, the main languages spoken in the territory have remained English and French, as a legacy of more than 300 years of history.
LOUISIANA FRENCH
As I mentioned, the presence of francophones dates back to the first settlers who landed on the continent.
They brought what is now considered “colonial French of Louisiana”.
The settlers spoke the French of the 1600s and therefore, to date, it still includes some archaic aspects compared to standard French, i.e., the metropolitan French spoken in France. The evolution of languages depends on many factors which are not only internal but also and above all external, so it’s quite normal that colonial French has not evolved in step with the standard version of the language.
But let’s go back to 1763, when many inhabitants of the Canadian region then called Acadia migrated to present-day Louisiana. These immigrants brought a variety of French with them that was typical of the Canadian territories, thus also different from the French spoken in France. This variant took the name “Cajun”, a term that derives from the Acadian pronunciation of the word acadien (person from Acadia), that is, acadjonne.
The variant has very particular, yet typical features. Not only from a spelling point of view but also from a phonetic, lexical and grammatical perspective. Cajun owes its peculiarities to all the historical events described above, and therefore borrows a great deal from Spanish, the languages of the Native Americans, and especially from English. For example, at the lexical level the use of English terms (but pronounced in French) such as truck instead of camion and, at the level of syntax, a typical construction of phrases of the Anglo-Saxon language, such as L’ami je sors avec in which the influence of English is evident, meaning The friend I go out with, instead of the more standard l’ami avec lequel je sors.
See you again next episode.
English translation and adaptation by Sarah Schneider
