Preliminary Peculiarities of Northshore Creole, a Louisiana Creole Dialect (original) (raw)

The Louisiana Creole dialect formerly spoken along the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain in St. Tammany Parish has been recognized as somewhat divergent from other varieties of the language (Klingler and Dajko 2006). Northshore Creole–referred to elsewhere as St. Tammany Creole–does not benefit from a full grammatical description. On the basis of a sample of previously unanalyzed data, this paper gives a preliminary account of some linguistic peculiarities of the dialect and compares them with the better described Louisiana Creole dialects of Bayou Teche (Neumann 1981) and Pointe Coupee Parish (Klingler 2003). The data come from interviews conducted by Dr. Thomas A. Klingler in the mid-1990s. The audio was extracted from the interviews (originally recorded on Betamax tapes) and transcribed by Creole community members thanks to a grant from the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (NOCGS).