Preliminary Peculiarities of Northshore Creole, a Louisiana Creole Dialect (original) (raw)
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The English Vernacular of the Creoles of Louisiana
Language Variation and Change, 2003
The English spoken by Creole African Americans in southern Louisiana reveals language change in the shift from French to English and the persistence of local forms of English. The overview of the socioeconomic history of Louisiana details the number of ethnic groups and the fluctuating social and linguistic relations among them over time. The study sample consists of 42 African Americans with French ancestry living in Opelousas in St. Landry Parish and Parks in St. Martin Parish. The high rate of the absence of glides in the vowels (ai, au, oi, i, u, e, o) is maintained across all generations of the 24 male speakers described. A possible source of glide absence, such as foreign language influence, is explored but found unconvincing. A more plausible explanation is that glide absence was part of the English brought to the area by native speakers in the early 19th century. We acknowledge the generous support of the National Science Foundation (BSR-0091823) as well as the coding work done by two research assistants Vicky Polston and David Herrell. We also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the text and their valuable comments.
Louisiana Creole (Louisiana, USA) – Language Snapshot
Language Documentation and Description, 2024
Louisiana Creole is an exogenous, French-based creole of the Americas and the only such creole to have had its genesis in what would become the United States. Records of the language date back to the later half of the 18th century, and at one time it was widely used by speakers of various races and ethicities in South Louisiana and the greater Gulf South region. A series of events that includes the Sale of Louisiana (1803), the Civil War (1861), compulsory public schooling (1921), and two world wars (1917, 1941) all contributed to the shift away from the language in favor of English. Although the language has effectively ceased to be transmitted intergenerationally, it persists in small pockets of ever-aging mother-tongue speakers. Additionally, an established revitalization movement is underway that has produced a sizeable number of competent younger speakers. This snapshot pays particular attention to an underdescribed regional dialect of the language spoken along the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in St. Tammany Parish (Louisiana).
"Tout Que' Chose": the Creole repertoire(s) of Carencro, Louisiana
2019
Carencro, Louisiana is situated in a liminal zone of southern Louisiana that was historically typified by intense language contact between different, French-lexified speech varieties. On the basis of linguistic description, these varieties can be grouped into two broad categories: Characteristic Louisiana Creole (CLC) and Characteristic Louisiana French (CLF). The language ideologies of speakers themselves, however, often downplay the differences between these varieties. Instead, united by a shared ethnonym (i.e., “Creole”), individuals typically refer to the totality of their non-English speech forms by the same name. Such ethnoglossic isomorphism masks the diversity inherent in speech labeled as “Creole.” This paper analyzes data from five participants to demonstrate the linguistic diversity of the Creole repertoire(s) in Carencro, Louisiana. The settlement history of the region is also explored as a potential explanatory variable for such heterogeneity.
The Dictionary of Louisiana French (henceforth The Dictionary) is a very large, beautifully presented book that is the result of more than a decade of research.
Ti Liv Kréyòl: A Learner's Guide to Louisiana Creole
2020
Louisiana Creole (aka “Kouri-Vini”) has been continuously spoken for over 250 years in what is now the modern state of Louisiana as well as in other communities of the Gulf South region and elsewhere in diaspora settings where Creoles have migrated. This book represents the first modern publication concerning the language, and it is unique in its orientation to the everyday language learner.
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(2), p. 277-281, 2021
In their comprehensive new book, Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture, the two editors of the volume, Nathalie Dajko and Shana Walton, invite us to consider the complexity of Louisiana both from a linguistic and a cultural standpoint. Louisiana has long been considered to be a rich region to study language variation, identity, and culture, given its peculiar history as, successively, the territory of Indigenous peoples, a French colony, a Spanish colony, an American territory and, finally, an American State. Anterior synthesis works on languages in Louisiana have most notably focused on the history and description of Louisiana French and Creole (Valdman, 1997; Valdman et al., 2010). One of the great interests of Dajko and Walton's new book is to gather in the same volume a wide range of projects on Indigenous languages, on French, on Creole, on varieties of English, and on language practices by migrant groups. The book will be of interest for several (mostly academic) audiences as it presents a variety of fieldwork research, language revitalization projects, and touches upon multiple social issues linked to language and identity. The diverse linguistic, sociolinguistic, historical, and grassroots perspectives presented bring a certain heterogeneity to the volume in terms of depth of analysis and interest for different types of readers (as often expected in an essay collection) but also constitute one of its main strengths. The first section of the book (pp. 3-68), and probably one of the most innovative ones, focuses on the history and resilience of Indigenous languages in Louisiana. Most frequently, research on languages in Louisiana has been interested in linguistic variation and change brought about by the implantation of European languages by settlers since colonization. Due to a history of racism, relocation, linguistic assimilation, and scarcity of documentation, Indigenous languages spoken in Louisiana pre-contact have been understudied. With the chapters of this section, the book addresses multilingualism in Louisiana's pre-colonial and colonial history and underscores a history of active (and often forced) social and geographic mobility. With different perspectives (academic projects and grassroots initiatives), the chapters also address the negative bias toward indigenous languages both in popular culture and in scientific discourse. In the first chapter on the history of the Chitimacha language, Daniel Hieber illustrates the effects of language contact with other neighboring indigenous languages from the southeast across time due to successive relocations. Hieber's chapter also tells a story of resilience, documentation, and revitalization of the language by linguists, speakers, and the Cultural Department of the Chitimacha Tribe. In chapter 2, Linda and Bertney Langley present the language revitalization project led by the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana aiming to preserve Koasati, a Muskogean language that has remained the Tribe members' first language to this day, but is being progressively replaced by English among the younger generation. The history of the Tribe is familiar: settled for 150 years in southwest Louisiana, the Coushatta people had to relocate several times due to European encroachments. They resisted relocation on reservations and ended up taking advantage of homestead laws to purchase land in Louisiana. The chapter shows how the efforts led by the Tribe after it regained federal recognition in 1973 have transitioned from language documentation to
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 1995
Cajun Vernacular English is comprised of eight articles authored or coauthored by eight different contributors, all of whom are linked, by virtue of upbringing, profession, or interest, to the linguistic landscape of "Acadiana," the historically Francophone parishes of South Louisiana. The genesis of the book goes back to a graduate seminar in sociolinguistics conducted in 1988 by editor-contributor Ann Martin Scott. The seminar was held at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, in the heart of Cajun country. The need for such an anthology became apparent when attempts by the seminar participants to establish a bibliography for the study of Cajun English "revealed a complete absence of published work" (p. i). It will detract little from the force of this statement to point out that at least one previously published lexical study did in fact exist: Babington and Atwood (1961). Also, as Eble (1993, pp. 172-173) has pointed out, the Linguistic atlas of the Gulf States: The basic materials (Pederson, Billiard, Leas, Bailey, & Bassett, 1981) provides important published documentation waiting to be exploited for the purpose of describing Cajun English. (See also Dillard & Rivers, 1989, published shortly after Scott's seminar.) Apart from such exceptions, however, the English of Acadiana remains "perhaps the least studied variety of contemporary American English" (Eble, 1993, p. 171). The original seminar papers were, therefore, readied for publication and comple-1) Libraries and scholars interested in obtaining copies of Cajun Vernacular English for research purposes are invited to contact the editor directly:
Rethinking decreolization: Language contact and change in Louisiana Creole
PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019
All languages change. Creoles are no exception. However, do creoles change in the same ways as other languages? Research on language change in creoles has hinged on the notion of decreolization: apparently a ‘special case’ of contact-induced change whereby the creole adverges to the lexifier (Bickerton 1980). Decreolization has been characterized as ‘an insecure notion: insufficiently distinguished from ordinary change processes, possibly conceptually incoherent, and certainly not adequately supported by diachronic investigations to date’ (Patrick 1999:19, see also Aceto 1999, Russell 2015, Siegel 2010). This study tests whether decreolization can truly be distinguished from ‘ordinary’ change processes in non-creole languages and, crucially, brings diachronic corpus data to bear on this major gap in our understanding of language contact, change and creoles. These data are drawn from Louisiana Creole, a critically endangered and under-researched French-lexifier creole. Louisiana Creole is particularly well-suited to a study of decreolization: over the course of its life, it has been in contact with its lexifier (French) and a more distantly related language (English). This allows a comparative study of the outcomes of contact between the creole and its lexifier (i.e. Louisiana Creole-French contact) and a dominant language which is not its lexifier (i.e. Louisiana Creole-English contact). Further, different varieties of Louisiana Creole have had differing levels of contact over their history: the variety spoken along the Bayou Teche is typically described as heavily decreolized as a result of contact with French as well as being heavily influenced by English (Neumann 1985a); the variety spoken along the Mississippi river, from which the former variety developed, has had relatively less contact with French (Klingler 2003a). Additionally, this thesis demonstrates that Louisiana’s long history of racial segregation has significantly impacted the sociolinguistic dynamics in the region, with LC undergoing differing levels of contact with French on either side of the Jim Crow divide. Data on the morphosyntactic, phonological and lexical consequences of language contact are drawn from a purpose-built diachronic corpus containing 19th-century folklore texts, 20th-century language documentation materials as well as a transcribed subsample of some 50 hours of sociolinguistic interviews conducted in early 2017. In addition, a corpus of Facebook data is used analyze the language of the burgeoning online language revitalization community. Ultimately, this thesis finds that contact-induced change in Louisiana Creole does not proceed in a creole-specific fashion. It is therefore argued that language contact and change in creole languages is better characterized through existing theoretical frameworks and not through the creole-specific notion of decreolization. The intention of this thesis is not to dismiss decades of work on decreolization; rather, this thesis demonstrates that work on decreolization can be integrated into a non-creole-specific account of language contact, variation and change and so contribute to our understanding of the universal factors which modulate these phenomena. Mayeux, O. (2019). Rethinking decreolization: Language contact and change in Louisiana Creole (Doctoral thesis). https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.41629