[LINK] "In Cajun land, a reveille to French heritage"

[rfmcdonald]

Sean Cockerham's widely-syndicated article--available here at the Sacramento Bee--makes a compelling argument that the French language in Louisiana faces at best a dire fate. Language transmission to younger generations has collapsed, at least in part because there is no longer much of an economic incentive to speak French: the English language is clearly dominant in Louisiana as it is in the United States as a whole; the number of people in Louisiana who prefer to speak French to English continues to drop sharply; it's unlikely that you can get enough sustained migration from Francophone areas of the world to keep French afloat as a language of Louisiana communities; and, the French dialects spoken in Louisiana differ significantly from standard French. Language shift has gone too far.

I disagree with the people interviewed who suggest Cajun culture couldn't survive a definitive language shift to English. Ireland is still Irish despite being overwhelmingly Anglophone, right? Cajun (and other French-related) cultural identities will just mutate, that's all.

It's 9:30 a.m. and the drinking and dancing already are raging at Fred's Lounge, a fais do-do of Cajun French music, waltzes and two-steps, with cans of Miller Lite the breakfast of choice in this joint down a winding road past rice fields and crawfish ponds. The Saturday morning party from the windowless, 66-year-old bar is broadcast live throughout the South Louisiana prairie on 1050 AM out of Ville Platte, and the music has been credited with helping to sustain the Cajun French culture since just after World War II.

But Fred's 81-year-old manager, Sue Vasseur, known as Tante Sue de Mamou, worries about the survival of the Louisiana French culture. The current generation, she said, isn't picking up the French language, which is part of the soul of the Acadian people who settled in Louisiana in the mid-1700s, when they were expelled from the present-day Canadian province of Nova Scotia after refusing to swear their allegiance to the British crown.

"I'm hoping it's going to continue. They are teaching French in our schools here now in Mamou and Evangeline Parish. So I think possibly some of it will rub off on our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren," said Vasseur, wearing a pistol holster of cinnamon schnapps on her hip as dancers whirled to a rollicking 10-button accordion and a singer belting out a love song in French.

There's a major effort in Louisiana, a state named for the French king Louis XIV, to reverse the trend and restore the French language. It's part of a resurgence in cultural pride, and there are signs that the decline in French speakers has slowed. Among the last hopes is the nation's largest French immersion program, in which every subject except English is being taught in French to kindergarteners through eighth-graders. Just under 4,000 students in nine parishes are in the program, typically with teachers imported from France, Belgium, Quebec and French-speaking African nations.

[. . .]

Louisiana French advocates are fighting an uphill battle. There are economics at play, the fact that Louisiana is a poor state that doesn't have a lot of jobs in which speaking French is an asset. There also are politics. Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal used his veto power last month to slash 40 percent of the budget of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana. That state agency is charged with, among other things, helping to recruit immersion teachers from French-speaking countries. The agency is left with a budget of $150,000 and two employees, a situation that director Joseph Dunn suggested in a recent interview might allow it just to "keep the lights on and do the absolute bare minimum."

Language revolution comes slowly in a place such as Butte La Rose, a town of 800 accessible by a narrow pontoon bridge, where locals for generations have harvested crawfish and catfish from the Atchafalaya River and the surrounding swamp. It's a beautiful, muddy world of cypress trees and Spanish moss, of bullfrogs, alligators and snakes.

At Doucet's Grocery, the only retail outlet in town, Jack Doucet sat behind the counter shooting the breeze with his customers as he's done every day while running the place for 47 of his 83 years, closing only for Christmas and New Year's. Gwen Duplechin stopped in for a leisurely chat, and reflected on the survival of Cajun French. "Our older people are dying off, our people that talk French are dying off," Duplechin said.
Duplechin said her granddaughter took French immersion in school and learned "the good French" (as opposed to the Cajun French dialect) from the teachers imported from Quebec and France. "But she doesn't speak it; you have to keep it up or it doesn't work," Duplechin said.