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Sociolinguistics of Ethnicity in Francophone Louisiana

Nathalie Dajko*
Tulane University

Abstract
The situation of French in Louisiana and its relationship to ethnicity is often presented in an over-
simplified way. Misunderstandings of the terms Cajun and Creole tend to lead to a perception that
Louisiana Francophone categories are easy to define or correspond simply to language varieties
bearing the same names. In fact, historical changes to both Cajun and Creole identities have led
to today’s conflation of terms that belies a much more complex state of affairs featuring consider-
able linguistic diversity. Furthermore, the focus on these two terms has ignored a third group of
Francophones, American Indians. Linguistic fieldwork reveals that Cajuns, Creoles, and Indians all
express their identities by manipulating the language differently, but that labels given are not
always reliable indicators of the type of French spoken.

Introduction
In a scene from the 2003 film Runaway Jury, an elderly black woman working in a New
Orleans French Quarter store greets customers in French. It is explained that the woman
doesn’t speak English; she is Cajun. This scene illustrates one of the most pervasive
misunderstanding surrounding Louisiana French: that Louisiana French is Cajun French,
and that any Louisiana Francophone is a Cajun. Louisiana’s alternate Francophone label,
Creole, does not fare much better. People not familiar with Louisiana French may use
Creole to refer to any French spoken in Louisiana, presumably to indicate that the French
spoken is native to the State and also non-Standard. In fact, in popular understanding,
the terms Cajun and Creole are often conflated. Francophone residents may complicate
the situation by using the generic term French to apply to any type of French in Louisi-
ana, using the terms Cajun and Creole only when they wish to differentiate their language
from Standard French (SF); (self-identified) white francophones most often refer to their
language as Cajun, and people of black or mixed ancestry most often use the term Creole.
Observers (including linguists) often assume that these labels refer to discrete, different
types of French.
In short, by one view, there is a single French variety spoken in Louisiana that bears
multiple labels, and by another, there is a simple linguistic divide that corresponds to eth-
nic divisions. Both of these views are misleading. Louisiana French is highly variable, and
language labels do not always correspond neatly to ethnic divisions.
At this point it seems pertinent to note that the situation is further complicated by the
relationship between the concepts of race and ethnicity. While it is widely agreed upon
by anthropologists that race is a social construct and not a biological fact, to people on
the ground, as is arguably the case in most of America, physical traits are seen as real
markers that divide groups. Ethnicity and race are related concepts in that both refer to
an imagined common ancestry for their definition. In Louisiana, as we will see below,
race has come to be a major component of ethnicity – when asked to define the terms

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Cajun, Creole, or Indian, for example, respondents will most often refer to physical traits:
‘‘Indians are brown,’’ for example (Dajko 2007). For the remainder of this paper, I will
use the term race (or the terms black and white) when discussing groups of people based
on perceived physical differences, and ethnicity for a characteristic which is perceived as
shared background which is not (solely) seen as based on phenotypic characteristics. Race
and ethnicity are often seen as related but not the same. It is possible, for example, to be
white but not Cajun; however, for most people, being white is a mandatory element of
Cajun identity. To be Cajun (or Creole, for that matter) involves additional factors,
including shared foodways, music, the French language (in some form; as we will see)
and until recently, the Catholic faith. That Cajuns and Creoles interact and influence
each other in all these ways is possibly a reason for the stress on the social construct of
race as integral to ethnic identiy. As we will see, Cajuns sometimes do speak Creole, and
Creoles do speak Cajun, but this does not mean that there is only a single variety of
French going by two names, nor even that there are only two types of French spoken in
Louisiana.
To better understand the situation in Louisiana, it will help to first list the varieties of
French spoken there, to give a few details on their nature and history, and to then discuss
the confusion over ethnic labels. What kind of French is spoken in Louisiana? How did
it develop, and who speaks what?

Varieties of French Spoken in Louisiana

French is spoken today in southern Louisiana, in a region referred to as the French Tri-
angle, stretching from roughly Lake Charles in the west to Marksville in the north and
New Orleans in the east (though today it is extremely rare to find a native New Orlea-
nian Francophone), and bounded by the Gulf coast to the south. Despite a long history
of French settlement in Louisiana, since the mid-19th century and building momentum
in the 20th, French has been undergoing a shift toward English; today the bulk of Louisi-
ana’s francophones are over the age of 60.
Linguists generally recognize three main varieties of French in Louisiana. The first is
commonly called Colonial French, though many prefer to call it Plantation Society
French (Klingler 2003a; Picone 1997). Sustained contact with France, including immigra-
tion to Louisiana that continued even after the purchase of the territory by the United
States in 1803 and up to the eve of the Civil War (Brasseaux 2005; Picone 1997) is the
basis for the development of this variety. While it attests some nonstandard features (such
as the lexical item banquette ‘‘sidewalk’’ cf. SF trottoir), it is in many ways more similar to
SF. One example is the use of a uvular (throaty) r, as in SF, rather than the apical r (made
by flapping the tongue in the front of the mouth), more commonly attested in Louisiana
and other nonstandard dialects. Today, this variety is essentially extinct.
The second variety is a creole language, Louisiana Creole (LC), created by the slaves
whose importation began in 1719, and lexified by the dialectal French that entered Loui-
siana in the early years of the colony. Though it shares many features with Haitian
Creole, evidence nonetheless supports a Louisiana origin for this language (see for exam-
ple Klingler 2003a; Klingler and Dajko 2006; Marshall 1989; Neumann 1984). Given its
origin, this variety is in many ways very similar to nonstandard French dialects, particu-
larly at the level of the lexicon. Though researchers have noted the presence of a contin-
uum and the consequent difficulty in distinguishing the varieties (e.g. Brown 2008;
Klingler 1994) it does differ enough from these dialects to merit its own designation;
Brown (2008) points out that in many ways the designation may be motivated by politics

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or consideration for the speakers, that some features are nonetheless exclusive and there-
fore markers of LC further supports this decision. In some regions differences may render
intelligibility difficult, though not necessarily impossible. A few hallmarks of this variety
include the use of gen or ganyen (from gagner; in SF and in other Louisiana varieties ‘‘to
win’’) in place of the verb avoir, the use of subject pronouns derived from French tonic
pronouns (e.g. mo, to, ye; from moi, toi, eux) and, like most creole languages, drastically
reduced verb morphology and the use of tense ⁄ mood ⁄ aspect markers.
The third variety is simultaneously the most widely spoken and also the most widely
misrepresented French variety in the state [despite attempts over the years to dispel the
myths surrounding it, most recently by Klingler (2009)]. Though mutually intelligible
with SF, it bears a number of features that distinguish it from that variety, among them
pronunciations (including the flapped r and the retention of the sound ⁄ h ⁄ , which SF has
lost), the use of nonstandard lexical items (famously asteur ‘‘right now’’ cf. SF maintenant),
and some grammatical structures unattested in SF. It is with this variety that we will
begin the examination of the confusion over identity and labels. This is the variety that is
commonly called Cajun French, though it is more accurate to label this variety – or
assortment of similar varieties – Louisiana Regional French1 (LRF). LRF is often misun-
derstood to simply be a direct descendant of the French of the Acadians who survived
the Grand Dérangement in 1755 (the forced expulsion of French settlers from the Cana-
dian region known as Acadia – today Nova Scotia – by the English) and made their way
to Louisiana. Scholars often contribute to the confusion by shorthanding Louisiana’s com-
plex history, often interchanging the terms Acadian and Cajun (Klingler 2009). Still others
suggest that Acadians remained isolated until the 20th century, and thus their French is
the only French to have survived in Louisiana until the present (Picone and Valdman
2005;2 Caldas 2007). Finally, in 1970, the state legislature dubbed the 22-parish region in
which the most French is spoken ‘‘Acadiana,’’ further cementing the link between Acadia
and Cajun. A brief look at settlement history and the developments of the 19th and 20th
centuries will serve to demonstrate that the popular belief that this French descends
directly from Acadian French – and the concomitant belief that its speakers are
consequently of primarily Acadian descent – belies a much more complex story.

Settler Origins and Linguistic Influences

The earliest Francophone settlers (records survive for both military and civilian popula-
tions) were drawn from all over France; however, most came from a crescent-shaped
swath incorporating roughly the Ancien Régime provinces of Île-de-France, Brittany,
Champagne, Poitou, Aunis, and Burgundy (Brasseaux 1987).3 In fact, the overwhelming
majority were drawn from Île-de-France, notably the Parisian metropolitan region.
Figures 1 and 2 below (based on Brasseaux 2005) illustrate this. Blue-shaded areas indicate
settler origin; darker-shaded areas indicate regions providing more settlers.
Added to these immigrants were a number of Canadians, a handful of Germanophone
immigrants, and a large population of enslaved Africans, who would develop the French-
based creole spoken in the region. By the end of the French period in 1763, the colony’s
population was approximately 10,000, of which the overwhelming majority were Franco-
phone.
The Acadian settlers, by contrast, who began arriving shortly after the Spanish acquisi-
tion of the colony in 1763, were a strikingly homogenous group. A full seventy percent
of them came from the Poitou-Saintonge-Aunis region alone, and of that seventy
percent, seventy percent of them came from within a 20-mile radius of a single town,

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Fig 1. Origins of French period military.

Loudun, in the Poitou (Figure 3; based on Brasseaux 2005). Of the 10,000–12,000

expelled from Nova Scotia in 1755, approximately 3000 would eventually make their
way to Louisiana, arriving between 1765 and 1785, during the period of Spanish posses-
sion (1763–1800).
Despite the Spanish control of the colony, French speakers continued to form the base
of immigration and the colony remained primarily French in nature, with the exception
of an noteworthy number of Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Canary Islands. The
origins of the remainder of the French settlers arriving during the Spanish colonial period
are less certain; we can only trace the origins of seven percent of that immigration. But
within that seven percent, we do know that while Île-de-France, Brittany, and Nor-
mandy are again represented, the bulk of these settlers came from the Southern provinces
of France, notably Guyenne and Provence (Figure 4; based on Brasseaux 2005).
But what does all this mean for the linguistic history of Louisiana? First, it is important
to remember that the ancestor of French as we know it today was historically the lan-
guage of only a small percentage of the French population. In fact, France was (and still
is) linguistically diverse, as the following map of historical French linguistic regions
(Figure 5) illustrates4
By comparing the linguistic map with those of the origins of French settlers, it is
apparent that these early settlers represented a very broad range of linguistic variation.

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Fig 2. Origins of French period civilian settlers settlers.

Moreover, the social class of these early settlers is not a negligible factor – even those
originating in the Parisian region were not likely to be speakers of the direct ancestor of
modern Standard French, despite the dialect’s origin in that region. The Parisian working
class spoke (and still speak) something we call le français populaire, which was at any point
a mix of dialects from various regions around the country (Lodge 2004). Given that
Louisiana’s early settlers did not generally represent the higher classes of French society, it
would be strange if the majority during the French and Spanish colonial periods had
imported with them a variety of French that closely resembled modern SF. It is much
more likely that they brought with them varieties that resembled each other to a great
degree but were nonetheless neither standard (even for the time) nor uniform. And it
was into this linguistic mix that the Acadian refugees, themselves speakers of a nonstan-
dard dialect, arrived.

Acadian Immigration and Development of Cajun Identity and Language

Of note regarding the Acadian immigration is their minority in the colony. The first
waves of Acadian settlers, numbering about 1500 total, arrived in Louisiana between
1765 and 1770, at a time when the overall population of the colony was approximately
10,000 people of Old World origin (slave and free). Thus, the Acadians represented about

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Fig 3. Acadian origins.

10% of the overall population, Twenty years later, when the second wave of Acadians
arrived, the population of Louisiana had swelled to over 40,000. Even if we consider the
fact that the Acadian settlers had produced a new generation and their numbers had also
gone up, it is hard to consider the Acadians anything but a small minority in this sea of
other largely Francophone (West 1986) immigrants. Table 1 (below; reproduced from
Klingler 2009: 93) presents these numbers.
The Acadians settled in compact areas, the first wave settling primarily in the area of
what is now Lafayette and along the Mississippi upstream from New Orleans and the
German Coast, in a region dubbed the Acadian Coast, and the second settling primarily
in the Lafourche basin (Brasseaux 1987). A settlement established at Natchez in 1768 was
abandoned fairly rapidly, those settlers joining family in other established Acadian settle-
ments. By 1785, settlers from the first wave had expanded only slightly from their origi-
nal settlements (Figures 6 and 7; from Brasseaux 1987: 95, 97).
In fact, over the years, Acadians would show a remarkable resistance to expansion, pre-
ferring to remain near their friends and relatives (Brasseaux 1987: 115). Consequently,
very few, if any, ventured into some of the civil parishes that today are nonetheless
counted among the parishes of Acadiana.
Moreover, in their new homes, Acadians would come into contact with other groups
that would alter both their culture and their language. What took place was language

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Fig 4. Origins of French settlers, Spanish period.

leveling, accompanied by a shift in identities that ultimately would result in the conflation
of categories and confusion that reigns today. Along the Acadian Coast, for example,
already-established French settlers were less than enthused at the arrival of the newcom-
ers, whom they saw as lower class than themselves (Brasseaux 1987). While the settlers to
the west were entering less-occupied (by Europeans, at any rate) territory, they did not
remain isolated for long. Along the Lafourche, the Acadians would be outnumbered by
Francophone immigrants from other areas by a ratio of 3:2 (Brasseaux 1992:167) as
French immigration to the colony continued throughout the first half of the 19th century
despite Louisiana’s acquisition by the United States. This immigration would further
complicate the linguistic situation in Louisiana, as these immigrants (often called the for-
eign French) brought with them a French that differed little from modern Standard
French. Francophone refugees from St. Domingue (modern Haiti) in 1809, who num-
bered about 10,000 (Brasseaux 2005: 23) doubled the size of the city of New Orleans
(Brasseaux 2005) and brought in both a creole language and a SF-like variety.
Following the Civil War, wealthy French planters and 19th-century immigrants, eco-
nomically ruined by the war, joined the agrarian Acadians on the bottom rungs of the
socioeconomic ladder. The result was rampant intermarriage, with half of Acadian mar-
riages taking place with non-Acadians (Brasseaux 1992). The high rate of intermarriage,
which produced a strong pressure to assimilate, resulted in a new, hybrid culture. Even in

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Fig 5. French dialect regions.

Table 1. Population of Old World origin.

1766 1788

Free 5611 19,455

Slave 5799 23,166
Total 11,410 42,621

areas where they were numerically superior, Acadians absorbed foreign practices and their
society was significantly altered (Brasseaux 1992: 109).
As the cultures influenced each other, their languages did as well (Baronian 2005;
Brasseaux 1992). Though not all exogamous marriages were made with other Franco-
phones (Brasseaux 1992: 106) there was a general leveling of French dialects across the
state (Brasseaux 1992: 109). Moreover, given that many of these dialects bore similarities
to each other, it is very difficult today to attribute features of modern Louisiana Regional

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Fig 6. Acadian Settlement, 1760s.

French to any one source, Acadian or otherwise. Indeed, areas with high concentrations
of Acadians often lack features that are attested in Acadia, yet these same Acadian features
may be predominant in areas with higher concentrations of foreign French (for example,
the replacement of the sound ⁄ Z ⁄ (the final sound in rouge) with ⁄ h ⁄ (so, jamais ‘‘never’’
becomes hamais), a feature well-documented in Acadia, which is strongly attested in

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Fig. 7. Acadian settlement, 1785.

lower Lafourche Parish, but entirely absent in heavily Acadian Lafayette – or in fact any
other region of the state) (see also Picone 2006 and Baronian 2010 for discussions of the
difficulties of assigning provenience to features). Today’s Cajun French may be descended
from the non-standard dialects of the early French immigrants, Acadian French, and the
near-Standard French of the later 19th century immigrants in different measures, depend-
ing on region.

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Further complicating the situation was that Anglo American settlers, arriving en masse
following the Purchase and especially American statehood, did not differentiate between
Francophone groups. They applied the term Cajun, a term deriving from the French
Acadien (Acadien > Cadien > Cajun) to any poor, rural, white Francophone. As Brasseaux
explains, ‘‘The term Cajun thus became a socioeconomic classification for the multicul-
tural amalgam of several culturally and linguistically distinct groups’’ (1992: 104–05). The
insistence on a Cajun identity linked to Acadian ancestry began in the early 20th century
(Brundage 2009) and was continued in particular by the state agency CODOFIL (the
Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) following its establishment in
1968. Trépanier (1988, 1991) documents this phenomenon, noting that in only a 5-year
period between 1977 and 1982, white people who had previously called themselves
Creole were now calling themselves Cajun. It is thus that areas that historically sported
very few Acadian immigrants, like Evangeline and Avoyelles parishes, are now known as
hubs of Cajun culture (Brasseaux 1987; Klingler 2009). Increasingly, Cajun has become
the only choice of ethnic identity for white Francophones.

Creole Ethnogenesis and Language

Further complications arise with the term Creole, which has a complex, often confusing
history. At any given point in time, it may refer to white Louisianans of French and ⁄ or
Spanish descent, to people of African descent, or to people of mixed African and Euro-
pean descent, all of whom are believed to belong to different ethnic groups based on
their perceived physical differences. Dominguez (1977, 1986) gives an overview of the
changes in the meaning of the term: During the colonial era and into the early Ameri-
can period, it was associated with two ethnic groups (both also Francophone and Catho-
lic): whites of European descent, and Free People of Color (people of mixed ancestry
who enjoyed all of the legal and most of the social privileges of those of European-only
origin). In the late nineteenth century, however, the binary system employed by the
United States that classified anyone with even minor African ancestry into the single
group ‘‘colored’’ caused a rift in the population, with white Creoles now distancing
themselves from those of African descent and defining the term as exclusively white.
Free People of Color (or Creoles of Color), of course, continued to use the term
regardless. Two developments of the twentieth century may help to account for the cur-
rent state of affairs. The first is the promotion of a Cajun identity dependent on Acadian
ancestry. Trépanier (1988; citing also Waddell 1979) points out that this not only gave
dignity to the term Cajun, it permitted whites heretofore identifying as Creole a way to
further dissociate themselves from the Creoles of Color; the racial origins of Acadians
were unquestionably white. Moreover, as the term Cajun came to be the only apparent
designation of choice for whites, in the 1980s blacks who had never been called Creoles
appropriated that term for themselves. As a result, while the term Creole remains polyse-
mous, increasingly the term implies at least some African ancestry and most often refers
to a person of mixed race.

Correspondence between Language Labels and Ethnic Labels

What kind of French Creoles and Cajuns may speak is an additional point of confusion;
while linguistically the term creole is straightforward enough, when used by nonlinguists
this is by no means so. Historically, neither of the groups who traditionally identified as
Creole (whites or Free People of Color) was associated with the creole language spoken

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in Louisiana, though of course many were bilingual speakers; that language was associated
with slavery. Increasingly, however, the language label Creole has become associated with
those with African ancestry who go by the same name. As ethnicity became polarized
around race, it appears that language labels shifted as well, to match the new arrange-
ment.
Recent studies of Louisiana French focusing on ethnic labels and language ability illus-
trate this process. In a series of papers, Dubois and several co-authors (Dubois and Melan-
çon 1997; Dubois and Sankoff 1996; Dubois et al. 1995) have shown the emergence of
two competing identity definitions in Louisiana. Based on interviews with over 900 peo-
ple using a questionnaire asking respondents to describe their fluency in Cajun French
(her term) and their definition of Cajun ethnicity (using factors such as residence, ances-
try, music, foodways, and language), they show that individuals are likely to list as neces-
sary components to Cajun identity only those factors that they themselves meet. As the
French language dies, speakers are less likely to suggest that it is a requirement for Cajun
identity. Dubois’ work confirms the emergence, noted earlier by Trépanier (1988, 1991)
of a new ethnic identity in which the ability to speak French is no longer key. In fact,
Dubois’ work shows that ancestry is the single feature that all respondents consider key to
identity. Importantly, however, speakers who possess at least some ability to speak what
they call Cajun French are more likely to call themselves Cajun than those who have no
proficiency in the language at all. Dubois and Melançon (2000) present similar results for
Creole identity.
Work by Klingler (2003b) has refined these definitions somewhat, showing that race is
in fact a very powerful determiner not only of ethnic categorization, but as a conse-
quence also of language labeling. His research shows that the label given to the language
one speaks may be dependent on other, non-linguistic factors. This work follows up on
earlier work by ethnographers Le Menestrel (1999) and Spitzer (1977) who, as he notes,
both remark that often language labels seem to follow ethnic identification more than
they do linguistic features. This same tendency was earlier noted by Tentchoff (1975).
Klingler sets about to test this claim by selecting three features that can be unambiguously
categorized as either LRF (i.e. Cajun) or Creole. He surveys St. Landry and Pointe Cou-
pee Parishes, finding that in St. Landry both ethnic groups speak LRF, and in Pointe
Coupee, both speak Creole. These results are correlated with informants’ ethnic self-
identification and self-declared language label; the findings confirm that speakers often
label their language in accordance with their ethnic affiliation rather than differences in
speech patterns. In other words, not only do white Francophones call themselves Cajun,
they often call their language Cajun French, even when they are speaking something that
linguistically would be characterized as Creole. Conversely, those who call themselves
Creole (i.e. those who also claim African descent) will also call their variety of French
Creole, even when it bears the hallmarks of what linguistically would be characterized as
LRF, or Cajun French.
This is not to suggest that there are no differences which correlate with the
Cajun ⁄ Creole distinction, but the differences present are not great enough to merit desig-
nation by a different label. More recent work by Klingler (2008a,b) suggests that even
when both Cajuns and Creoles are speaking the same language variety, there may be
small differences in pronunciation between the two groups: Creole speakers tend to more
frequently use unrounded variants of the front rounded vowels ( ⁄ i ⁄ , ⁄ y ⁄ , ⁄ ø ⁄ , and ⁄ œ ⁄ )
(so, feu becomes fé and du becomes di) and tend more toward r-lessness than do Cajun
speakers, regardless of which variety of French they are speaking.

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Francophone Indians
One final group of Francophones has been very rarely addressed in the literature. Ameri-
can Indians are simultaneously one of the most Francophone and also the most consis-
tently ignored group in the state. Like Cajuns and Creoles, Indians are subject to a host
of assumptions about their language. The most frequent of these, ironically, is that while
Cajuns and Creoles are often assumed to speak French differently than each other, Indi-
ans are most often assumed to speak identically to their Cajun neighbors.
It is well known that through frequent contact and, ultimately, intermarriage with the
numerous French and Acadian settlers, more than one group of Louisiana Indians aban-
doned their traditional languages and shifted to French, particularly as they were pressured
to assimilate to European norms. Scholars and government agencies have claimed that the
Indians have adopted a French indistinguishable from that spoken by their neighbors.
Larouche (1981), in his report for the Université Laval’s Projet Louisiane, is illustrative in his
assertion not only of the similarity of Cajun and Indian lifestyles but also of the Lafourche
Basin’s Indians’ ability to speak French in the same way as the nearby Cajun communities:
Francophone de part et d’autre, l’Indien manie le langage de la même façon et avec le même
accent que le Cadjin (Appendix B, p.7).5
While several authors have documented the French of the this region (Guilbeau 1936,
1950; Lecompte 1962, 1967; Oukada 1977; Papen and Rottet 1997; Parr 1940), these
studies were conducted without using the ethnic affiliation of those studied as a variable to
be investigated, often under the assumption that Indians speak no differently than Cajuns.
Guilbeau (1950) is representative of the trend to dismiss potential ethnic differences when
he asserts that all the ethnic groups in Lafourche Parish speak the same French. This state-
ment appears to be based on informal observation or personal opinion and not on empiri-
cal evidence collected for the paper. Guilbeau certainly notes the existence of Indian
communities in the southern end of the parish, but none of his informants were from that
community, and there is no indication in his dissertation of the ethnic affiliation of the
informants he did work with. Guilbeau’s dissertation is, however, an exception to the
trend of assuming uniformity of the French in the region, in that he selects informants
from all areas of the Parish, and he does make brief mention of regionally based variation.
On the other hand, he tends to dismiss these differences as insignificant: he notes, for
example, that the replacement of the sound ⁄ Z ⁄ with ⁄ h ⁄ (e.g. jamais becomes hamais) is
more common in the town of Galliano than elsewhere, and he vaguely indicates that other
features are more characteristic of the upper bayou than the lower, but he concludes that
the differences are not important and that the language is generally the same everywhere
(Guilbeau 1950: 304–305). Quite possibly, then, Guilbeau may have been aware of differ-
ences between ethnic groups but considered them unimportant.
More recently, assumptions have surfaced alleging completely the opposite. Thus, Ste-
ven Caldas (2007) asserts that ‘‘by the turn of the twentieth-first century, essentially only
two varieties of French are still spoken in the state to any extent, Cajun and Creole. . . .
There is also a variety of French spoken in Terrebonne Parish among the Houma Indi-
ans’’(452). This assertion appears to be based on a misreading of Picone (1997), which
notes the high level of French retention in the Indian population of the Lafourche Basin,
but does not, however, suggest that the French spoken by the Indians is any different
than that spoken by Cajuns in the area – in fact, it does not address that subject at all.
Rottet (1995, 2001)) was the first to indicate that Indians may speak a French that dif-
fers in some respects from that of their non-Indian neighbors. Although his goal was to

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292 Nathalie Dajko

document the effects on French of language shift to English in Terrebonne and Lafourche
parishes, he paid close attention to sociocultural factors, and noted differences in the lan-
guage spoken according to respondents’ age, gender, and (self-declared) ethnicity. He
identified six items unique to Indian speech in Terrebonne-Lafourche, and one that was
more commonly attested in Indian speech than it was in Cajun. Moreover, he systemati-
cally sorted his data by ethnic group and thereby documented a number of further poten-
tial differences.
Dajko (2009) picks up where Rottet left off, conducting a systematic comparison of
ethnic groups in four towns in the lower Lafourche basin. Her results confirm that Indi-
ans do, in fact, manipulate the language differently than do Cajuns, though as was the
case for Cajun and Creole speakers in St. Landry and Pointe Coupee Parishes, the differ-
ences are not important enough to merit the use of a separate language label. The French
spoken by Indians in the Lafourche Basin attests only one feature that is not also found in
the speech of Cajuns of the area: the lack of gender differentiation in third person subject
pronouns. Where Cajun speakers use il for the masculine third person subject pronoun
and alle for the feminine, American Indian speakers often, though by no means always,
use il for both masculine and feminine subjects. The other differences between Indian
and Cajun speech are of degree, not of kind – the groups attest the same features, but to
different extents. Perhaps the most distinguishing of these features is the nasalization of
the sounds ⁄ e ⁄ and ⁄ e ⁄ (the vowels in French nez and mais) when they appear in word-
final position following a nasal consonant ( ⁄ m ⁄ , ⁄ n ⁄ , or ⁄ N ⁄ ). Thus, for example, donner
[done] becomes donnain [don~e], and mais ‘‘but’’ becomes homophonous with main
‘‘hand’’. Indians are more likely than are Cajuns to attest this nasalization. Another strong
distinguisher is the pronunciation of the masculine definite article, le, normally [lø], as lo
[lo], which is again more common among Indian speakers than among Cajuns. Likewise,
Indians are more likely to agglutinate the sound ⁄ l ⁄ to the verb aimer ‘‘to love’’, thus pro-
ducing laimer, and they are more likely to depalatalize the sound ⁄ Z ⁄ in the first person
singular pronoun – in other words, je becomes se or ze more often in Indian speech than
in Cajun. Finally, Indian French is more internally variable than is that of Cajuns, that is
to say, Indian communities differ more between each other than do Cajun.

Conclusion
The oversimplified understandings of Francophone Louisiana detailed at the beginning of
this article are perplexing because they are not always advanced by the speech community
itself. While the link between Cajun and Acadian is widely promoted and accepted in Lou-
isiana, other generalizations are not. Speakers are often cognizant of differences (or the lack
thereof) in their language. They are very much aware of regional variation in their lan-
guage, delighting in misunderstandings that occasionally arise. Indeed, many a fieldworker
has been informed by the community, that blacks and whites may give a different name to
the same language variety. But whether differences are deemed worthy of note may also be
a reflection of social distance between groups. Rottet (1995) documents a higher rate of
reported difference between Cajun and Indian speech in the Lafourche than does Dajko
(2009). This is not necessarily a reflection of actual perception of difference; when pressed,
residents will often acknowledge variation but dismiss it as insignificant. It is possible that
the different rates obtained are due to a slight relaxation in recent years of a historically
tense relationship between these groups (Dajko 2009) – a tension that remains much stron-
ger between Cajun and Creole communities. As it turns out, Cajuns do speak Creole and
Creoles do speak Cajun, but this simple statement belies a far more complex situation.

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 Language and Ethnicity in French Louisiana 293

Short Biography
Nathalie Dajko is Assistant Professor at Tulane University, New Orleans. She received
her BA in anthropology at UNLV in 2002 and her MA and PhD at Tulane University
in 2005 and 2009 respectively, both in linguistic anthropology. Her dissertation was a
paper of Louisiana French as it is spoken by Cajuns and Indians in Lafourche and Terre-
bonne Parishes. She has also conducted fieldwork with French and Creole speakers in
Acadiana at large, on Grand Isle as well as in Evangeline, Avoyelles, Lafayette, Natchi-
toches, Plaquemines, and St. Tammany Parishes. Her publications include a book chapter
on the origins of Louisiana Creole (Klingler and Dajko 2006). She was further responsible
in part for the production of a video on the French and Creole of Natchitoches Parish,
Tout quelqu’un parlait français ici, and an accompanying website ([Link]
[Link]/[Link]). Current research projects include a paper of liaison in Louisiana
French, a longitudinal paper of the dying language, and an analysis of similarities between
Louisiana Regional French and Creole in the Lafourche. She is also currently collaborat-
ing with local filmmaker Rocky McKeon on video documentation of the French
language in the Lafourche basin.

Notes
* Correspondence address: Nathalie Dajko, Department of Anthropology, 101 Dinwiddie Hall, Tulane University,
New Orleans, LA 70118, USA. Email: ndajko@[Link]

1
This is a term discussed in Klingler (2003b). See also Klingler and Dajko 2006 for further discussion.
2
‘‘En fin de compte, ce n’est qu’au sein de la population d’origine acadienne isolée...que se conserva une variété
de français, le FC.’’ (Picone and Valdman 2005:150) [‘‘In the end, it is only in the heart of the isolated Acadian
population…that a variety of French is perserved, Cajun French’’ (translation mine)].
3
All the demographic data on early settlement that I provide here is taken from Brasseaux (2005).
4
Map by the Institut géographique national de France. Available at [Link]
France_dialectale.htm. Downloaded from [Link] July 25,
2010.
5
‘‘The Indians are thoroughly Francophone across the region, and use the language in the same way and with the
same accent as the Cajuns’’ (translation mine).

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Further Reading
Herrell, David M. 1997. A description of the cultural situation of the Houma Indians of South Louisiana. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Master’s thesis.
Larouche, Alain. 1980. Les Cadjins du Canal Yankee: problèmes d’identité culturelle dans la paroisse Lafourche en
Louisiane. Québec: Département de Géographie, Université Laval.
Salmon, Carole Lucienne. 2007. Français acadien, français cadien: Variation stylistique et maintenance de formes
phonétiques dans le parler de quatre générations de femmes cadiennes. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
PhD dissertation.
Valdman, Albert, and Thomas A. Klingler. 1997. The structure of Louisiana Creole. French and Creole in Louisi-
ana, ed. by Albert Valdman, 109–44. New York and London: Plenum Pess.
——, ——, Margaret M. Marshall, and Kevin J. Rottet. 1998. Dictionary of Louisiana Creole. Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press.
——, Kevin Rottet, Barry Jean Ancelet, Richard Guidry, Thomas A. Klingler, Amanda LaFleur, Tamara Lindner,
Michael D. Picone, and Dominique Ryon. 2010. Dictionay of Louisiana French as spoken in Cajun, Creole, and
American Indian Communities. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

ª 2012 The Author Language and Linguistics Compass 6/5 (2012): 279–295, 10.1002/lnc3.333
Language and Linguistics Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd