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 | Research > Cajun and Creole English Project
Sociohistorical forces and language changes in English-speaking Creole and Cajun communities in Southern Louisiana : An NSF project under the direction of Dr. Sylvie Dubois.
In spite of its being one of the most culturally and linguistically interesting areas in the U.S., South Louisiana had received little attention from linguists until Dr. Dubois and her associates began their research efforts there in 1995. The findings of their first project sponsored by the NSF (SBR-9514831) (see the "Cajun French project" at left) has revealed a central fact about French-speaking communities: language shift has been taking place rather dramatically over the last three generations. These communities have moved from monolingual French to bilingual French-English and are now moving rapidly to monolingual English. Situations of shift offer a unique opportunity to study language change in progress. The Louisiana French communities are interesting for many reasons: 1- the shift to English began when French was discredited but attitudes towards things French changed to positive during the course of the shift; 2- the variety of English they spoke is heavily stigmatized in southern Louisiana; and 3- the social differences between Cajuns (mostly a white population) and Creoles (African-American community) lead language change and linguistic identity along separate paths. The sociolinguistic effect of language shift has been the development of two ethnolects (Cajun English and Louisiana African American Creole English), i.e., varieties of a language in which the expression of ethnic identity is maintained in an adopted language after loss of the ethnic language.
Recently, Dr. Dubois at the Department of French Studies has received her second three-year grant from the prestigious National Science Foundation. The research projet will describe both the historical and social contexts as well as the internal features of two dialects of American English spoken by French-speaking communities --Cajun English and Creole African American English, which have scarcely been studied or even recognized.
Preliminary analysis of Cajun English has revealed four change processes in the development of selected sociolinguistic features in the ethnolect: the origination of the variant in the accented English of the oldest generation; the adoption of local regional variants of English by the middle generation, the recycling of the accented English by the young and/or the persistance of particular features over two or more contiguous generations. The sociolinguistic patterns associated with these processes are complex and intimately tied to the sociohistory of these communities.
The Cajun and Louisiana African American Creole French communities of Southern Louisiana provide a unique opportunity for a comparative sociolinguistic study of the process of language shift. There are many points of comparison between the Cajun and Creole communities: they are from the same locale (Southern Louisiana), have the same ancestry language (French); have shared the occupation of the land; being oppressed by English-speaking whites, both became stigmatized social groups; and both have a recent history of linguistic integration under government pressure (none of their variety of French taught in schools) followed by belated attempts to encourage the use of academic French (largely for tourism/economic reasons.) The major difference between the two groups is race. The study of both developing ethnolects - Cajun and Louisiana African American Creole English - will help to sort out the problem of the linguistic origins of ethnolectal features (in the accented variety of second language learners or adoptions from the same or different regional variants).
The social setting of the Cajun and Creole communities which has led to the development of English dialects will be compared through the examination of their recent sociohistory in order to identify the similarities and differences in the social forces guiding language change and dialect development. The overall goal of the study is to construct a model of the development of ethnolects which takes account of geographical location, ethnic/racial identities, sociohistory and linguistics. |
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