Jonathan Abrams reports for the NY Times (archived) about a worthy attempt at preservation:
While relaxing a couple of years ago, Prof. Joshua Caffery found himself in the mood to unwind with some old-time Cajun music. He asked Amazon’s Alexa to play selections from Dewey Balfa, a celebrated fiddler and singer credited with popularizing the genre. Instead, Alexa frustratingly steered him to the catalog of the modern pop artist, Dua Lipa, Caffery said.
“I love Dua Lipa,” said Caffery, the director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Don’t get me wrong. But it seems problematic if you’re interested in a different kind of culture and you want to surround yourself with the music of your region. That, to some degree, is threatening my hold on these things I love.”
Louisiana French, the oral dialect of which Balfa was a cultural guardian, is part of the Bayou’s societal DNA, a link to its history, music and identity. Today, Caffery described the language as struggling and endangered, a notion reinforced by Alexa’s overlooking Balfa.
In response, Caffery assembled a small team at the center to train its own language learning model in automatic speech recognition for Louisiana French, drawing from a trove of historical artifacts and interviews. Over the months, as the learning language model is trained on bits of the language — such as an old-age French nursery rhyme — it brings centuries-old dialect closer into the digital age. […]
The consequences of the language gap can be far greater than an A.I. assistant confusing musical artists, said Christine Mallinson, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The importance of accurate speech recognition becomes greater as important tasks like job hiring and medical transcriptions become more automated and digitized, she said.
“Social differences are encoded in language,” Mallinson said. “There’s accents, patterns of grammar, word choice. Those differences are connected to our families, our neighborhoods, our age and gender and racial and ethnic and cultural backgrounds and where we grew up. “If A.I. speech systems make more errors for speakers of underrepresented languages or language varieties, then there can be these serious downstream consequences,” she continued.
For centuries, Louisiana French was the predominant language spoken in South Louisiana. In 1921, a new state constitution declared English the primary language. Many parents stopped teaching their children the language out of fear of discrimination, as students who spoke Louisiana French in class were often punished with knuckle-rappings.
A reversal came in 1968 when the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana was created to advance French, largely through education and community initiatives. In 2023, the Advocate of Baton Rouge estimated about 120,000 Louisianans still spoke French.
More at the link, including audio files; thanks, Eric!
Someone mentioned James Lee Burke’s detective stories here approvingly not long ago; I forget who it was (apologies) but I agree with the assessment (though I find the novels intense enough that I don’t think I’d want to read two in close succession.)
His Louisianan hero Dave Robicheaux is of the generation that fought in Vietnam; his parents are implied to have been French-speaking. He himself utters a bit of French now and again, but you get the impression he’s a semispeaker (language is not a big focus in the stories.) Seems about right.
that sounds similar, or maybe slightly behind a distinct* but similar trajectory of anglicization as new england “french-canadian” french (which is almost but not quite a “the border crossed them” situation), where my sense is that kerouac and his generation spoke it, but mostly with their parents, and not necessarily with their children.
i never really talked about that history with my father’s second wife, who was born in the 1950s into a merrimack valley french-canadian family, but her parents had distinctly french names, while her sibling’s names (and hers) are perfectly standard anglo-u.s. names popular in the period among white middle-class parents. i can’t ask her now; it was her 10th yortsayt last week.
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* mainly because there wasn’t (i think still isn’t) the same sense of themselves as an entire way of life that the cajun world has – partly i assume because the old home (québec or new brunswick) was right there, and you didn’t even need a passport to go back and forth until the 00s.
As part of its turbulent political history, Louisiana has had more different constitutions than any other American state (ten in total). A history of the twists and turns of language policy through those different constitutions is given at some length in one section of this article, although it seems to tell the tale from a factional viewpoint. (Thinking a key focus of the constitutions of 1864 and 1868 should have been further entrenchment of Francophone privileges rather than squelching the legacy of secession and slaveowning is certainly a point of view …) https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5694&context=lalrev
Hard to argue with the article’s big-picture overview: “During certain periods, the French language has thrived in Louisiana. At other times, it has been swept under the carpet as an embarrassing relic of the State’s colonial past. Presently, the French language, or a variation thereof, subsists in certain parts of the State and plays an integral role in Louisiana’s tourism industry. As long as there are tourist dollars to be reaped, the French language and culture appear secure in Louisiana. However, the security provided by tourism does not extend to the French language in Louisiana law.”
Separately, it’s not clear to me whether the 1921 constitution actually squelched an existing system of Francophone public schools in parts of the state or simply assured that as public education finally became universal for the poorer rural population it would be Anglophone education. The state convention that generated the 1921 constitution was FWIW presided over by the impressively-named Hewitt Leonidas Bouanchaud. He was from something of a minor political dynasty, with one nephew who subsequently served as sheriff of Pointe Coupee Parish rejoicing in the name of Alcide “Bub” Bouanchaud.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I know a woman, now in her 90s, who’s a lifelong Mainer born in the Lewiston area. She told me that when she was a child, there was a French-speaking community in that area, but that while the children were typically bilingual, many of the parents had little or no English.
Maine, like Louisiana, made efforts to extinguish French, and largely succeeded. I think Rozele is right about there being no strong collective French identity in Maine that corresponds to the Cajun culture of Louisiana.
I’m certainly fuzzy on the details in Maine but I suspect the dynamics influencing language use in various contexts are different in southern mill towns like Lewiston where the original Francophones were an urban immigrant group who might as well have been from Slovenia than they are way up north in the St. John Valley where people are in many ways more closely connected (including sometimes by blood relation) to the immediately-neighboring parts of Francophone Canada than they are to southern/coastal Maine and indeed where some folks are living where their ancestors did before the exact location of the U.S./Canadian border was finally settled. Whether the ancestrally-Francophone potato-growers up around Presque Isle feel any particular sense of ethnic kinship with the ancestrally-Francophone erstwhile millworkers (I assume the mills all shut down 50 years ago …) down in Lewiston is not known to me.
that all makes sense to me! and the mill towns of maine may be more similar to those of the merrimack valley and elsewhere in upper southern new england – though the massively multinational/multicultural makeup of the early 20thC workforces in places like lowell and lawrence would also have changed the linguistic landscape.
i know the great allan bérubé zts”l wrote about his childhood and family somewhere (and i think about franco/anglophony), but i can’t remember where. wikipedia says that his grandparents were farmers in western massachusetts and his parents were semi-migrant workers in various industries, but nothing about their languages.
French was the first language of Jack Kerouac (aka Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac).
I want more complaints about Alexa’s lack of Lousiana-musicology insight when decoding spoken instructions. “I asked for Clifton Chenier and got Evelyn Waugh.”
Pointe Coupee Parish
For aficionados of Louisiana-fried French, this is apparently pronounced /ˈpɔɪnt kəˈpiː/ except by prissy folk who insist on the Frenchier /ˈpwɑːnt kuːˈpeɪ/.
FRENCH IN MAINE was discussed at Language Hat in 2006, in response to a New York Times article reporting (optimistically?) “le Français fait une rentrée — French is making a comeback”. Several commenters in New England confirmed bigotry against French and said it was tied in with anti-Catholic bigotry.
Wish cuchuflete were here for the Maine perspective.
I suspect people in Louisiana also associated French-speaking with Catholicism, but there were too many Catholics there to do all that much with the observed correlation. The Cajun parts of Louisiana were pretty much the only part of the Deep South where the Democrats gained rather than lost votes when they ran the famously non-Protestant Al Smith as their Presidential candidate in 1928. Plus the difficulty that French-speakers had historically included your old-line gentry-elite types in the state as well as colorful rural yokels, whereas the more Anglo-Protestant-heavy northern parts of Louisiana were very non-elite (Huey Long’s populist power base, not to mention the cultural matrix from whence sprang Jerry Lee Lewis) and thus very different from New England Brahmins tut-tutting about the superstitious Popery of immigrant millworkers.
The difference within New England is that Ct., Mass. & R.I. had a wider variety of Catholic immigrant groups you could have tut-tutted about, with the Quebecois being comparatively minor players compared to Irish and Italians everywhere, Poles and Portuguese some places, etc. etc., all before more recent Hispanic arrivals While further north the French-speakers might well have been the dominant Catholic ethnicity, or at least the dominant non-Irish (and thus non-Anglophone) one.
I like newer Cajun music OK, but it’s a bit too Country for my taste. The Frères Breaux’ Ma Blonde Est Partie is more soulful and touching than later yee-haw versions. Their sister Cléoma and her husband Joe Falcón did some truly beautiful things, and even the funny Mon Bon Vieux Mari has depth and gravity to it.
BTW Joe Falcón was Isleño, not Cajun. Per WP there are still some native speakers of Isleño Spanish around.
I just discovered this old Alexa joke today.