What is louisiana creole

Plantation Society French, which has now practically disappeared from Louisiana, was close in structure to Standard French of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but distinguished from it by a number of phonological and lexical particularities. It flourished in Louisiana during the first half of the nineteenth century, especially among the planter and merchant classes whose families could afford to educate their children in French, often by sending them to France.

Louisiana Regional French, more commonly known as Cajun French, 2 displays far more features that distinguish it from Standard French, including a number of morphological and syntactic constructions. It is also much more widely spoken than Louisiana Creole , and while no reliable figures are available, it is likely that the great majority of the , respondents who indicated on the U.

Census Bureau With Plantation Society French virtually absent from the scene, the only other variety of French that Louisiana Creole speakers are likely to come into contact with today is Louisiana Regional French.

Contact between speakers of Louisiana Creole and Louisiana Regional French was likely to have been much more intensive in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when poor whites and ex-slaves and their descendants often worked side by side in sugarcane and cotton fields as sharecroppers or hired hands.

This sustained contact may have been one avenue for the spread of Louisiana Creole among some elements of the white population Neumann , a , and it may also explain why the Louisiana Creole spoken today, especially in the Bayou Teche area, generally shows more French-like features — such as front rounded vowels [lary] vs. But if Louisiana Creole on the whole appears to be less basilectal today than in the nineteenth century, there are clear ethnolinguistic differences among current speakers, with the Louisiana Creole of white speakers showing a measurably greater proportion of French-like features than that of black speakers Neumann , a; Klingler , There is also interesting regional variation within Louisiana Creole , and on the whole it may be said that the Louisiana Creole of Pointe Coupee is more basilectal than that of Breaux Bridge.

This variation led Speedy , to posit a separate genesis for these varieties, though Klingler has argued against this hypothesis. As previously noted, speakers of all French-related varieties have been subjected to great pressure to shift to English, and as a result, the only monolingual speakers of Louisiana Creole or Louisiana Regional French are a very small number of elderly people who never attended school.

Extensive bilingualism has led to massive borrowing from English, rampant codeswitching, and structural influence on Louisiana Creole and Louisiana Regional French e. The vowels are shown in Table 1. Table 1. Louisiana Creole features 22 distinct consonants shown in Table 2 and is distinguished from French mainly by the existence of a voiced and an unvoiced palatal fricative e.

There is no widely accepted orthography for Louisiana Creole , and those who have sought to represent the language in writing have typically used an ad hoc spelling based on French orthography.

An exception is the Dictionary of Louisiana Creole , which used an adapted version of the official orthography for Haitian Creole. We have chosen to use this orthography for all of the Louisiana Creole examples in this article, even if they appear in a different spelling in the original source.

Table 2. Nominal morphology is absent in basilectal varieties of Louisiana Creole. Neumann a : notes that agglutination rarely occurs in the Louisiana Creole of whites and is one of the features that most clearly distinguishes the Louisiana Creole of this group from that of blacks. Nouns are not inflected for number or grammatical gender, though natural gender is distinguished by means of several lexical pairs e.

The indefinite determiner is en in the singular and de in the plural. In modern-day Louisiana Creole , this system has been partially replaced with one using prenominal l, la sg. Postposed determiners continue to coexist with their preposed equivalents, however especially in Pointe Coupee ; when the postnominal plural form does occur, it today takes the form ye rather than la-ye , and it sometimes co-occurs with prenominal le : tou le jen jan ye [all DET.

The singular demonstrative determiner is postposed sa-la , which in Pointe Coupe has the variants sa-a and sa. In Breaux Bridge, the form sila , typical of nineteenth-century Louisiana Creole , is also attested. Sila-ye , found in nineteenth-century texts, appears rarely in Breaux Bridge but is not attested in Pointe Coupee.

Unlike the other French creoles of the Atlantic region except that of French Guiana, the possessive determiners of Louisiana Creole are prenominal rather than postnominal see Table 3.

This tendency is greater in Breaux Bridge than in Pointe Coupee, and it is greatest among white speakers in both regions. The possessive pronouns see below also double as emphatic possessive determiners:. In possessive NPs , the possessor may be marked by the preposition a or simply follow the possessum, with no marking.

Both structures may be seen in example 5 :. Louisiana Creole has both prenominal and postnominal adjectives , the two categories corresponding to those of Standard French:.

While adjectives in nineteenth-century Louisiana Creole are not inflected for gender, today adjectives showing feminine morphology are not uncommon, especially in the Louisiana Creole of whites: en nouvo lamezon vs.

There is no clear distinction between dependent and independent pronouns , and, with the exception of the 3SG, adnominal possessives are largely homophonous with their subject pronoun counterparts see Table 3. Table 3. Histoire de la Louisiane. Paris: De Bure. Marshall, M. Bilingualism in southern Louisiana, a sociolinguistic analysis.

Anthropological Linguistics, 24 , — The origins of Creole French in Louisiana. Regional Dimensions, 8 , 23— Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 6 1 , 73— CrossRef Google Scholar. McGowan, J. Creation of a slave society: Louisiana plantations in the eighteenth century. Unpublished Ph. Mercier, A. Neumann, I. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. Neumann-Holzschuh, I. Pelleprat, P. Paris: S. Pitot, J. Observations on the colony of Louisiana from — trans.

Henry C. Many self-identify as African American, while others as mixed race. And so, the Louisiana Creole language was mainly created from the combination of French and African languages with a little Spanish added in , enabling slaves to communicate with each other and to colonists. The distinct languages and cultures impacting Louisiana Creole give it a special sound.

Louisiana Creole is French-based language with many African influences and elements. It has something called reduplication , where a word gets repeated, usually three times, for emphasis. The concept is similar to how we put extra stress on a word or syllable for emphasis. Louisiana Creole : To bras li zhiska li vini zhon zhon zhon. Literal translation : You mix it until it become yellow yellow yellow. English translation : You mix it until it turns very yellow.

Below are a few examples. Literal translation : How you like gumbo-this English translation : How do you like this gumbo? Estimates say there are under 7,—10, people who still speak Louisiana Creole. As is common with endangered languages, many Louisiana Creole speakers are older, preferring their native tongue and preserving their culture.

Younger people very often adopt the dominant language. Most speakers of Louisiana Creole are, of course, in Louisiana, and most also speak English fluently. Fueled by European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, creolization occurred throughout the Latin Caribbean world: different populations, most of them in lands new to them, blended their native cultural practices—culinary, linguistic, musical—to create new cultural forms.

Creolized French—Kouri-Vini, also known as Louisiana Creole—was, by the s, in wide practice, including among Acadian descendants. The accordion, a star feature of both Cajun and zydeco music, was brought to the colony by German settlers, and its use was popularized in part by the enslaved people working those plantations. It all gets back to self-identification. Three teenagers are pictured at the Carencro racetrack. Much harder to substantiate is when those Acadian Creoles began calling themselves Cajun.

If the first step in becoming Cajun was creolization, then Americanization was step two. Well established by the s, Jim Crow separated white from nonwhite, funneling the historically diverse Creole populace into a racial binary at a time when its language traditions were under threat. A publicity image from the film Evangeline depicts the world of the 18th-century Louisiana Acadians as a romantic, Eurocentric idyll.

During the s the hardening of the racial divide prompted white historians and community leaders to valorize the period of the Acadian expulsion, on which the story of Evangeline is based. During the s the hardening of the racial divide prompted white historians and community leaders to valorize the period of the Acadian expulsion, which is to say, before creolization.

As Landry recounts in his doctoral thesis, the dream of Acadie blossomed in the popular imagination: Evangeline , the Longfellow poem from , and two film adaptations of it , were held up as a Eurocentric Acadian ideal. Tourism to Nova Scotia, based on interest in the Acadians, rose. World War II was a turning point in the process of shifting Cajuns away from their Creole roots and toward the burgeoning American mainstream.

Although many whites still identified as Creole, segregation and the Acadian-focused heritage movement of the s had conscripted white and nonwhite residents of South Louisiana into increasingly separate, racialized spheres—Acadian and Creole. The revival movement to come would separate those categories even further, turning Acadian into Cajun in the process.

A man at a Mardi Gras celebration in the town of Mamou dons a suit made of moss.