The Lexicographer's Rules

For Acadians, History Speaks in Accents Disconsolate. "Over time some parents stopped insisting their children speak French, and schoolteachers shushed the sons and daughters named Fournier and Cyr. Now many adults in their 30s and 40s cannot speak Valley French, the Acadian patois that is more drawn out than crisp Parisian French."

Hmm, just last year the New York Times was telling us about a Francophone revival in Maine. Apparently it’s Parisian French that’s getting revived.

The same phenomenon happened to the Cajuns in south Louisiana. A variety of factors—government decisions, the growth of national culture, the expansion of the oil industry—combined to make French the shameful language of the home. I’m Cajun, and by the time I was a kid in the ‘70s and ‘80s, French was the language your folks switched into when they didn’t want the kids to understand. Even though I had older relatives who spoke only French into the early 1990s, it’s just a memory to my generation.

When an attempt was made to revive French, it wasn’t done by bolstering the existing Cajun French dialect. Instead, a government group imported teachers from France and Belgium and required that version of the language to be taught in schools. That led to all the sort of class and cross-cultural tension you’d expect.

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