In Louisiana, Desire for a French Renaissance
New York Times ByRICHARD FAUSSETFEB. 14, 2015
VILLE PLATTE, La. — “Qui c’est qui parle?” Jim Soileau asked, his baritone filling the studio of radio station KVPI and traveling across the Cajun prairie. Who’s speaking?It was a Monday morning, and the phone lines were open for “La Tasse de Café” (“The Cup of Coffee”), one of the last vestiges of French-language talk programming onLouisianaradio.
Mr. Soileau, 77, arrived at the station before daybreak to announce the news in French. At 8 a.m., he joined the station’s general manager, Mark Layne, to welcome the voices that began trickling in from the rice farms, tiny towns and two-lane highways in and around Evangeline Parish. “Qui c’est qui parle?” Some callers were senior citizens, eager to reminisce in the fluent French they had learned around their parents’ breakfast tables. Some were younger, and clumsier with the language. There were the regular callers, like Buffy from Mamou, who riffed on the news and the weather. There were the merely bilingual-curious and the cleverconteurstelling wry tales of Louisiana life and often flip-flopping, like Mr. Soileau, from French to English and back.
But the show is also a conscious effort to sustain an iteration of French that followed its own evolutionary path here, far from the famed vigilance of the AcadémieFrançaise. Many now believe Louisiana French to be endangered, even as other aspects of the state’s rural culture flourish amid the homogenizing forces of modern life.
“We’re not losing the music. We’re not losing the food,” Mr. Layne said from his office in Ville Platte, a city of 7,500 about two and a half hours west of New Orleans. “But we’re losing what I think is the most important thing, which is the language.”
The issues of language and culture tend to play out in complicated ways in Louisiana. Gov. Bobby Jindal, the son of Indian immigrants, has made a point of warning about Muslim immigrants who have not adapted to Western cultures and about any groups of people who would come to the United States to live in unassimilated enclaves and not learn English. The Cajuns here were once pushed to assimilate, specifically through laws discouraging them from speaking French in school. But today, their culture thrives in a conservative area, where patriotism runs neck and neck with fierce regional pride.
Mr. Soileau, for example, said he would be comfortable with English becoming the official language of the United States, but he added, “I think the government should not dictate to you how you should speak.”
So his show plays out as a lesson in a language swimming against the tide. According to census figures, Louisiana had more than 250,000 French speakers in 1990; by 2013 there were about 100,000.
Mr. Soileau, a veteran broadcaster, is recognized as an expert in the art of Louisiana French. His indispensable credential, in a primarily spoken language, is an education at his grandmother’s knee.
French was introduced to Louisiana in the late 17th century with the first European settlers. It flourished, most famously, here in southwest Louisiana, which eventually became home to many French-speaking settlers, including the Acadians, or Cajuns, who were expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in the mid-18th century. Many other Louisianans of French descent, both black and white, refer to themselves as Creoles.
The demise of their language was hastened in the last century by mass media, urban prejudices against French-speaking rural people and a mandate in the 1921 Constitution that public schools teach only in English. Many older Cajuns remember being punished for using their vernacular in class.
The late 1960s, however, brought the rise of a Cajun pride movement and an embrace of French cultural roots that continues today, with a statewide French immersion education program that is the largest in the country, serving more than 4,000 students.
But few here believe that is enough to undo the damage. The immersion students are a small fraction of the state population, and two-thirds of the teachers recruited for the program are foreigners whose “book French” may not always square with the Louisiana variety, with its irregularities and Anglicisms. (A truck here is, more often than not,un truck.)
“My generation is partially at fault for this,” said Charlie Manuel, 73, a retired insurance agent who hosts the thrice-weekly “La Tasse” on Fridays.
But there is also a hope that efforts like the show, along with a small band of Francophone scholars, activists and Cajun musicians, might nourish the language until it somehow flourishes again.
Cajun food, like cracklins and hog head cheese, is a part of the culture that has had more staying power than the language.
Barry Jean Ancelet, a renowned folklorist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said French-speaking Louisianans might look to the example of Hebrew, a largely dormant language that was revived by 19th-century Zionists. “Sure there’s every indication that this is dwindling at an alarming rate,” he said. “But there are also indications of remarkable activity and creativity.”
The route to linguistic renaissance may be unclear, but in Evangeline Parish, there is certainly a desire to find it. The parish does not have a French immersion program, and in December, the police jury, the equivalent of the county council, passed a resolution asking the school board to consider starting one.
The mayor here,Jennifer Vidrine,recently ordered bilingual street signs for the city, which are set to go up any day now. At Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church, the Rev. Jason Vidrine, a distant relative of the mayor who studied French at seminary school in Toulouse, has begun giving his Thursday morning sermons in what he calls “Frenglish.”
Questions ON YOUR OWN PAPER
1. How and why was French discouraged in Louisiana?
2. What is being done today to preserve it? (There are several things, not just one)
3. Why is Hebrew mentioned in the article?