Louisiana Creole

Louisiana Creole, also known by the endonym Kouri-Vini (), among other names, is a French-based creole language spoken by fewer than 10,000 people, mostly in the U.S. state of Louisiana. Today it is spoken by people who may racially identify as white, black, mixed, and Native American, as well as Cajun and Creole. Its sister language is Louisiana French, a dialect of the French language. Many Louisiana Creoles do not speak the Louisiana Creole language and may instead use French or English as everyday languages. Due to its rapidly shrinking number of speakers, Louisiana Creole is considered an endangered language.

Origins and historical development

Louisiana was colonized by the French beginning in 1699, as well as by Acadians who were forced out of Acadia around the mid-18th century. Colonists were large-scale planters, small-scale homesteaders, and cattle ranchers; the French needed laborers, as they found the climate very harsh. They began to import enslaved Africans, as they had done in their Caribbean island colonies.

Also, the monopoly held by the Company of Indies in both Senegal and Louisiana may also have contributed to the Africans' relative ancestral homogeneity. Because of this homogeneity, retention of the Africans' indigenous languages may have hindered the development of a Creole in Louisiana. In fact, the Pointe Coupee slave revolt in 1731 was organized by the Bambara who were purportedly speaking their ancestral languages to plan the coup. Ultimately, Louisiana Creole did develop, with West African languages becoming the substrates to a varied French lexifier. The social situation that gave rise to the Louisiana Creole language was unique, in that the lexifier language was the language found at the contact site. More often the lexifier is the language that arrives at the contact site belonging to the substrate/adstrate languages. Neither the French, the French-Canadians, nor the enslaved Africans were native to the area; this fact categorizes Louisiana Creole as a contact language that arose between exogenous ethnicities. Once the pidgin tongue was transmitted to the next generation as a lingua franca (who were considered the first native speakers of the new grammar), it could effectively be classified as a creole language.

In 1978, researchers located a document from a murder trial in the colonial period that acknowledges the existence of Louisiana Creole. Some Spaniards immigrated to the colony, but it was dominated by French language and culture. Like South Carolina, Louisiana had a "minority" population of Africans that greatly outnumbered the European settlers, including those white Creoles born in the colony.

The social status of Louisiana Creole further declined as a result of the Louisiana Purchase. Americans and their government made it illegal for francophones to speak their language. In 1921, the State of Louisiana mandated that public education take place in English only. Children and adults were often punished by corporal punishment, fines, and social degradation. By the 21st century, other methods were enforced. The promise of upward socioeconomic mobility and public shaming did the rest of the work, prompting many speakers of Louisiana Creole to abandon their stigmatized language in favor of English. Additionally, the development of industry, technology and infrastructure in Louisiana reduced the isolation of Louisiana creolophone communities and resulted in the arrival of more anglophones, resulting in further exposure to English. Because of this, Louisiana Creole exhibits more recent influence from English, including loanwords, code-switching and syntactic calquing.

Today, Louisiana Creole is spoken by fewer than 6,000 people.

Efforts to revitalize French in Louisiana have placed emphasis on Cajun French, to the exclusion of Creole. Zydeco musician Keith Frank has made efforts through the use of social media not only to promote his music, but preserve his Creole heritage and language as well, most notably through the use of Twitter. Additionally, Frank developed a mobile application in 2012 titled the "ZydecoBoss App", which acts as a miniature social network linked to a user's Facebook and Twitter accounts, allowing users to provide commentary in real time amongst multiple platforms. Aside from social media activism, Frank also created a creole music festival in 2012 called the "Creole Renaissance Festival", which acts a celebration of Creole culture.

A small number of community organizations focus on promoting Louisiana Creole, for example CREOLE, Inc. and the "Creole Table" founded by Velma Johnson. Northwestern State University developed the Creole Heritage Center, designed to bring people of Louisiana Creole heritage together, as well as preserve Louisiana Creole through their Creole Language Documentation Project. In addition, there is an active online community of language learners and activists engaged in language revitalization, led by language activist Christophe Landry.

These efforts have resulted in the creation of a popular orthography, a digitalized version of Valdman et al.'s Louisiana Creole Dictionary, and a free spaced repetition course for learning vocabulary hosted on Memrise created by a team led by Adrien Guillory-Chatman. A first language primer was released in 2017 and revised into a full-length language guide and accompanying website in 2020. 2022 saw the publication of an anthology of contemporary poetry in Louisiana Creole, the first book written completely in the language. A December 2023 article in The Economist highlighted revitalization efforts with the headline "Louisiana Creole is enjoying a modest revival," focusing in particular on language activists Jourdan Thibodeaux and Taalib Pierre-Auguste.

There once were creolophones in Natchitoches Parish on Cane River and sizable creolophone communities in adjacent Southeast Texas (Beaumont, Houston, Port Arthur, Galveston) Native inhabitants of the local area Louisiana Creole speakers in California reside in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Bernardino Counties and in Northern California (the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento, Plumas, Tehama, Mono, and Yuba Counties). Historically, there were Creole-speaking communities in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama (on Mon Louis Island); however, it is likely that no speakers remain in these areas.

Phonology

The phonology of Louisiana Creole has much in common with those of other French-based creole languages. In comparison to most of these languages, however, Louisiana Creole diverges less from the phonology of French in general and Louisiana French in particular.

Consonants

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

|+ Consonants of Louisiana Creole Examples of this process include:

diri~duri () 'rice', compare French du riz ()
vyé~vye () 'old', compare French vieux ()
djèl~djœl () 'mouth', compare Louisiana French djeule ()

Vowel lowering

The open-mid vowel may be lowered to the near-open vowel when followed by , e.g. frè~frær () 'brother'.

Grammar

Louisiana Creole exhibits subject-verb-object (SVO) word order.

Writing system

Louisiana Creole has never had a standard, universal orthography. For example, ('to kill') could variably be rendered tchué, tchwé, chwé, and so on. Historically, Louisiana Creole was often written in French-based or "pan-Creole" orthographies, the latter reminiscent of Haitian Creole writing. In the most recent popular orthographic system (described below), the Louisiana Creole alphabet consists of twenty-three letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet (excluding c, q, and x) and several special letters and diacritics.

:{| class="wikitable"

!Letter

!Name

!Name (IPA)

!Diacritics

!Phoneme correspondence

Nouzòt Popá, ki dan syèl-la

Tokin nom, li sinkifyè,

N'ap spéré pou to

rwayonm arivé, é n'a fé ça

t'olé dan syèl; parèy si latær

Donné-nou jordi dipin tou-lé-jou,

é pardon nouzòt péshé paréy nou pardon

lê moun ki fé nouzòt sikombé tentasyon-la,

Mé délivré nou depi mal.

Notes

References

Sources

Partial preview at [ Google Books].

External links

Louisiana Creole Dictionary – Online
Brian J. Costello – La Language Créole de la Paroisse Pointe Coupée
Centenary University Bibliothèque Tintamarre Texts in Louisiana Creole
Christophe Landry, Ph.D.
Le bijou sur le Bayou Teche
"Allons Manger" Cajun French with Creole dialect