Cent ans de français cadien en Louisiane: étude sociolinguistique du parler des femmes by Carole Salmon

Abstract

SALMON, CAROLE. Cent ans de français cadien en Louisiane: étude sociolinguistique du parler des femmes. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. ISBN 978-1-4331-0455-8. Pp. xv + 123. $69.95. Given the limited number of empirical studies on Cajun French, the endangered French dialect of South Louisiana, this publication will be welcomed by scholars with an interest in North American varieties of French. Salmon’s study focuses on the maintenance of Acadian dialectal phonological features in Cajun French. The book begins with an overview of the various waves of Acadian and French immigration to Louisiana in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries; the varieties of French spoken by these immigrants all influenced the language known today as Cajun French. Based on earlier studies of Acadian and Cajun French and a comparative assessment of dialectal features found in these varieties, Salmon selects five phonological variables to study in the speech of four generations of Cajun women. Historical sources are used to establish that the variants were present in France before the original Acadian migration to Canada, and the history of each variable in the development of French from Latin is presented. One shortcoming of this detailed exposition is the use of what appears to be a combination of orthographic and phonetic notation in the discussion of the variants, which compromises the clarity of the presentation. Language data for this study comes from interviews from the Cajun French corpus compiled by Dubois in 1997 and from a corpus collected by a team of Canadian researchers in 1975. The sample of female interviewees examined for this study includes three unilingual speakers of Cajun French born between 1890 and 1901 (ancêtres), nine French-dominant or bilingual senior speakers born between 1901 and 1915 (doyennes), eight bilingual elders born between 1917 and 1932 (aînées), and nine bilingual younger community members born between 1935 and 1949 (cadettes). Salmon finds maintenance of the Acadian dialectal features in the speech of all generations in all parishes studied. Thus it appears that linguistic traditions have been maintained among women in Cajun communities. However, certain dialectal variants show an unexpected increase in use in the younger generations. To determine why this is the case, Salmon compares the two interviews conducted with each speaker in the Dubois corpus: one interview with a community insider who is a native speaker of Cajun French and a second with a member of the research team who spoke an academic variety of French. (This comparison is not possible for the earlier corpus, in which the data come from a single interview with a Canadian researcher.) The analysis reveals that more dialectal forms are employed during the interview with the community insider, which contributes to the higher percentage of dialectal forms for the younger generations. Salmon concludes that the results indicate that the women are able to adapt their discourse to different situations of communication and thus that no reduction in stylistic variation is in evidence. One may wonder, however, whether this observed linguistic accommodation really implies that stylistic shrinkage, common in declining languages, has not occurred for Cajun French. The book unfortunately suffers from a lack of careful editing—with issues ranging from typographic errors to reference to colored lines for black-and-white figures—which undermines the quality of the presentation. Most problematic are the missing column headings in Table 2.1, which is intended to present the regions in which preservation of traditional morphosyntactic and phonological Reviews 215 forms is in evidence; the reader has no way to determine in which Canadian maritime provinces or Louisiana parishes the variants are found. Although this publication sheds light on the maintenance of Acadian dialectal features in Cajun French and thus provides valuable information about this dialect, the study is limited to language-internal considerations. Readers who hope to find consideration of actual language use or the role of Cajun French in contemporary Cajun communities may be disappointed that such issues are not addressed. University of Louisiana, Lafayette Tamara Lindner Methods and Materials edited by Sarah Jourdain SCHULTZ, JEAN-MARIE, and MARIE-PAULE TRANVOUEZ. Réseau: Communication, intégration , intersections. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2010. ISBN 978-0-13241392 -3...