French-English Literary Dialect in The Grandissimes

Abstract

BY THE TIME George Washington Cable wrote The Grandissimes, in 1879, use of the French language in Louisiana was in decline. Like the French speech of England five hundred years before, it could still be heard and would continue to be heard, but its day of dominance was over. Unlike the French of medieval England, of course, this New-World French had been the native language of the European settlers of the area and had become firmly entrenched in the homes of simple and sophisticated alike. And even during the forty-odd years of Spanish rule in the latter eighteenth century, when Spanish was the official language, French actually prevailed-not only in the home, but also on most levels of communication.1 It was only with the official arrival of the Americans in. 1803-the period in which The Grandissimes is set-that the commanding position of French began to be seriously threatened. Nine years later, when the southern tip of the Louisiana Purchase became a state, the handwriting was clearly on the wall. Although laws were to be written and cases tried in both French and English for decades,2 and although judicial announcements were to be published in French in the New Orleans papers for more than a hundred years afterwards,3 it was obvious by 1812 that the intruding Americans had the authority and the numbers to make their language ultimately the dominant one. And it is equally obvious from contemporary documents, such as C. C. Robin's Voyage to Louisiana,4 and from the pages of Cable's novel that the Creoles5