French Louisiana Research Articles

Letter-writing in French Louisiana

This article reports a sociolinguistic analysis of the French spelling system in newly discovered, authentic personal letters written by literate settlers living in Louisiana during the 18th and 19th centuries. After showing that French and non-French vernaculars were very much alive among the Louisiana founding population, the paper examines the use of old and new French norms in Louisiana for three socio-economic classes over time: the elite, planter, and military/merchant populations. Socio-demographic pressures are described that could have led to the maintenance of old French features or the expansion of some French varieties. It is shown that the history of French spelling in France, the origins of diverse migrant populations that settled in colonial Louisiana, and the powerful socio-economic events that shape the expansion of a socially well-delineated population not only explain the linguistic behavior of both French settlers and Louisiana-born writers, but also provide many hints to determining the sociolinguistic attributes of the illiterate French vernacular-speaking population.

French colonial archaeology at old mobile: An introduction

Twelve years of excavation and analysis of the Old Mobile archaeological site (1MB94) are revealing the physical and social dimensions of the capital of French colonial Louisiana between 1702 and 1711. The specialized studies included in this thematic issue document the interplay of French colonists, enslaved and free Native Americans, and Hispanic trade contacts as a new colonial society developed on the northern Gulf Coast at the turn of the 18th century.

"Mardi Gras, Chic-a-la-Pie:" Reasserting Creole Identity Through Festive Play

Abstract Mardi Gras, in the predominantly Creole and African American 12th Street area of Lafayette, Louisiana, reflects both the cultural diversity of Creoles of color and the dynamics of asserting Creole identity in a region more widely known as Cajun Country. The festive play of this Mardi Gras incorporates Afro-Caribbean performance styles as well as French Louisiana Mardi Gras chants and rituals. Creole identity is reflected, challenged, and celebrated in the intercultural borrowings and negotiations of this carnival performance.

"Mardi Gras, Chic-a-la-Pie:" Reasserting Creole Identity through Festive Play

Mardi Gras, in the predominantly Creole and African American 12th Street area of Lafayette, Louisiana, reflects both the cultural diversity of Creoles of color and the dynamics of asserting Creole identity in a region more widely known as Cajun Country. The festive play of this Mardi Gras incorporates Afro-Caribbean performance styles as well as French Louisiana Mardi Gras chants and rituals. Creole identity is reflected, challenged, and celebrated in the intercultural borrowings and negotiations of this carnival performance.

Ritualized Inebriation, Violence, and Social Control in Cajun Mardi Gras

The rural Mardi Gras run is a rite of reversal in which a rowdy band of costumed merrymakers visits homes and businesses to collect" charity " for a communal supper. Unorthodox conduct, misbehavior, and violence in this context are often directly linked to intoxication. However, such drunkenness is a form of ritualized inebriation that develops through drinking, the sense of freedom afforded by participants' anonymity, and their assuming expected roles for the deep play associated with Mardi Gras. Violence and misconduct are largely attributable to overzealous play, loss of temper, personal conflicts, and spectators' negative reactions to Mardi Gras antics. Although seemingly chaotic, Mardi Gras follows an idealized script and it has mechanisms of control which mediate between acceptable drinking behavior and play and actual intoxication and misbehavior. There is, however, a negotiable gray area within this spectrum that reflects variation within the Cajun cultural ethos especially pertaining to drinking behavior.

Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives

IN 1944, THE YEAR WHEN ERIC WILLIAMS'S Capitalism and Slavery dramatized some of broad and central meanings of Atlantic Slave System, Gunnar Myrdal noted tendency of Americans localize and demarcate Negro problem, which was nevertheless an integral part of... whole complex of problems in larger American civilization.1 Yet despite such influential voices as Myrdal and Williams, American Negro often seen as source of what white Americans termed the Negro problem, continued to be studied and taught as a chapter in history of U.S. South. Even in 1998, after more than three decades of voluminous scholarly research and publication, average American, upon hearing words slavery, will almost certainly think of South and Civil War. Many of today's college students would also think of a subject now departmentalized in African-American Studies. I can think of two ways of looking at slavery from broader perspectives that help us move beyond localizing and demarcating tendencies that Myrdal described. Of course, specialized studies-such as examinations of slavery in Spanish Florida, French Louisiana, and Dutch New Amsterdam that Ira Berlin drew on for his monumental book Many Thousands Gone-are indispensable for any broader syntheses.2 That said, first method I have in mind is comparative approach in which two or more examples of human bondage are compared, analyzed, and contrasted, as in pioneering works by Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins.3 The second method is to take a global or multinational view of origins, development, and abolition of racial slavery in New World, which can be thought of as a way of gaining broader insight into world history and human costs of modernization.4

Albert Valdman (ed.), French and creole in Louisiana. (Topics in language and linguistics.) New York & London: Plenum, 1997. Pp. xiii, 372.

The purpose of this volume is not only to provide “more delicate and accurate descriptions” (p. 2) of Louisiana French, but also to highlight the variation, origins, and social contexts of French-related varieties in Louisiana. The volume's editor, whose research on French and creole linguistics spans decades (cf. Valdman 1977, 1978, 1983, 1993) has gathered – starting from workshops and annual meetings on regional dialects – an impressive collection of articles on Western Hemisphere French, in order to create a comprehensive overview of the past, present, and future of French in Louisiana. The reader may consider dividing the book into four sections: (a) general issues surrounding endangered languages and minority languages in the US; (b) linguistic sketches of Cajun French (CF) and Louisiana Creole (LC); (c) discussions of sociopolitical events surrounding the language planning and preservation movements; and (d) chapters devoted to other varieties of French that have similarities to CF and LC.

Cajun Mardi Gras: Cultural Objectification and Symbolic Appropriation in a French Tradition

Rural Louisiana Mardi Gras is viewed as a Cajun-French custom although it was once shared by a diverse Louisiana French population. This transformation occurred during a late-twentieth-century ethnic revival which objectified and symbolically appropriated local culture as Cajun. This Cajunization process was aided by external influences such as scholarly literature and the media which identified local culture and French Louisiana in general as Cajun. Despite a recent Afro-French ethnic movement, which also claims ownership or co-ownership of local culture, Mardi Gras is still identified as a Cajun cultural institution and the celebration unifies a diverse Cajun-French population. (Cajun, Mardi Gras, ethnic revival, symbolic appropriation, cultural objectification) There are two well-known forms of Mardi Gras in Louisiana: the famed New Orleans celebration, and the rural or Mardi Gras. The latter celebration is now widely treated as a uniquely Cajun-French cultural institution. However, Mardi Gras was once found in areas of France and French Canada, and in Louisiana it was shared by a racially and ethnically diverse Louisiana French population. This article describes the Cajunization of country Mardi Gras, a sociocultural process that occurred during a late-twentieth-century Cajun-French ethnic revival centered in southwest Louisiana. This movement, like concurrent ethnic movements in North America and Europe, objectified valued cultural elements as part of a specific identity to be publicly promoted. The transformation of these elements into cultural property involves symbolic appropriation because ownership of cultural materials is often promoted even though they are present among other groups. With the Cajun-French this involved both their laying claim to generic Louisiana French cultural elements and having these traits ascribed to them by outsiders. External ascription came from scholarly and popular writings, documentary films, the media, and ethnic tourism promotion, all of which promoted and reinforced a one-to-one link between French Louisiana culture and Cajun culture and identity. Cajunization, internally and externally driven, included subsuming other white Louisiana French under the ethnic label, Cajun-French, and a neglect of the Afro-French and their contributions to the evolution of Louisiana French culture. A growing African-American-directed ethnic movement is only now contesting the latter process. Nonetheless, Mardi Gras as a cultural institution, and as a complex of cultural elements, promotes an imagined Cajun-French community and integrates a diverse population. COUNTRY MARDI GRAS AS GENERIC FRENCH TRADITION Mardi Gras has origins in pre-Christian celebrations. By the Middle Ages many of these celebrations were associated with the Catholic liturgical calendar. In France, Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), became a day of excess and riotous behavior before Ash Wednesday ushered in Lent, a 40-day period of austerity for Catholics. In French cities, Mardi Gras evolved into the large-scale urban carnival that in the United States is now associated with New Orleans. However, in small French towns and the countryside, a begging tour was the defining element of Mardi Gras as well as other holidays like Guillonnee (New Year's Eve), La Chandeleur (Candlemas), and MiCareme (Mid-Lent). In these tours, rowdy bands of costumed revelers visited house to house, singing, dancing, and performing comical acts in exchange for food, to be consumed on the spot or to provision a communal feast as a climax to the holiday (Van Gennep 1947). The various holidays were transplanted to North America; however, Mardi Gras was the only custom to take root in Louisiana. While it is often assumed that Mardi Gras was introduced to Louisiana by Acadians, no study to date has confirmed this. The complex settlement history of Louisiana and variation within the Mardi Gras tradition suggest that the custom developed from elements originating in multiple areas of France, or later in Canada, and then diffused to Louisiana at different times with various French settlers. …

The Indian's New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast.

In this concise but sweeping study, James Axtell depicts the complete range of transformations in southeastern Indian cultures as a result of contact, and often conflict, with European explorers and settlers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Stressing the dynamism and constant change in native cultures while showing no loss of Indian identity, Axtell effectively argues that the colonial Southeast cannot be fully understood without paying particular attention to its native inhabitants before their large-scale removal in the 1830s. Axtell begins by treating the irruption in native life of several Spanish entradas in the sixteenth century, most notably and destructively Hernando de Soto's, and the rapid decline of the great Mississippian societies in their wake. He then relates the rise and fall of the Franciscan missions in Florida to the aggressive advent of English settlement in Virginia and the Carolinas in the seventeenth century. Finally, he traces the largely symbiotic relations among the South Carolina English, the Louisiana French, and their native trading partners in the eighteenth-century deerskin business, and the growing dependence of the Indians on their white neighbors for necessities as well as conveniences and luxuries. Focusing on the primary context of interaction between natives and newcomers in each century - warfare, missions, and trade - and drawing upon a wide range of ethnohistorical sources, including written, oral, archaeological, linguistic, and artistic ones, Axtell gives a rich sense of the variety and complexity of Indian-white interactions and a clear interpretative matrix by which to assimilate the details. Based on the fifty-eighth series of Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures, The Indians' New South is a colourful, accessible account of the clash of cultures in the colonial Southeast. It will prove essential and entertaining reading for all students of Native America and the South.

The Socioeconomic Position of the Louisiana Creoles: An Examination of Racial and Ethnic Stratification

This study suggests that the class-caste argument associated with the debate between William Julius Wilson and Charles W. Willie provides a fundamental line of division in theories of racial and ethnic stratification; it maintains that groups that combine minority statuses may be affected by both class and caste influences, a situation of double jeopardy; and it describes French-speaking Louisiana black people, or Creoles, as a group that combines minority statuses. Analysis of Census data shows that race and Louisiana French ethnicity are each related to life chances and that ethnic inequality is primarily a matter of class characteristics, while racial inequality is primarily a matter of caste characteristics. There is an interaction between ethnicity and race, however; minority ethnicity shows a weaker relationship to household income for black than for white people. The authors suggest that this may be a consequence of the relative power of minority identities

Red lines on maps: The impact of cartographical errors on the border between the United States and British North America, 1782–1842

In 1782 it was agreed that the frontier between the United States and British North America should run from the east to the Lake of the Woods, wrongly perceived (on the basis of Mitchell's 1755 map) as the westernmost of the Great Lakes, and then due west to the Mississippi. Other cartographical errors and misapprehensions also played a role in the fixing of the border. Thus in 1804 President Jefferson seized on the 49th parallel as the line supposedly agreed on after the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht for the border between the British Hudson's Bay territories and French (now American) Louisiana, and it was eventually adopted. The discovery of what was thought to be a conspicuous line of continuous highland south of the St. Lawrence, and the renewed attention paid in the mid‐eighteenth century to the borders specified in King James VI's 1621 grant of Nova Scotia, helped frame the parameters of a dispute over what is now the Maine‐New Brunswick border—one that periodically disturbed Anglo‐American relations between 1783 and 1842. The negotiation of the Webster‐Ashburton treaty that ended the dispute in 1842 provides another example of the selective use of maps in diplomacy.

The Silence of the Gators: Cajun Ethnicity and Intergenerational Transmission of Louisiana French

This study considers the relationship between Cajun ethnicity and the intergenerational transmission of the French language. It questions the commonsensical assumption of a positive relationship between ethnic identity and language transmission. It suggests that if an ethnicity is associated with socioeconomic disadvantages, then the greater the ethnic identification of parents, the more disadvantageous for them ethnic traits will be. Therefore, ironically, parents who identify themselves as Cajuns and who live in Cajun ethnic areas may be less inclined to pass on French language abilities than are non-Cajun parents or parents in non-Cajun areas, once we control for the parents own language abilities. We use US Census data to examine this question and we employ qualitative data to attempt to explain why we find a particular type of association between Cajun ethnicity and French language transmission.

Settlement, Economy and Cultural Change at the End of the European Iron Age: Excavations at Kelheim in Bavaria, 1987-1991

Creeks at the turn of the 18th century had the opportunity to leave a genetic legacy behind them, if not among the Cherokees and Creeks (and hence today perhaps among the Seminoles) then in the form of mestizo children in Georgia, the Carolinas, and in the Caribbean (hence today perhaps even among newly-arrived Cuban or Haitian immigrants). Much fascinating historical and archaeological research lies ahead to trace that history. In the 18th century the Apalachee people not only still existed as several distinct bands in Spanish Florida and French Louisiana, they also petitioned for and received land grants in Texas from the United States in the 19th century. In sum, it is simply not the case that Florida's original inhabitants were all annihilated by European colonization, as the lay reader might easily assume after reading this book. A second problem, admittedly less controversial to most archaeologists, is the book's casual treatment of historical sources. Milanich rightly points out that however good the archaeological record may prove to be, we are inevitably dependent upon the historical record for completing the picture during the post-contact period. If the historical record is that important, however, it would be advisable to make just as significant a distinction between primary and secondary documentary sources as we make between archaeological materials recovered from undisturbed stratified excavation and those collected from a reworked sur-

Enclave Dialect Contraction: An External Overview of Louisiana French

L'A. decrit la situation critique dans laquelle se trouve le francais en Louisiane du sud : il represente un dialecte enclave coupe de sa langue source et assailli par une langue dominante completement differente. Apres avoir presente le contexte historique et demographique de la Louisiane du Sud, il aborde la question de la maitrise de la langue dans la communaute linguistique en declin, puis examine la vitalite de la langue et du dialecte dans le cadre de la dynamique du registre. Il ne se concentre ici que sur le profil externe, sociohistorique de la variete en declin, en ne faisant que de breves references aux changements linguistiques internes qui accompagnent le declin

French in South Louisiana: Towards Language Loss

This paper presents a study of the ethnolinguistic vitality of the French community in Louisiana. After a brief overview of the history of French Louisiana and of a model of bilingual development based on the ethnolinguistic vitality framework, the present vitality of the French community in Louisiana is analysed in terms of its demographic, economic, political, and cultural capitals. The aforementioned provide the background of a study in which 403 high school students participated. Four groups of students were formed on the basis of the proportion of francophones in their families. Measured contacts with French through the social network, the media, and schooling were low for all student groups. Except for schooling in French which was uniformly low for all groups, the above results on social and media contacts with French, as well as the scores on self-rated oral French competence, use of French, French identity, and beliefs indicative of the desire to integrate the French community, covary as a function of the proportion of francophones in the family. Nonetheless, the average scores for even the group with the strongest proportion of francophone family members are only in the moderate to low range. This is hypothesised to be due to the generally low contacts with French, even when the proportion of francophones in the family is high. Overall, the results show that the present generation of youths of Cajun and French descent is one which will not be able to transmit the French language to its children.

Review of Scott (1992): Cajun Vernacular English: Informal English in French Louisiana

Review of Scott (1992): Cajun Vernacular English: Informal English in French Louisiana

Lexicogenesis and language vitality

AbstractAs exemplified in the case of Contemporary Metropolitan French, spontaneous indigenous lexical creativity is a natural adaptive survival strategy for a language in the earlier (and intermediate) stages of its domination with regards to a competing language and culture. Indigenous lexicogenesis can also include convergent types, as exemplified in the case of Malinche Mexicano, where borrowings are subjected to indigenous processing using native inflectional and derivational morphology. For declining languages, on the other hand, the circumstances of language shift correlate with indigenous lexicogenetic failure and very often to its replacement with a ‘peripheral’ type, namely reliance on code switching (which, in some cases, may actually be ‘code-intermediate’ in nature) as the main strategy for generating vocabulary, as exemplified by Louisiana French. In some cases, however, even in the midst of general decline, in order for the language to function in its remaining registers, some indigenous ‘c...

Voices of the Old South: Eyewitness Accounts, 1528-1861

Spanning the period from the earliest European expeditions to the eve of the Civil War, Voices of the Old South assembles a fascinating array of firsthand perspectives on the great events that shaped the region as well as its customs, attitudes, and commonplace occurrences. Encompassing key themes in southern history, the eyewitness accounts Alan Gallay has brought together for this volume are remarkable in their variety. In addition, Gallay's selections reflect a multicultural approach in which African Americans, native Americans, and women are treated not as mere tokens but as major participants in southern life. Unlike many works on the Old South, which tend to focus on the immediate pre-war years, this volume gives equal attention to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Its geographic definition of the region is notably broad, including not only British America but also French Louisiana, the mountain areas as well as the lowlands, the pine barrens and the cotton belt. While famous names - such as Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Frances Anne Kemble - can be found here, Gallay also features writings by a number of obscure or less familiar figures. A French carpenter's account of an ill-fated expedition in Florida, a Scottish tradesman's description of the social mores of Georgia and the Carolinas, a free black's journal of daily life in Natchez, Mississippithese are but a few of the rare and unusual documents excerpted in the book. In his introduction, Gallay explains the diversity of his selections, contending that to identify common threads among particular groups is not enough: we must also understand how the common threads take differentforms when they penetrate different subcultures. By allowing the reader to listen to the richly divergent voices of those who lived in or visited the Old South, this collection suggests some fruitful ways of reaching that understanding.

A History of French Louisiana. Volume Two: Years of Transition, 1715-1717.

A History of French Louisiana. Volume Two: Years of Transition, 1715-1717.

Fred Kniffen's Contributions to Understanding French Louisian

Fred Kniffen's contributions to a better understanding of French Louisiana are many and varied. As a student of culture, he soon after his arrival in Louisiana recognized the uniqueness found in the state's French area. He was always an outsider looking in on the French people and their ways, and as such he could see the unique and different traits of their culture. Kniffen was never judgmental, and enjoyed the uniqueness of the culture. Although published on French Louisiana, particularly on material culture, his greatest contribution was in encouraging research. Consequently, several students did master's and doctoral work in French Louisiana, gathering and recording a wealth of information. Most of this information would have been lost had he not encouraged the research, as the French culture is becoming Americanized very quickly. It would have been a great loss had Kniffen not come to spend his academic career at Louisiana State University.