Cajun-French Language Maintenance and Shift: A Southwest Louisiana Case Study to 1970

by Rocky L. Sexton

LOUISIANA WAS FOUNDED as a French colony at the end of the seventeenth century and by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the southern portion of the present-day state was decidedly Francophone.1 The subsequent Louisiana French experience was conversion to ethnic minority status. The changing linguistic character of the Francophone population is a little documented aspect of this transformation. Recent scholarship has posited a rapid nineteenth-century decline of the public and private use of French and suggests strong linguistic assimilation of the Louisiana French by 1900. This essay focuses on the Cajun-French of southwest Louisiana to offer an alternative scenario. The nineteenthcentury Cajun-French, who constituted much of the white Louisiana French population, was mother tongue Francophone, including widespread monolingualism, and French was common to private and public discourse. This factor was linked to settlement patterns, population density, and the maintenance of social networks and institutions that inhibited language shift. Bilingualism was common; however, this was an uneven trend influenced by class, sex, and rural versus urban residence, and it did not correlate with the abandonment of French as a primary mode of communication.