Louisiana Creole French

language
name=Louisiana Creole
nativename=Kréyol La Lwizyàn
states=Louisiana, particularly St. Martin Parish,Natchitoches Parish,St. Landry Parish, Jefferson Parish and Lafayette Parish, Illinois and a small community in East Texas. Significant community in California; chiefly in Northern California
speakers=~337,500
familycolor=Creole
fam1=Creole language
fam2=French Creole
fam3=Antillean Creoles
iso2=lou|iso3=lou

Louisiana Creole is a French Creole language spoken by the mixed Louisiana Creole people of the state of Louisiana. The language consists of elements of French, Native American, Spanish, and West African roots.

Geography

Speakers of Louisiana Creole French are mainly concentrated in south and southwest Louisiana, where the population of Creolophones is distributed across the region. There are also numbers of Creolophones in Natchitoches Parish on Cane River and sizable communities of Louisiana Creole-speakers in East Texas (Houston, Port Arthur, Beaumont, Galveston), the Chicago area, and Maryland. California has the most Creole speakers of any state outside of Louisiana, and the number of speakers in California may in fact surpass that of Louisiana. Louisiana Creole French speakers in California reside in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Bernadino counties and in Northern California (Alameda, Sacramento, San Francisco, Mendocino, Plumas, Tehama, Siskiyou, Napa, Sierra, Mono and Yuba counties; notably in Tennant, California). Speakers in Maryland reside in Worcester County, Dorchester County, Somerset County, Wicomico County, Caroline County, Talbot County, Charles County, Calvert County, Saint Mary's County, and Anne Arundel County.

peaker demographics

The language is now spoken mostly by older generations (over 60 years old), 4.6% of whom are monolingual in Louisiana Creole. Louisiana Creoles under the age of 30 tend to prefer speaking English. In the state of Louisiana, 112,465 people, or 2.4% of the population, reported speaking Louisiana Creole French at home (12% of the non-English-speaking community), 700 of whom reported speaking English "not well" or "not well at all"Fact|date=July 2008. St. Martin Parish has a particularly large concentration of Creole speakers (1.52% of the parish reports speaking the language at home, 250 of whom had low English-language skills [ [http://www.mla.org/cgi-shl/docstudio/docs.pl?map_data_results Data Center Results ] ] ). In Texas, there is a population of 3,505 speakers, 230 of whom report poor English skills. [ [http://www.mla.org/cgi-shl/docstudio/docs.pl?map_data_states Data Center States Results ] ] . In California, some estimates have put the number of speakers to be over 110,000Fact|date=July 2008.

Census and demographic reports have counted very few native speakers of Louisiana Creole. These low yields are due to identification issues in Louisiana. For example, some speakers of Creole identify themselves culturally and ancestrally as French, and therefore call the language they speak French, when in fact it is Creole. One can also find this on the prairies of southwest Louisiana, where speakers of Cajun-French identify themselves as Creole, and call the language they speak Creole (Valdman).

St. Martin Parish forms the heart of the Creole-speaking region. Other sizeable communities exist along Bayou Têche in St. Landry, Iberia and St. Mary Parishes. There are smaller communities on False River in [http://www.pointecoupeehistory.com/index.php/page/view/12 Pointe-Coupée Parish] , and along the lower Mississippi River in Ascension, St. Charles, and St. James Parishes (Klingler; Marshall; Valdman).

Grammar

The grammar of Louisiana Creole is very similar to that of Haitian Creole. Definite articles in Louisiana Creole vary between the "le", "la" and "les" used in standard French (a testament of possible decreolization in some areas) and "a" and "la" for the singular, and "yé" for the plural. In St. Martin Parish, the masculine definite article, whether "le" or "-a", is often omitted altogether.

In theory, Creole places its definite articles after the noun, unlike French. Given Louisiana Creole's complex linguistic relationship with Colonial French and Cajun French, however, this is often no longer the case. Since there is no system of noun gender, articles only vary on phonetic criteria. The article "a" is placed after words ending in a vowel, and "la" is placed after words ending in a consonant.

Another aspect of Louisiana Creole which is unlike French is the lack of verb conjugation. Verbs do not vary based on person or number. Verbs vary based on verbal markers (e.g., "té" (past tense), "sé" (conditional), "sa" (future)) which are placed between the personal pronouns and conjugated verbs (e.g. "mo té kourí au Villaj", "I went to Lafayette"). Frequently in the past tense, the verbal marker is omitted and one is left to figure out the time of the event through context.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Louisiana Creole is overwhelmingly of Colonial French origin. Most local vocabulary, i.e. topography, animals, plants are of regional Amerindian origin - mostly substrata of the Choctaw or Mobilian Language group. We find vestiges of west and central African languages (namely Bambara, Wolof, Fon) in folklore and in the religion of voodoo. The grammar, however, remains distinct from that of French (Midlo Hall; Klingler; Valdman).

Numbers

Included are the French numbers for comparison.

External links

* [http://www.learnlouisianacreole.wordpress.com Learn Louisiana Creole Online]
* [http://www.pointecoupeehistory.com/index.php/page/view/12 Learn Pointe-Coupée Parish Creole]
* [http://caneriver.tulane.edu/Home.html Cane River Valley French]
* [http://www.lescreoles.org/ Les Créoles de Pointe-Coupée]
* [http://www.geocities.com/naurine1946/ Créoles Sans Limites]
* [http://www.angelfire.com/ky/LeCorde/cajun.html Louisiana Creole Grammar]
* [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=lou Louisiana Creole French] at Ethnologue
* [http://www.centenary.edu/french/louisiane.html#creole Centenary University Bibliothèque Tintamarre Texts in Louisiana Creole]

References

* Brasseaux, Carl. French, Cajun, Creole, Houma: A Primer on Francophone Louisiana. Bâton-Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.

* Klingler, Thomas A. If I could turn my tongue like that: The Creole Language of Pointe-Coupée Parish, La. Bâton-Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

* Marshall, Margaret. The Origin and Development of Louisiana Creole French: French and Creole in Louisiana. Ed. Valdman, Albert. New York: Plenum Press, 1997.

* Valdman, Albert. Valdman, Albert, et al. Dictionary of Louisiana Creole. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

* Valdman, Albert, Thomas A. Klingler, Margaret M. Marshall, and Kevin J. Rottet (eds.). 1996. "The Dictionary of Louisiana Creole". Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Footnotes