Cajun Vernacular English: phonology

The Cajun speech community: an overview

Cajuns live all along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Mississippi but are primarily concentrated in the small rural towns of southern Louisiana. Lafayette is the metropolitan center of Cajun country. Cajuns are the descendants of Acadians from Nova Scotia, Canada, who fled to French Louisiana around 1765 when the British took control of their lands. In Louisiana they joined many other French dialect-speaking populations as well as other people who had a language other than French as their first language (Dubois 2003). Even after the Louisiana Purchase, when English became the de facto official language, the Cajuns living in rural communities continued to speak only French. The majority of the Cajuns were poor and had little education. They lived – as many continue to live today – in small towns in close-knit extended families. Whereas some of the people of French ancestry were held in high esteem in Louisiana, the same cannot be said for the Cajuns. They were often ridiculed and made the butt of jokes.

Although the state government mandated English as the sole language of education in 1929, English was not extensively used within the Cajun communities and in the family setting. Moreover, English was not well learned because many attended school irregularly or left school early. For quite a while English may have been the language of the classroom, but Cajun French was the language of the playground. It is this generation, people who are 60 years or older today, who are the original speakers of the dialect we have labelled Cajun Vernacular English (CajVE). Although language contact and language interference are clearly implicated in the origins of CajVE, we want to argue against the idea that CajVE is a variant of migrant English or foreigner English. We believe that the variable structure of CajVE is not Southern English and that these CajVE features are part of the vernacular of Cajuns. As Rubretch (1971) has mentioned for the nasalization process in CajVE, the phonological principles as well as the set of linguistic features we describe in CajVE represent a native development of English speech rather than a borrowing. CajVE is spoken fluently by Cajuns in their everyday lives within the community and often as the primary intergenerational language (Dubois and Horvath 2001).

World War II marks an important juncture for Cajuns; the military service introduced many of the men to American ways, particularly to American ways of speaking. Some of the men who were old enough to join the army were already bilingual or semi-bilingual because of a concerted effort on the part of the Louisiana state government to enforce the speaking of English. After WWII, the social changes that swept across the landscape came to have a profound effect on the Cajun way of life. The children of the original CajVE speakers, who had grown up speaking French within their families, began to learn English better than their parents, attended school more regularly and for longer, and became financially more secure because of the discovery of oil in the region and the introduction of large-scale agriculture, which brought economic opportunities not previously available. Many of this generation of speakers stopped using French with their own children, hoping to avoid the negative stereotypes associated with being Cajun in Louisiana. Cajuns increasingly adopted American cultural ways; even Cajun music, an important part of Cajun life, was rejected in favor of country and western music.

What stopped this cultural change from completely taking over is popularly called the Cajun Renaissance. Like many other ethnic groups, it is often the third generation in the language change/replacement process who feels the loss of culture the most. The old have not lost it, the middle-aged have consciously rejected it, and it is the young who suffer a sense of loss. Today, things Cajun have risen to an unprecedented status among Cajuns as well as outsiders. Cajun music, Cajun food, children’s books about Cajun life, serious Cajun literature – all backed up by state government support for its formerly French-speaking citizens - are to be found everywhere. Tourists come from near and far to participate in Cajun festivities. Bilingualism, however, has suffered such a loss that it is only the ideologues who would suggest the possible survival of French as the primary language of everyday communication by Cajuns. The dilemma for Cajuns is that they no longer have the linguistic distinctiveness they once had; those who want to mark their Cajun identity linguistically have only English as a vehicle. The young, especially young men, have begun to use some aspects of the CajVE of their grandfathers, the variety of English that had been widely rejected by the middle-aged at the same time that they were rejecting French.

Not all people who identify as Cajuns speak CajVE and using the term “Cajun English” risks that interpretation. The term “ethnolect” is useful to identify a subtype of a vernacular such as CajVE, particularly because that term seems to describe a large number of locally based community dialects of English, widespread in the United States and elsewhere, which develop when a speech community collectively changes its language of everyday communication from French, Spanish, a Native American language, etc. to the politically dominant language, English in the case of the United States. Perhaps the key characteristic of an ethnolect is that “ethnicity” and the ethnic language are not given up concurrently so if ethnicity is to be marked linguistically, it can only be marked in the dominant language; this marking of ethnicity can become a source of language change in that language.