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The Cajun Renaissance and Cajun English. The Social, the Linguistic, the Imaginary

Olivier Glain

Abstracts

This paper focuses on Cajun English and the sociolinguistic implications of the Cajun Renaissance, a sociocultural movement that started in the 1960s in Southern Louisiana. Being either a monolingual French speaker or a bilingual French-English speaker was long at the heart of what it meant linguistically to be Cajun (Dubois and Horvath 2001). However, native-like competence in French almost completely vanished from Louisiana with the younger generations born during the 20th century, and Cajun English (CE) is now a full-fledged variety of English that allows the speaker to mark his/her Cajun identity (Dubois and Horvath 2000, 2008). One of the key questions linked to the Cajun Renaissance is therefore to determine to what extent (Louisiana) French played a part in the emergence of this identity-driven variety. After explaining the historical background of language in Louisiana, I propose a description of the main features of Louisiana French and Cajun English to see how French in general, and Louisiana French in particular, have had an influence upon Cajun English. This description is based on the existing literature and the segmental and suprasegmental analysis of various recordings, including the Cajun English Corpus (Carmichael 2013). I argue that Cajunness very effectively manifests itself linguistically through the stance taken by CE speakers, either through the long-term accretion of stance (Du Bois 2007) that is due to the Cajun context and the speaker’s habitus, or through the temporary projection of Cajunness through stancetaking, which implies that the speaker positions him/herself relative to an addressee. One particularly interesting manifestation of stancetaking is found in the popular Louisianan practice of telling Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes, recordings of which can be found in the Cajun English Corpus. Finally, in a discussion on Cajun English and the Cajun identity based on speakers’ processes of self-identification, I argue that the Cajun collectivity can best be described as an ideological community, whose language variety has emerged from complex interactions within the speakers’ linguistic imaginaries (Houdebine 1982) and has been influenced by a powerful social imaginary (Castoriadis 1975).

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1. Background: a short history of the Cajuns and their languages

1.1. Francophone immigration and the rise of French in Louisiana

1Louisiana is a cultural and linguistic melting pot, with French, Spanish, African, and Native American influences. Even though English has been steadily gaining ground for a century, French has a unique place in the history of Louisiana. It has been spoken there for over three hundred years, and much of Southern Louisiana was predominantly francophone until the mid-twentieth century. In 1682, the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de la Salle descended the Mississippi. His expedition ended near the site of present-day Venice, Louisiana, where he claimed the Mississippi basin for France and named the region La Louisiane a much bigger territory than today’s state of Louisiana in honor of Louis XIV. French occupation of the Gulf Coast only began with the initial settlement of Biloxi (present-day Mississippi) in 1699 and several other settlements in the 18th century. The early immigrants came from Quebec, Haiti, and Alsace, but a vast majority later came from Île-de-France, Brittany, Normandy, Picardy, Champagne, Poitou, Aunis, and Bourgogne (Brasseaux 1987; Dajko 2020). They came from lower socio-economic categories and they brought with them various West-central dialects of French. The French quickly began to bring African slaves, who “represented dozens of nations and brought at least fifty languages with them” (Dajko 2019a:70). Louisiana Creole developed from linguistic contact between speakers of French and African languages.

2As a result of its conflict with Britain, both in America (the French and Indian War, 1754–1763) and worldwide (the Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763), France secretly ceded Louisiana to Spain, its ally, in 1762. The Treaty of Paris signed between the French and the British in 1763, at the end of the war, separated Louisiana at the Mississippi. Eastern Louisiana was ceded to Britain, and the western part was retained by France, which de facto meant that it belonged to Spain (Spain did not fight Britain for control of eastern Louisiana). France’s loss of Louisiana did not stop francophone immigration. Starting in 1765, one of the major groups of French-speaking immigrants came from Acadia (present-day Nova Scotia and New Brunswick). After the British took control of their land, the Acadians refused to pledge unconditional allegiance to the Crown. As a result, about half the Acadian population were expelled from what had become British territory (Bernard 2008: 23). This period of Acadian history is known as le Grand Dérangement (“the Great Upheaval”). It is estimated that about 3,000 Acadians, half the exiles (Bernard 2008), settled in Louisiana over the next twenty years, in two major waves of immigration (Brasseaux 1987). They brought with them “a dialect descended largely from that spoken in the Poitou-Saintonge region in western coastal France and, like most of the earlier-arriving varieties, classified as a northern oïl dialect” (Dajko 2019a: 77). Spain saw the benefit of welcoming people who might oppose British expansion in the Americas. At about the same time, the French-speaking population of Louisiana was completed by the arrival of about 10,000 speakers from Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) after the Haitian revolution (1791-1804).

3In 1800-1801, negotiations between France and Spain led to the transfer of Western Louisiana (and New Orleans) back to France in exchange for the Duchy of Parma. However, Napoleon decided to sell Louisiana to the United States of America in 1803. Despite France’s definitive loss of Louisiana, “significant francophone immigration to Louisiana continued […] up to the eve of the Civil War, after which it was significantly curtailed, though not extinguished” (Dajko 2019a: 70). Nineteenth-century immigrants were overall wealthier, better educated, and belonged to the highest strata of society, particularly plantation society. Many families continued to send their children to schools in France. Their dialect, sometimes called Plantation Society French (Picone 2015), was rather similar to standard French. Brasseaux (1992: 104-109) notes that relationships between the various francophone groups were tense, which kept people from different social backgrounds and of different origins separate until the Civil War. Things changed with the economic downfall that followed the conflict, as it caused a great deal of poverty in the South and affected people from all social classes, particularly in south Louisiana. Barriers between different groups gradually crumbled as they began working together in the fields (Bernard 2008: 42), which resulted in a great many inter-marriages and a more unified culture that brought together Acadian and non-Acadian practices and language.

4The history of francophone immigration to Louisiana therefore makes it clear that several dialects of French were in contact over the years and that the synthetic variety that emerged through dialect leveling (Brasseaux 1992: 109; Dajko 2019a: 78) and that has been maintained until today “bears influence from multiple sources” (Dajko 2019a: 75). This is the reason why linguists usually refer to Louisiana French (e.g. Ancelet et al. 2010) or Louisiana Regional French (e.g. Klingler 2003), as opposed to the more common Cajun French, which conveys the misconception that the French spoken in Louisiana is the descendant of the sole Acadian variety (Dajko 2019a: 76). Adding to the confusion is the fact that English-speaking settlers did not differentiate between francophone communities and used the term Cajun as an umbrella term (Brasseaux 1992: 101-105). Moreover, even if Louisiana Creole is grammatically different from Louisiana French, it has certainly had an influence on some of the changes and variations that characterize French in Louisiana. The use of specific labels is all the more subjective as it often corresponds to the way speakers identify themselves ethnically (Klingler 2003). Indeed, people tend to call their language Cajun French, Louisiana Creole (Klingler 2003), or even Indian French (Dajko 2020) in accordance with the ethnic group they identify with, and independently of structural factors that would objectively point to one variety or the other.

5From a socio-ethnographic point of view, things are not clear-cut either as the French-speaking populations of Louisiana mixed. It is often considered that only certain communities historically maintained the traditions of the Acadians and that their descendants form the core of the present-day Cajun communities, as explained by Bernard (2008: 38-39):

Because upper- and middle-class Acadians abandoned their heritage in favor of French Creole and later Anglo-American society, the poor, rural French-speaking Acadians preserved the values and traditions of their pioneer ancestors. These values stressed self-reliance, closeness to the earth, respect for community elders, rejection of material wealth, and the importance of large, extended families. Acadian subsistence farmers, particularly those along the lower Mississippi River, responded to pressures caused by population growth and a shortage of farmable property by migrating to the winding, murky bayous of southeastern Louisiana and the vast, open prairies of the southwestern part of the state. In these isolated areas they and their descendants would become the modern Cajun people.

6However, Dubois and Melançon (1997: 63) explain that “there exists no single definition of the ‘Cajun community’”. As is the case with French-based varieties spoken in Louisiana, the concept of the Cajun community is therefore a highly subjective one. To define it, Dubois and Melançon (1997: 65) insist on the separation from mainstream American culture, on the grounds of a different religion (Catholicism), language (French), cuisine (“Acadian cuisine adapted to the environment in Louisiana”), and pastimes. This concept of the Cajun community will be further discussed in section 3.2 of this paper. As to the name Cajun, it obviously comes from the French word acadien, which was shortened to cadien in Louisiana, and pronounced [kadʒɛ̃] in Louisiana French, through yod palatalization (cf. [kadjɛ̃] in standard French). The spelling and the pronunciation of the word were anglicized and became respectively <Cajun> and [ˈkeɪdʒən] in English.

7After the Southern Reconstruction period, Cajuns came to be stereotypically considered as “lazy, ignorant, illiterate, and simple […] because their values negated the closely held American values of material wealth, the Protestant work ethic, and progress” (Hebert 2000), and also because they spoke either only French or what was considered to be poor English. The main reason for their lack of English is that they formed a very dense social network (cf. Milroy 1980) in southern Louisiana. They lived “in small towns in close-knit extended families” (Dubois and Horvath 2008: 208). Densely connected social networks are characterized by few social changes, a great deal of internal contact, but not much contact with other networks. As a result, they tend to be resistant to linguistic innovations (Milroy 1980). In the case of Cajuns, their lack of contact with other communication networks implied that they had no need to speak English until the beginning of the 20th century. Following Bloomfield’s terminology and his density principle (1933), we may argue that there were no “lines of weakness” in the Cajuns’ “network of oral communication”, which would have allowed for contact with other groups, thereby making it possible for these other groups to exert some form of linguistic influence (Bloomfield 1933: 476). However, lines of weakness were to materialize as the Cajun world gradually opened out onto the American world.

1.2. The loss of Louisiana French and Cajun culture

8French continued to be “the language of everyday life and government in Louisiana into the 19th century. But the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and statehood in 1812 placed serious pressure on French Louisiana to conform to the language and culture of the United States” (Ancelet et al. 2010: xii). After Louisiana became a state in 1812, waves of anglophones settlers arrived, constituting 70 percent of the new state’s population by 1860 (Brasseaux 1992). These figures were reinforced by the arrival of new anglophone farmers in the late 19th century and oil workers in the early 20th century. “Also, at that time, Theodore Roosevelt’s battle cry, ‘One nation, one people, one language!’, thundered across the land. It induced a quest for national unity that suppressed regional diversity across the country” (Ancelet et al. 2010: xii). French continued to be spoken, but mainly in “the area of south Louisiana known as the French Triangle or Acadiana” (Dajko 2019b: 70). In 1916, the state of Louisiana made school mandatory for all children. Then, in 1921, the state’s constitution made English the compulsory language of the classroom. Cajun children were not allowed to speak French at school any longer, often under threat of corporal punishment. Other punishments included having one’s mouth washed with soap or having to write 100 times “I will not speak French” (cf. Figure 1).

  • 1 As a teacher of French in Mississippi in the 1990s, I personally met a number of Cajuns who were (...)

9 As a result, Cajun children began to feel linguistically insecure. Ancelet et al. (2010: xii) explain that “several generations of young Cajun pupils soon associated their native language and culture with social stigmatization; speaking local French was considered something well-raised people did not do in public”. Speaking the English they knew was of little help as Cajun Vernacular English was heavily stigmatized (Dubois and Horvath 2008). The Cajun community was furthered altered by urbanization and industrialization at the beginning of the 20th century (Brasseaux 1987, 1992), with the construction of railroads and roads, commerce via steamboats in the bayous, military service and the two World Wars, the development of the oil industry in Texas and Louisiana, and a federally-administered rural electrification program. As these developments connected the Cajuns to the outside world, they were as many opportunities to escape their poverty and provide their children with a better education (Dubois and Melançon 1997: 66-67). As cultural assimilation into the American culture increased, the use of French decreased. “The relatively stable networks which constituted Cajun communities began to change. Inexorably, English replaced French, event at home” (Dubois and Melançon 1997: 67). Other assimilation forces were radio and television, as well as the new interstate highway system, which slowly eroded the “physical and cultural barriers separating south Louisiana from English-speaking America” (Bernard 2008: 45). The Second World War accelerated the loss of Cajun culture and of Louisiana French because “many young Cajun men drafted into the armed services began to be acculturated into mainstream Anglo-American values [.They] believed in the inferiority of their culture and impressed their opinions upon their wives and children” (Hebert 2000), which reinforced the community’s linguistic insecurity. After the national effort that the War implied, many Cajuns came back home with a new sense of patriotism, “a newfound pride in their American nationality” (Bernard 2008: 54-55). Dajko (2020: 6) notes a “a precipitous drop in use of French in the generations born after World War II”. Until what is known as “the Cajun Renaissance” (cf. section 1.3), rural Louisiana francophones continued to suffer significant prejudice from anglophones, and the term Cajun was often used as a derogatory label. In the early seventies, Carpenter (1972) conducted a perception study of Louisiana dialects. She concluded that the participants rated the Cajun speakers less favorably than the African-American speakers, a somewhat surprising result given the traditional prejudice against African-American English (e.g. Baugh 2000; McWhorter 2017), particularly in the South. Oil-related business boomed in the region after World War II and employed thousands of Cajuns. These jobs provided Cajuns with the money that gradually turned their traditional society into a more materialistic one, “and because national and most local programs aired in English, television further convinced Cajuns that speaking French was unimportant” (Bernard 2008: 56). Increasingly, many parents decided not to speak to their children in French so they would not be at what was considered to be a linguistic disadvantage. English was much more valued from a social point of view; it gave its speakers linguistic – and by extension social – capital (cf. Bourdieu 1979, 1982). By the 1960s, only about 12% of Cajun children “used French as their first language. Few even used it as a second language. And the numbers fell rapidly for Cajuns born after 1970” (Bernard 2008: 58)1.

1.3. The rebirth of Cajun culture

10What stopped the Cajun culture from dying was the Cajun Renaissance (or Cajun Revival) that began in the 1960s within a socio-historical context that was favorable to the expression of ethnicity and the promotion of ethnic heritage (cf. section 3.1), as materialized by the civil rights movement. “As part of this national trend, Cajuns launched their own pride and empowerment movement” (Bernard 2008: 60). The movement had actually begun with the 1955 bicentennial of the Acadian exile, which local political leaders used as a symbolic starting point to try and revive Cajun culture. “The message of 1955 was that the Cajuns had survived the worst; their culture and language were injured but alive” (Ancelet et al. 2010: xii). Cajun leaders also renewed relations with Acadians in Canada and New England (some of the Acadians who left Canada at the time of the Grand Dérangement settled in other places than Louisiana), which helped them create a sense of Acadian identity common to Louisiana, New England, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Within the Cajun community, as is often the case with ethnic groups, the third generation in the process of language shift (from French to English) and cultural change was the generation that felt the loss of culture the most (Dubois and Horvath 2008: 209). They were the generation whose parents had intentionally rejected the Cajun culture and language because their own parents had suffered from the stigma attached to them. The renewal of Cajun ethnic pride has been on the increase ever since the 1960s. Much more recently, Dajko (2020) interviewed some people who recalled deliberately avoiding the term Cajun in their youth, while commenting that it had become prestigious since.

11In 1971, the Louisiana State legislature recognized that 22 Louisiana parishes and “other parishes of similar cultural environment” had “strong French Acadian cultural aspects” (House Concurrent Resolution No. 496, June 6, 1971). The Heart of Acadiana was made the official name of the region (see Figure 2). The name used by the general public is simply Acadiana (Bernard 2003: 167).

12Figure 2. Parishes of Acadiana. Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Acadiana_parishes_map.png

13This cultural rebirth was not altogether disconnected from an effort to revive the French language. The impact of the Second World War on French in Louisiana was not entirely negative (cf. section 2.2) as some Cajuns served as interpreters and realized that the French they spoke could be valuable. Some community leaders who lamented the loss of French worked together with Louisiana’s legislative bodies to find legal solutions to the problem. In 1968, the Louisiana state legislature created the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), the purpose of which was to foster “the development, utilization, and preservation of the French language as found in the State of Louisiana for the cultural, economic, and tourist benefit of the State” (Legislative Act No. 679). The founders of COFODIL therefore saw the economic interest behind the cultural and linguistic revitalization. The revival worked spectacularly with people outside the Cajun community, as it led to a new interest in Cajun culture. Cultural “ambassadors” came to be known beyond the borders of Acadiana, both nationally and internationally, and particularly in the very popular fields of Cajun gastronomy (e.g. Paul Prudhomme) and Cajun music (e.g. Dewey Balfa, Zachary Richards). This resulted in “the commodification of the distinctive ‘Frenchness’ of Louisiana” (Milroy and Gordon 2003), giving it social and cultural capital. The new term Acadiana and the introduction of an Acadian flag in 1974 were clear markers of the cultural idiosyncrasies of Southern Louisiana, which has sparked the interest of tourists ever since. “Along with money and teachers have come hordes of tourists eager to visit this long-lost, long-forgotten ‘exotic’ place where, against all odds, French has somehow survived in the belly of the beast” (Ancelet et al. 2010: xiii). In 1968, the Louisiana state legislature also made it compulsory for public elementary and high schools to offer French-language courses. Louisiana universities began to train French-language instructors. Cajun activists did their best to develop relationships with other French-speaking territories.

Cajun civic leaders developed commercial ties between south Louisiana and other French-speaking regions. Cajun children benefited from student exchange programs that permitted them to live with French-speaking families in Quebec, while Cajun families opened their homes to French Canadian children. Cajun activists symbolically paired their communities with towns and villages in France, Belgium, and Quebec in what became known as jumelages (twinnings). (Bernard 2008: 61)

14CODOFIL chose standard French for teaching purposes, and teachers were recruited from France, Belgium, and Quebec. This laid the emphasis on linguistic norms that were located outside the Cajun community. It was seen by some as elitist, which caused resentment (Dubois and Melançon 1997: 84). Even the minority of children who did speak French were sometimes made to feel that they did not speak “the real French”, but some “bastardized” version of it, which did not help to curb any feelings of linguistic insecurity. Further, the thirty minutes of daily French-language instruction in elementary schools (Bernard 2008: 69) were not enough to permit any real fluency in the language when children did not speak it outside the classroom. For these reasons, the introduction of French instruction in schools was rather limited from a purely linguistic point of view, even though it meant a great deal from a cultural point of view. Immersion programs in Canada were more successful and mostly began in the 1980s. With the 1990s, a more popular movement emerged in defense of a more local variety of French, which was felt to be more closely related to the identity of Louisiana residents.

15Despite some success, command of spoken French has continued to dwindle in Southern Louisiana, and “nearly everyone is illiterate in French” (Dajko 2020: 7). Therefore, the renewal of Cajun ethnic pride has had to manifest itself through other linguistic manifestations in the past twenty years. Indeed, “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” (Dubois and Horvath 2008: 209). As a result, young Cajuns have started to use some features of the Cajun Vernacular English of their grandparents, the variety of English that had been rejected and stigmatized by previous generations.

16In order to try and determine to what extent French in general, and Louisiana French in particular, have had an influence on the Cajun variety of English that is spoken in Southern Louisiana today, I shall now turn to linguistic descriptions of Louisiana French and Cajun English.

2. Linguistic descriptions

2.1. Louisiana French (LF)

2.1.1. Background

17A full description of Louisiana French (LF) is well beyond the scope of this paper. What I mainly want to focus on is the interaction between French and English, particularly the features of LF that may have an influence on Cajun English (CE) and therefore serve as markers of the speaker’s Cajun identity, thereby possibly partaking of a process of sociolinguistic rebirth. Yet, we will see that some of these features – particularly phonetic and phonological ones – can also be found in other English varieties, which might raise questions as to whether it is certain that LF is the sole influence behind these CE characteristics. Moreover, CE is also influenced by features of French that do not specifically belong to LF, but that are rather typical of all varieties of French. These features will not be listed in the present section. They will be described in the section on CE (cf. section 2.2).

18Dajko (2020) addresses common misconceptions about the varieties of French spoken in Louisiana. LF is commonly misunderstood as a direct descendant of one variety only: that which was spoken by the Acadians who came to Louisiana after 1775. However, if Acadian French was important in shaping LF, it was by no means the only source of French that was brought to Louisiana (cf. section 1.1). The original dialects were multiple and implied a great deal of linguistic variation, even if they eventually mixed. Yet, the vast majority of the settlers spoke some form of Oïl dialect. To summarize, Dajko (2020: 52) writes that

As people mixed with each other, their dialects mixed, too. Moreover, many of these dialects were so similar to each other that it is very difficult to attribute features of modern Louisiana Regional French to any one source, Acadian or otherwise.

19Today, LF varies according to who speaks it and where it is spoken within Southern Louisiana. These variations are beyond the scope of this paper as they do not particularly seem to have an influence on Cajun English.

20LF is also frequently thought of as a relic of 17th-century French, as a mixed language that brings together elements from French and from English, and as a variety of French that is incomprehensible to speakers from France. In fact, today’s speakers of LF and of varieties spoken in France can converse without many difficulties, despite some lexical differences. There may be difficulties linked to different pronunciations, but nothing that cannot be sorted out with a few efforts on either side. When LF is spoken very quickly (but this is true of other varieties as well), “the uninitiated may sometimes have difficulty understanding, particularly if they are not familiar with another nonstandard variety of French” (Dajko 2020: 43).

21It is a misunderstanding of the nature of LF to think that it is a mixed language. Given the contact between French and English in Louisiana, there are of course borrowings of English lexical items in the speech of LF speakers. For instance, some frequent lexical borrowings are the nouns truck and drive (Dajko 2020: 43) and some are the result of processes of code-switching (Picone 1997). Interesting examples can be heard online, for example in the speech of Jourdan Thibodeaux, a locally famous Cajun musician and LF activist. In a 2020 interview that he gave on France 242, he uses English nouns and noun phrases such as beehive, recipe, or Je vais pas aller ten thousand miles d’ici (in which the use of English is facilitated by different units of measurement). He also frequently uses the English discourse marker you know, as in

Un tas de gens qui veut d’être plus en plus américains parce que c’est plus cool, you know, c’est plus accepté. Mais moi je préfère d’être ça que je suis.

22In the example above, the presence of de between the verb and the object (préfère d’être), which would not be found in Standard French, is probably due to the use of the infinitive particle to in English (cf. “I prefer to be…”). Yet, despite the influence of English, LF consists of structures and a lexicon that are undeniably French, “with unsystematic English influence that represents a minority of forms” (Dajko 2020: 43).

2.1.2. LF: phonology

23One of the main features of LF is its heavy and widespread nasalization of vowels when they occur in front of a nasal consonant. According to Ancelet et al. (2010: xxxviii), this mostly concerns “the vowels [a], [e], [ɛ], [œ], [o], [ɔ]”. For example, the terms chêne (“oak tree”), pomme (“apple”), femme (“woman”) respectively yield the following realizations in LF: [ʃɛ̃n], [pɔ̃m], [fɑ̃m]/[fɔ̃m], the latter femme variant because the equivalent of Standard French [ɑ̃] is often [ɔ̃] in LF.

24Below, Figure 3 shows a spectrogram generated by Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2018) of two realizations by the same male speaker of /a/ in monosyllabic words: the purely oral variant [a] and the nasalized realization [ɑ̃] in front of the nasal [m]. This is taken from the recordings of the corpus provided by the “Cajun French Virtual Table Française” (cf. section 3.2). The spectrogram clearly displays two of the main features of nasalized vowels for [ɑ̃] (Delvaux, Metens and Soquet 2002), that is lower energy, particularly at higher frequencies, and a lowering of F2 (with a mean value of 1017.5 Hz for [ɑ̃] vs. a mean value of 1345.02 Hz for [a]).

Figure 3. Spectrogram of [a] and [ɑ̃], LF male speaker

Figure 3. Spectrogram of [a] and [ɑ̃], LF male speaker

25In LF, the vowel [ɛ] is frequently lowered when it occurs before [r]. “The degree of lowering varies” but “the vowel [æ], which is similar to the sound of the vowel in the English word cat, is most commonly heard. However, some speakers will lower further to the vowel [a],” (Ancelet et al. 2010: xxxviii). The authors give the following examples: “frère “brother” [frɛr] → [frær] → [frar] and personne “no one” [pɛrsn] → [pærsn] → [parsn]”. It is often heard in the word cher “dear” ([ʃɛr] → [ʃær] → [ʃar]), a frequent term that serves both as a term of endearment and a discourse marker in LF. This lowering of [ɛ] can be heard in a Télé-Louisiane interview of Amanda Lafleur, professor in the Languages department at Louisiana State University, which is available online3. In the words secondaire (4 min 25 sec from the beginning of the video) and immersion (4 min 58 sec), her pronunciation of the vowel in front of [r] is lowered, yielding realizations close to [səgɔ̃dæʀ] and [imæʀsjɔ̃]. To a lesser extent, lowering of [ɛ] also occurs in front of [l]. This is most typically the case in the pronunciation used for the third-person subject pronoun elle, frequently pronounced [æl] or [al]. The very spelling of the pronoun in LF is telling, as it is more frequently <alle> than <elle> (Dajko 2020: 40).

26The phoneme /r/ tends to weaken in word-final position when it comes after a vowel, sometimes so much that it becomes entirely elided. Ancelet et al. (2010: xxxix) note that “most often, however, a trace of the [r] remains in the lengthening of the preceding vowel. Thus, the word frère ‘brother’ may be pronounced [frær], [fræː].

27Let us now turn to connected speech processes. Final consonant cluster reduction (CCR) frequently occurs in LF. If this is true of most varieties of French, particularly in informal or colloquial styles, the reduction is more common in all styles in LF, where

it can be said to be nearly categorical. It is most systematic in the case of the liquids [l] and [r] occurring after another consonant, as in table “table” [tab] and quatre “four” [kat]. These consonants are virtually never pronounced in this context unless they are followed by a word beginning with a vowel, as in quatre ans “four years” [katr]. Consonant cluster reduction also affects other consonants, however, as in masque “mask” [mas] and insecte “insect” [sɛk]. (Ancelet et al 2010: xxxiv).

28After this overview of Louisiana French, the next section deals with the main features of Cajun English.

2.2. A description of Cajun English (CE)

  • 4 Many thanks to Janice Fabregas for kindly giving me access to a rare recording of one of the ear (...)

29 This section is based both on pre-existing literature and on a study of recordings of CE speakers. Through the “Cajun French Virtual Table Française”, I had access to a 62-minute interview of a man called Alcee Thibodaux (henceforth, AT), one of the original CE speakers as defined by Dubois and Horvath (e.g. 2000, 2008; cf. section 2.2.3)4. He was born in 1897 in Lafourche Parish and he spoke French as a first language. He did an interview in English with Nicholls State University, a public university in Thibodaux, Louisiana. He mostly talked about his life growing up in a sugar plantation. Although the English he speaks in the interview is entirely fluent, it sounds as if it is influenced by French, and it bears some of the characteristics of a second language. Some of the interviewer’s questions are translated into French in order to avoid any possible misunderstanding. One of them perfectly exemplifies the contact between the two languages in Southern Louisiana, as it is formulated as “Qu’est-ce tu faisais pour avoir du good time ?”. However, the repetitions and translations seem to be due to substantial hearing loss on AT’s part, rather than to a lack of command of the English language. Because of a poor acoustic quality, only an auditory analysis was conducted.

  • 5 Many thanks to Katie Carmichael for giving me access to the Cajun English Corpus and for answeri (...)

30 The other recordings are taken from the Cajun English Corpus (CEC), collected by Katie Carmichael (Virginia Tech) in Lafourche Parish in 20095. The CEC is composed of 18 speakers and two different types of recordings. First, it comprises interviews consisting of casual conversations lasting 30 to 90 minutes. It also includes the recordings of 7 speakers telling 33 Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes. This is a South Louisiana genre of jokes that is locally very famous and features two eponymous stereotypical Cajuns, Boudreaux and Thibodeaux being very common names in Acadiana. They are depicted as uneducated, dull, and incompetent. These jokes are based on stereotypes about the Cajuns as a socioethnic group and make fun of its members, who are portrayed as stupid (Davies 1982, 1987), much in the same way as jokes about the Belgians can be made in France. A significant difference, however, is that they are very popular within the Cajun community and are mostly told by Cajuns, who seem to enjoy the opportunity for collective self-mockery. The interest of the jokes lies as much in how the narratives are performed as in the actual content of the jokes. They are typically told with exaggerated stereotypical CE accents and they follow a common pattern that allows the joketeller to play two different parts. They usually consist of a frame narrative produced by the speaker turned narrator and of at least one dialogue between the two eponymous characters, from which the punchline is usually taken. The stance taken by the joketellers manifests itself both in the frame narrative and in the dialogues, with a similar exaggeration of CE features. Carmichael (2013: 167) argues that “some of these instances of variation may be explained as identity expression through language”. As the very act of narrating these jokes is very much part of Cajun culture, it might be argued that the stance adopted by the joketeller is relevant to the expression of Cajun culture and that it establishes him/her as a member of the Cajun community. The accent and other linguistic features that are performed therefore aim at a prototypical model that is meant to represent something genuinely Cajun, even though it is somewhat distant and dated. Similarly, the situations described in the jokes often recreate a way of life that has partly been lost, with Boudreaux and Thibodeaux regularly moving about the bayou on a pirogue, for instance.

31The CEC comprises recordings of 17 male Cajun speakers (M1 to M17) aged 32-83, and an additional female speaker (F1) aged 62. It includes 6 monolingual speakers of English, 3 “semi-speakers” of Louisiana French (i.e. “individuals capable of handling and constructing complete sentences, but not capable of actually using the language in all the usual communicative situations”, cf. Dubois and Melançon 1997: 74), 8 bilingual French-English speakers and 2 L2 speakers of English (with LF as a L1). The jokes are a predominantly male activity, and Carmichael only found one Cajun woman who was willing to participate (cf. section 3.2), which explains the gender imbalance of the corpus.

32The point of this section is twofold. Through a description of the main features of CE, it first aims at determining to what extent they are influenced by contact phenomena. On top of Louisiana French or French in general, special attention is paid to the possible influence of two varieties that historically and socially developed alongside CE: Southern American English (SAE) and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). In addition, this section is also concerned with the effects of stancetaking on the performance of CE in the jokes, when the speaker adopts a different persona to become the narrator of Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes.

2.2.1. CE lexis

33 The core of the distinctive CE lexicon is composed of French-influenced words and phrases. However, given the history of Louisiana, CE has been influenced by other languages as well. For example, African languages have brought the terms gumbo “a meat of fish-based soup or stew”, jazz, okra “a long and green vegetable”, voodoo or voudou “a form of religion involving magic”. The word coonass, “which has come to mean something like an authentic Cajun who does not care what others think of his or her lifestyle” (Carmichael 2019: 165) may come from the French word connasse “female idiot” but its origin is uncertain (Carmichael 2019). Southern Louisiana has also developed its own creations, like the word padna, which is regional slang for “buddy, friend” and is derived from partner (https://www.urbandictionary.com/​define.php?term=Padna). The spelling of the word reflects the traditional American pronunciation of /t/ in unstressed position as a flap. It is rendered by the letter <d>, a common approximation used to represent the process of flapping. It also reflects CE’s tendency towards non rhoticity, or variable rhoticity (cf. section 2.2.3). The fact that padna is very much associated with Southern Louisiana and Cajunness is made obvious by the fact that many of the CEC speakers use the term when telling Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes, as in the examples below:

M1: He went to see his padna, Thibodeaux.
M8: You heard about my padna that went buy a pig? […] My padna Boudreaux, he says “that’s the one I want.”
M13: Padna, we going fishin tomorrow? […] That's my padna.

34One of the most striking features of CE is of course the number of French-influenced words and phrases that can be regularly heard in the Cajun community, even among monolingual speakers of English. They can be simple borrowings, or they can be included in more complex processes of code-switching. The difference has been the topic of much debate (Picone 1997, Dajko and Carmichael 2014) and it is not always easy to differentiate between a borrowing and a code-switch in the specific context of Southern Louisiana (Carmichael 2019: 164). Some common words and phrases are bayou “a marshy area of water”, lagniappe “something extra provided by a shop owner to a customer”, fais do-do “a family dance party”, piastre “a dollar”, envie “a desire”, couillon6 “stupid”, gris-gris “good luck charm”, rougarou “werewolf” (a common villain in horror stories in Southern Louisiana; it comes from the French loup-garou), zydeco “a blend of African and Cajun music” (it seems to come from the Creole French pronunciation of French les haricots “the beans”), Mardi Gras “Fat Tuesday” (the events around the Carnival celebration), joie de vivre “joy for living”, laissez les bons temps rouler “let the good times roll, enjoy life”, lâche pas la patate “don’t give up” (literally “don’t drop the potato’; Carmichael 2019: 165). Given the importance of cuisine in Cajun culture, the following words are commonly heard and seen in adverts and on signs (see Figure 4) throughout Louisiana: boudin “a sausage filled with rice, meat, and spices”, beignets “square donuts with no holes in them”, bisque “a creamy soup”, brioche “a form of soft bread that is shaped like a bun”, courtbouillon “a stock made from vegetables, water, and wine”, andouille “a smoked sausage made of tripe, intestine, and meat”, jambalaya “seasoned rice with meat or seafood”, étouffée “a spicy Cajun stew made with vegetables and seafood”, filé “powdered sassafras leaves used in a gumbo”, pain perdu “bread soaked in egg, fried and topped with syrup or sugar”, praline “cake made with sugar, cream, and pecans”7. Even if some of these culinary terms may be found in other varieties of American English and in other places in the USA, they are particularly common in CE and in Louisiana. As with other lexical items, it is the high frequency of use of these terms in Southern Louisiana that makes them Cajun.

35 LeCompte (1967) analyzes the contexts in which CE speakers are most likely to use French words. Although it dates back to the late 1960s, his study is not without interest in determining the motivations behind the use of French lexical items. His informants resort to French in the following contexts:
- the English word is unknown,
- the French word is more commonly used in the community than the English equivalent,
- the speaker believes that the French word is “better”, mostly because the connotations of the French word are absent from the English equivalent,
- the informants usually prefer French expletives,
- the speaker uses French terms as an attempt at humor.

36The use of French words to generate humor is also something that characterizes the CEC, as the number of French words is significantly higher in the jokes. Here are a few examples taken from the CEC:

M1: She used to make all kind of desserts, and turkey, and ham […], les patates douces.
M2: […] unless you wanna get shot at and covered with plombs, like we call them, plombs, the little peas that’s in shotgun shells.
M4: They have a real joie de vivre.
M8 (joke): Mais, he says, c’est vingt-cinq piastres for un cochon, you know, twenty-five dollars a pig. […] Mon padna Boudreaux, he says “ah maudit cochon!”

37Two particular discourse markers are frequently used in CE: mais “but” (usually pronounced with a diphthong) and cher “dear” (pronounced with [æ] or [a] as in LF, cf. section 2.1.2). Carmichael (2019: 164) notes that

Like other discourse markers, they do not add much content or change the literal meaning of the utterance, though they may add some social information—for example, that the speaker seeks to indicate that he or she is Cajun or considers the listener an intimate friend. For this reason, mais and cher may be used liberally throughout an interaction.

38Below are examples of how mais is used in casual conversation in the CEC. M17 is one of the two L2 speakers of English; M3 is a semi-speaker (cf. section 2.2).

M17: I got punished for talking French at school.
Interviewer: What would they do to you?
M17: Mais, you would say something in French, the teacher would make you write it.
M3: Mais, she’s not dating my friend?

39The use of mais and cher is particularly common in Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes. Here are a few examples taken from the CEC:

M3: He said mais I’m going to get me some… he said I’m going to get me some ducks. […] Mais, that’s for the visit.
M8: Mais why?
M4: Don’t touch me, cher […] Would you find out this, cher? […] How come, cher?
M13: Mais, I’m green with envy.

40Some phrases and idioms used in CE do not involve French words but sound as if they have been translated directly from French. Such common calques are pass a good time (instead of “have a good time”; cf. French passez une bonne journée), making groceries (“buying groceries”; cf. French faire les courses), getting down out of the bus ( “getting off the bus”; cf. French descendre du bus) (Schilling 2016: 245), pass by your house (“stop in for a visit at your house”; cf. French je passe chez toi) (Carmichael 2019: 165), catch the rain (cf. French “attraper la pluie”) (LeCompte 1967: 39), and come see (“come over here”; cf. French viens voir (Cheramie and Gill 1992).

2.2.2. CE grammar

41Sometimes, French influence goes beyond the mere use of lexical words. Influence of a more structural nature was more common with an L2 speaker like AT and is more marginal with younger speakers of CE today.

42Brown (1986: 400) cites the use of the preposition in instead of the preposition to in “He went in France”, on account of the use of en in a similar sentence in French (cf. Il est allé en France). In his recording, AT uses the following calque-like constructions:

Interviewer: How old are you?
AT: Seventy years. (without the word old, cf. soixante-dix ans in French).
AT: We came on the bayou. (where the preposition on is used instead of to; cf. sur le bayou in French)

43M6, one of the two L2 speakers of English uses the pronoun you instead of the reflexive pronoun yourself in the following, probably because of the French influence:

M6: At night, the temperature would fall down way below forty. You’d have to cover you.

44AT tends to overuse the article the, as French people often do when they speak English. He does so when the zero article would be expected because the head noun has not actually become definite (as a result of being mentioned a second time, for example) and/or because the reference is generic. In a joke, M8 uses the definite article with names of diseases, as it would be used in French:

AT: Well, I never complained about the life on a plantation […] Today, the people don’t make their living, you see.
M8: She got the herpes on her lips […] She got the AIDS.

45 This particular trait in AT’s speech can probably be attributed to interference from French, which has a similar use of the definite article (cf. la vie dans une plantation, les gens ne gagnent pas leur vie). This is all the more likely as the younger speakers of the CEC do not display this use of the definite article, even the two L2 speakers. M8’s use of the in the examples above is therefore attributable to his performance of the dialect and is the result of stancetaking.

46 From the point of view of syntax, CE often uses dislocation, that is the emphatic repetition of personal pronouns at the beginning or the end of clauses (e.g. Me, I don’t like that much or He went to the store, him, cf. Carmichael 2013). Rottet (1996) and Carmichael and Gudmestad (2018) explain that this non-canonical usage may be due to similar pronoun repetition in Cajun French (a feature which is not restricted to the Cajun variety of French). In terms of information packaging choices, this allows the speaker to present the information about the subject in two places, as opposed to one, making it easier to process. Left dislocation (repetition of the subject at the beginning of the clause) emphasizes the topic, while right dislocation (repetition of the subject at the end of the clause) constitutes a form of clarification. The examples below are taken from AT’s recording and the casual-interview section of the CEC.

AT: Miss Rousseau, she was a widow.
M1: My brother that’s closest to me, he lives in Missouri now.
M2: My godfather, he used to fish trout.
M6: The draftees, they change their minds.
M8: Me and my brothers, we’re all one year apart.
M17: He’s a carpenter, him too […] Me, I can’t read music. […] Me, I can set a guitar by ear.

  • 8 In fact, dislocation seems to be a very commonly used feature in all stereotypical renderings of (...)

47Abundant use of dislocation is associated to the performance of the jokes, seemingly marking it as something of a CE stereotype8. Below are a few examples, sometimes associated with the mais discourse marker.

M1: Thibodeaux, he did a pretty good business […] Boudreaux, him, that’s true. […] Boudreaux, he’s out there, he’s hunting.
M4: You ate that bird, you. […] You don’t believe that, you? […] You stay out of this, you.
M13: Boudreaux, him and his wife, they had a big fight. […] Mais, I got the blues me. [..] Mais me, the other day I had diarrhea.
F1: Boudreaux, he needed to go on a vacation.

48A similar process that is also undeniably influenced by CE (and that is typical of French in general) is the use of the markers of agreement and negation yeah and no at the end of clauses, as in He don’t watch that show, no or I’m goin’ pass by your house later, yeah (Scott 1992). It is used in one of the jokes by M13 (That boy didn’t have too much sense, no), but it remains marginal in the CEC corpus. According to Scott (1992), CE lacks emphatic do, which is replaced by use of this form of tag (e.g. I like it, yes, as opposed to I do like it).

49French-influenced word order is often found in questions, when subject-verb inversion does not occur, as is usually the case in spoken French. Hence, word order can be What else you have? (Marshall 1982: 314), What that is? (Scott 1992). Here are examples taken from the CEC, where it is more frequent in jokes:

M3 (casual conversation): How long it took you? About four hours? […] So, who else in the family she met? She met the Roaches?
M4 (joke): What you think about them term limit for politician? […] Who you are, you?
M8 (joke): How much it is?
F1 (joke): Mais, why you don’t wanna come?

50Other grammatical features of CE are not due to the influence of French and can be found in other non-standard dialects. As speakers of Southern American English (SAE) do, CE speakers tend to use y’all (the contraction of you all) to indicate second-person plural (Carmichael 2019: 163). CE also exhibits a tendency towards was leveling, i.e. the use of was in all persons of the past tense, which is also typical of Appalachian English (Carmichael 2019: 166). Was leveling is a recurrent trait in the CEC, and it is not restricted to jokes. It also appears in casual conversation, both in the speech of AT and in the CEC:

AT: We was five boy in the family […] We was eight girl at the house, and five boy.
M1 When they was younger, I bought them rabbit-hunting a couple of times.
M8: We was the people […] They wasn’t paying good.
M13: We was happy.

51 Dubois and Horvath (2002) note that copula absence is also a feature that CE has in common with other non-standard varieties, including African American Vernacular English (AAVE). However, this CE trait does not appear in casual conversation in our corpora. It is difficult to tell whether the absence of this feature is purely circumstantial, whether copula absence is a receding feature of CE, or whether it has in fact never been that common compared to other CE features. However, it is used in some jokes in the CEC, a proof that it is still somehow connected to the performance of Cajunness, as in the examples below:

M3: You crazy.
M8: The best thing about it is he smart. […] He smart, that pig.
M13: I need to go pick up something for my wife, so she not so mad at me. […] You, you pregnant.

52 CE morphemic features include an absence of standard inflectional morphemes, particularly the morpheme of the past tense, a feature that can also be found in other non-standard varieties. This feature is rather common in AT’s speech, in which it alternates with standard marking of the past tense and double marking, with both did and -ed. Absence of the morpheme of the past tense is also marginally used in the CEC:

AT: I’m born right on Bayou Lafourche […] My father come from back there […] That’s where I’m born, too.
AT: You didn’t had what they got today for people, you see […] They didn’t had those store they got today. […] You didn’t had no car.
M1 (casual conversation): We all lived down here before, you know, we see each other all the time. […] When I was four years old, my grandmother was a widow and she never want to stay by herself after her husband died.
M3 (joke): He was on the wharf, he was fishing. He see Thibodeaux come.
M8 (joke): He ran out of the hotel room, he grab his fishing-line, he catch a fish. […] Boudreaux pick up Thibodeaux and they went to the game.
M13 (joke): He grab the rabbit, he start walking down the street.

53The morpheme -s may also be absent from CE, particularly when it marks the plural. LeCompte (1967) notes that this may be due the fact that the suffix is not pronounced in spoken French. However, the absence of other morphemes cannot be similarly explained by French phonology. This feature is a regular one in the speech in AT but it is almost nonexistent in the casual conversations in the CEC, with the exception of the two L2 learners, which seems to be an indication that it is recessive. Yet, it is used in the jokes, where it even draws a metalinguistic comment from M4. One of the jokes has Boudreaux ask Thibodeaux what he thinks “about term limit for politician”. M4 interrupts his joke to explain that “you don’t put an -s on politician”, thereby interestingly referring to one of the mechanisms that he uses to render the dialect and perform the joke. In an article that examines the past work on CE, Cheramie (1998) notes that “there seems to be some agreement that the -s suffix is generally dropped from some possessive nouns, plural nouns, and third-person singular verbs” (1998: 21). Absence of various types of -s is not uncommon in the CEC. It is not specifically a CE feature, as it occurs in a great many non-standard varieties of English, including AAVE. Below are examples from AT’s recording and the CEC.

  • 9 My emphases.

AT: We was eight girl at the house and five boy. There’s only one of my sister went to school at Laurel Valley School maybe three month. […] Two, three cow […] Two section
M1 (casual conversation): She used to make all kind of desserts […] a couple of time […] in the past couple of year […] My wife understands French but she don’t speak too much of it.
M1 (joke): This little boy comes, uh, come home from school. […] You got your three word?
M3 (casual conversation): She’s a couple of fry short of a happy meal […]
M3 (joke): Here come Thibodeaux, in a pirogue! […] Boudreaux come out, he take the cat…
M4 (joke): What you think about them term limit for politician?
M6 (casual conversation, L2 speaker of English): The draftees, they change their mind […] five hundred thousand dollar […], It don’t bother me at all. […] It don’t bother me […] He took four biopsy […] Walk 21 mile […] it don’t look good for you […] five hundred thousand dollar
M7 (casual conversation): I learned two song.
M4 (joke): It even hurt me when I cast my line.
M9 (casual conversation): She looks at the man and fall down.
M13 (joke): Two time […] a bunch of chicken.
M13 (joke): He walk, he walk, he look in the yard…
M17 (casual conversation, L2 speaker of English): 65% of the carpenter are gonna play an instrument […] I had three brother that played the guitar. […] He don’t know how to read music either. […] The teacher would make you write it, plenty of time, too. […] He’s the one that play the guitar. He make a lot of money. He know a lot of French song. […] That was the good old day […] all the chicken […] She say […] he don’t know how to read music, either.
F1 (joke): She say, ‘Mais, why not?’9

2.2.3. CE pronunciation

54 Many features of CE pronunciation seem to be influenced by LF. At the same time, many monolingual speakers of English within the Cajun community do display some of these CE pronunciation features (Dubois and Horvath 2002). It follows that the specific sounds of CE cannot be only attributed to interference from French, or interphonology, particularly when it comes to the youngest speakers. For the latter, the French-influenced traits of CE phonology, whose origin is to be found in the speech of older speakers, “have been recycled as markers of social identity” (Dubois and Horvath 2008: 210). In that sense, it seems that the Cajun Renaissance has been synonymous with some sort of linguistic rebirth, linked to former pronunciations. This is clearly shown in the works of Dubois and Horvath (e.g. 2000, 2008), where Cajun informants are divided into three generations. The “older generation” comprises the speakers aged 60 and over, a majority of whom were born before 1930. “They, along with the generation earlier than theirs, began the process of the creation of Cajun Vernacular English” (Dubois and Horvath 2008: 214) as they had to adapt from a monolingual French culture to English-speaking surroundings. Therefore, they may be considered as the original speakers of CE. They display no linguistic difference along gender lines. The “middle-aged generation” is composed of Cajuns aged 40 to 59 at the beginning of the 2000s, who are very much aware of the stigma that was attached to both LF and CE. They abandoned French and began to sound like other Southerners, or simply other Americans, when they spoke English. Sociolinguistic interviews suggest that they moved away from a Cajun identity (Dubois and Melançon 1997). The linguistic patterns of men and women are virtually similar. The “younger generation” are aged 19 to 39, were born after the Cajun Renaissance, and are proud to be Cajuns. They are most likely to self-identify as Cajuns. Since they solely or mostly use English in their daily interactions, their Cajun identity can only truly be expressed through English. They perceive both LF and CE in a much more positive way than older generations did (Carmichael 2013). Among them, it is mostly young men that have recycled a number of specific variants used by their grandparents’ generation. Young women tend to use more standard variants, such as those used by the middle-aged speakers, while young men use more recycled features. Not all specificities of CE pronunciation are due to an influence of (Louisiana) French, as CE speakers are “in contact with speakers of other dialects such as African American English, Southern English, and New Orleans English(es), among other language varieties” (Carmichael 2019: 162).

55A study of the recordings of the CEC makes it clear that pronunciation is particularly well-suited to the expression of Cajunness. It is the area in which the greatest number of specific Cajun variants can be found. While not all speakers use lexical or grammatical features of CE in the casual conversation, they all display specific CE pronunciation features, even if they do so variably. These features are in turn reinforced and exaggerated when the speakers become narrators of Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes. For the analysis of the CEC, both auditory perception and visual evidence from spectrograms in Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2018) were used.

56Carmichael (2013) found out that vowels were not very much manipulated by the speakers in order to indicate Cajunness in the joke section of the CEC. The only manipulation that displayed some kind of consistency was the monophthongization of the lexical set face /eɪ/. This absence of manipulation may be due to the fact that the typical CE vocalic features are already present in the casual-conversation recordings. It may also be that the vocalic specificities of CE mainly operate below the level of consciousness, partly because “vowel features of Cajun English have received less attention than consonantal features” (Carmichael 2019: 166).

57The vowels of CE are different from those of most Southern varieties insofar as they do not display the “Southern Drawl”, which is a prolongation of stressed vowels and diphthongs which can turn monophthongs into diphthongs and diphthongs into triphthongs. CE only displays the first part of the Southern Diphthong Shift, that is the monophthongization of the lexical set PRICE // into [ɑː] (Scott 1992, Dubois and Horvath 2008). However, this realization may be the result of processes that are distinct from the Shift, as CE tends to exhibit other instances of monophthongization, as well as a shortening of tense vowels, even in stressed syllables (Walton 1994). In addition, PRICE monophthongization is a widespread phenomenon in the South, even in accents that do not display the Southern Diphthong Shift. Wroblewski et al. (2009) carried out an acoustic analysis of CE vowels and concluded that CE speakers “consistently displayed glide absence” (59) for long, tense vowels. It follows that the lexical sets FLEECE and GOOSE are typically realized with the pure monophthongs [] and [], respectively; GOAT and FACE tend to become the monophthongs [] and [] (Dubois and Horvath 2008: 211). This is illustrated by Figures 5 and 6 below, which show spectrograms of the words to go and one day, as pronounced respectively by M1 and M3 in the casual-conversation section of the CEC. The vowels of go and day are typical of CE in that they tend towards monophthongization, their formants remaining almost parallel and horizontal, a proof that the vowel qualities do not change very much during the length of their realizations, unlike what happens with typical diphthongs. These two vowels are not particularly shortened, but they appear in nucleus position within their intonation boundaries, a position that does not favor syllable shortening. AT and all the speakers of the CEC display some degree of monophthongization. M8 produces particularly marked monophthongs in one of his jokes (to raise [reːz], he goes [goːz]), without any shortening at all, but the syllables are again in nucleus position. In other positions, the FACE vowel can be monophthongized and shortened. Shortening in particularly striking in the words day and today, both in the casual conversations and in the jokes, maybe because they are high-frequency words in the CEC and because high-frequency items are prone to undergoing some form of reduction (Bybee 2001). One exception to the CE tendency towards monophthongization is a lexico-phonetic specificity found in the casual-conversation part of the CEC, the pronunciation of the word aunt as [eɪnt], with a very clear diphthong. This is the way this word is systematically pronounced by M3 (a semi-speaker) and M9 (a bilingual speaker). Whether this is a trait of CE or a specificity of these two particular speakers is hard to tell as the word does not occur in the other recordings. According to Carmichael (personal communication), it is a lexical peculiarity within this region, amongst Cajun English speakers.

Figure 5. Spectrogram of to go, M1

Figure 5. Spectrogram of to go, M1

Figure 6. Spectrogram of one day, M3

Figure 6. Spectrogram of one day, M3

58Heavy nasalization (Walton 1994, Dubois and Horvath 1998) is the other often-described feature of CE vowels. While vowel nasalization is a common feature of SAE, CE nasalization also spreads to adjacent phones:

“Heavy nasalization” in Cajun Vernacular English is likely to appear in monosyllabic words and can be characterized by a heavier than normal degree of nasalization, that is the nasalization spreads to the consonant before the vowel (e.g. where the [b] in a word like Alabama is nasalized). More front closed vowels are nasalized than back vowels. (Dubois and Horvath 2008: 213)

59This process is reminiscent of nasalization in LF (cf. section 2.1.2) and it is difficult not to see the influence of the French variety of Southern Louisiana. Carmichael (2019: 166) notes that “monophthongized tense vowels and heavy vowel nasalization clearly correspond to more French-like pronunciations”. Moreover, it is recessive, being “less common among younger Cajun English speakers” (Carmichael 2019: 166), i.e. the speakers who are the least influenced by LF. Heavy nasalization is not a particularly obvious feature in the CEC.

60 Dubois and Horvath (2008: 211-212) note [æ] as a possible variant of the DRESS vowel in CE “in words such as Texas, bed, red, better, well and egg”. Scott (1992) mentions a general movement from [ɛ] to [æ] that is common to both CE and LF, influencing the pronunciation of English words such as hair and CE borrowings from LF such as cher. In both examples, the lowering occurs in front of /r/, as it does in LF (cf. section 3.1.2). AT has this pronunciation in his speech; for example, he pronounces fair with a vowel that sounds like [æ]. In the CEC corpus, the lowering occurs in other words and other environments such as tell (joke, M1), celebrate (joke, M4), November (joke, M4) bury (joke, M13), French (casual conversation, M17). It is difficult to find a pattern that would be common to these items. The fact that the lowering does not occur in front of [r] in any of these words does not seem to point to an exclusive influence from LF. However, lowering of [ɛ] occurs in front of [l] in LF as well, albeit to a lesser extent. His own realization of celebrate as [ˈsæləbreɪt] elicits a short reaction of a metalinguistic nature from M4: he draws the interviewer’s attention to it by repeating the word with extra emphasis on the first syllable. Given that he makes his accent much more Cajun when he switches from the casual conversation to the jokes, this must be a sign that he considers this particular realization of the vowel as a typically Cajun feature.

M4 (joke): Easter is the holiday that we celebrate – see, celebrate [ˈsæləbreɪt] – in November.

61 CE consonants have been the subject of more attention than vowels. They are also much more manipulated and exaggerated than CE vowels when the speakers of the CEC tell the jokes (Carmichael 2013). This is not surprising because consonants exhibit less variation and change than vowels across varieties of English, on account of their articulatory specificities, as explained by Cruttenden (2008: 64):

a consonantal articulation usually involves a contact which can be felt; such an articulation tends to be more stable. There have only been a small number of changes involving modification of consonants in English.

62Given that consonants are relatively stable units of speech, deviations from the variants that are considered standard have been noticed and commented upon in the case of CE. Such deviations have come to symbolize CE and have even become stereotypes of the variety. This is especially the case when the CE feature has the potential of altering the system of English, as with the substitution of /t/ for /θ/, and of /d/ for /ð/. Given the relative stability of consonants, consonantal variation and change are generally “of great linguistic, social and cognitive significance” (Glain 2015: 13).

63The CEC informants live in towns situated along Bayou Lafourche and they usually orient themselves based on the bayou (Dajko 2020). Following this logic, they can be divided into two groups: those who live “up the bayou” and those who live “down the bayou”. “Up the bayou and down the bayou have come to indicate the equivalent of ‘more urban’ and ‘more rural/isolated’, respectively” (Carmichael 2013: 386). Historically, down-the-bayou communities have taken longer to switch to English and have continued to be more influenced by LF; “there is a general perception that the insular communities situated farther down the bayou tend to speak with a stronger CE accent, while up the bayou residents are believed to speak more standard English” (Carmichael 2013: 387). As up-the-bayou CEC participants have “a more standard baseline to begin with” (Carmichael 2013: 377), they have a greater margin for exaggeration when turning from the casual conversation to the jokes. The performance of Cajunness is therefore the most apparent with the consonants produced in the jokes by the up-the-bayou speakers.

64The most prominent consonantal feature of CE is undoubtedly TH-stopping, that is the realization of the dental fricatives /θ, ð/ as the dental plosives [t̪, d̪], respectively (Rubrecht 1971, Scott 1992, Walton 1994, Dubois and Horvath 1998, Carmichael 2013). Even if it is not restricted to CE (it also occurs in AAVE and, more remotely, in New York City English, for example), it is probably the number-one stereotype of CE among the general public (Milroy and Gordon 2003: 91). Rubrecht (1971: 151–52) remarks that “Louisianans often cite the paradigm, ‘dis, dat, dese, and dose’ to partially explain how Acadians talk.” Walton (1994: 97) identifies TH-stopping as a “shibboleth for the dialect.” Even though it is present in many other varieties, it is perceived as a Cajun stereotype. It is interesting to note that even women in dense networks in the “younger generation” participate in this pattern (Dubois and Horvath 2000), which is not the case with other marked CE variants. TH-stopping is therefore an exception to the different linguistic behaviors of young men and women. AT systematically uses TH-stopping. As to the CEC speakers, all save one use it (some more systematically than others), even the monolingual English speakers. It is used both in the casual conversation and in the jokes, where it is often exaggerated. Carmichael (2013) notes that up-the-bayou speakers have significant increased rates of TH-stopping in jokes compared to casual conversations. Down-the-bayou speakers also display increased rates of stopping in jokes, but in a less dramatic fashion, there being less of a difference between their normal pronunciations and the pronunciations of the personae that they adopt when telling the jokes as a result of stancetaking. TH-stopping can occur within multiple contexts, such as in grammatical and lexical words, within words and across word boundaries. Below are a few examples in various contexts:

M1 (casual conversation): three older brothers […] over there
M4 (casual conversation): the same thing […] some of those […] north-east
M4 (joke): a crown of thorns
M5 (casual conversation): thirty […] three years
M7 (casual conversation): three theaters
M9 (casual conversation): both of us […] another one
M13 (casual conversation): thirty years […] throw […] that was doing the right thing […] I would go there

65“Nonaspiration” of /p, t, k/ at the beginning of stressed syllables is another characteristic of CE consonants (Rubrecht 1971, Walton 1994, Dubois and Horvath 2000, Carmichael 2013). It is not to be found in surrounding varieties of English and it is therefore attributable to French influence, as both Standard and Louisiana French do not display aspiration of plosives in this environment either. In most varieties of English, release of [p, t, k] at the beginning of a stressed syllable comes with a puff of air which delays the voicing of the following segment and distinguishes /p, t, k/ from their voiced counterparts /b, d, g/. This process of aspiration is called voice onset time (VOT) and it manifests itself with a fricative element that delays the phonation of the following vowel or that devoices the first part of the following approximant [l, r, w, j]. The articulators are in the right position to produce the following phoneme, but voicing is delayed. Unaspirated plosives are very noticeable in the pronunciation of AT. For example, his pronunciation of the word plantation sometimes sounds very much like [plænˈdeɪʃən]. Dubois and Horvath (1998) measure VOT in CE and treat it as a categorical variable. They find 38% unaspirated [p], 44% unaspirated [t], and 42% unaspirated [k]. They also find out that the youngest, non-French-speaking generation of speakers also produce unaspirated plosives and that it is therefore rather an instance of feature recycling for them, while it is attributable to French interference for the oldest generation. Carmichael (2013) also measures VOT but does not treat it as a categorical variable, therefore being able to establish various degrees of VOT along an aspiration-nonaspiration continuum. She finds that VOT is manipulated “by various joketellers without patterning by up the bayou/down the bayou or language background”, even though down-the-bayou speakers have a lesser degree of VOT in the casual conversations. Dubois and Horvath (e.g. 2000, 2008) find that nonspiration is the only feature that distinguishes men from women in the “middle-aged generation”, with women producing the puff or air typical of aspiration. They argue that “the variable (p, t, k) stands alone among the Cajun variables” (Carmichael 2013: 301) because it has been below the level of consciousness for all of the three generations of speakers and because nonaspiration has never been publicly recognized. Perhaps this is because it is a phonetic, non-distinctive feature in the vocalic system of English. However, the manipulation towards nonaspiration in the CEC jokes proves that it is a feature that the speakers clearly associate with CE; they must therefore have some awareness of it. A possible explanation is that, even though TH-stopping is technically a realizational difference (cf. Wells 1982: 73) and not a systemic one, it must be quite distinguishable to the speakers’ ears, as unaspirated pronunciations of [p, t, k] move closer to prototypical realizations of [b, d, g]. Below are two spectrograms of the words cook and comes that are meant to illustrate the move from aspirated [kh] to unaspirated [k] when the speaker’s stance changes from casual conversation to joketelling. They are both situated in monosyllabic words in the middle of their intonation units. Voicing onset is marked at the lowest negative point preceding the first periodic wave that indicates phonation. Figure 7 shows the pronunciation of cook by M1 in the casual conversation. VOT is visible in the silence and the fricative element that precede the vowel. Figure 8 shows the realization of comes by the same speaker in one of the jokes. There is no interruption in the phonation process from the onset of the syllable (which actually sounds more like [g] than [k]) to the vowel.

Figure 7. Spectrogram of cook, M1 (casual conversation)

Figure 7. Spectrogram of cook, M1 (casual conversation)

Figure 8. Spectrogram of comes, M1 (joke)

Figure 8. Spectrogram of comes, M1 (joke)

66Syllable-initial deletion of /h/ is sometimes listed as a CE feature (Dubois and Horvath 2000, 2008; Coyne 2008). While it is found in other accents of English, it could easily be attributed to French influence. However, this feature in present neither in the speech of AT nor in the CEC corpus.

67CE is variably rhotic today; that is post-vocalic /r/ is not systematically pronounced, as it is in most accents of American English. Contact phenomena and interference from LF are certainly two explanations for this feature. Historically, post-vocalic /r/ was not pronounced in the neighboring variety of SAE. However, it has become an increasingly rhotic variety over the last decades (Thomas 2008: 97), as “r-lessness” became less prestigious after the Second World war (Labov et al. 2006). In LF, post-vocalic /r/ exhibits a tendency to weaken when it comes in word-final position, sometimes to the point of being completely elided (cf. section 2.1.2). This double influence is reflected in the recordings. The pronunciation of AT is entirely non-rhotic, while the two L2 speakers of the CEC display variable rhoticity: M6 is mostly non-rhotic and post-vocalic /r/ is least pronounced in word-final position; M17 is mostly rhotic and the place where he most often drops /r/ is also the end of words. The other speakers of the CEC display variable rhoticity, with word-final position being the most likely context for elision (e.g. after, war, weather, brother) and the lexical set NURSE displaying rhoticity the most. As far as the realization of /r/ is concerned, LF-like trilled pronunciations of /r/ do not occur in the CEC or in AT’s recordings.

68Final consonant cluster reduction (CCR) frequently occurs in CE (Dubois and Horvath 2000, 2008; Coyne 2008), as it does in LF (cf. section 2.1.2). Speakers do not pronounce final consonants and drop certain final clusters altogether. This is one of the reasons why the standard inflectional morphemes -ed and -s are often absent from CE (cf. section 2.2.2). CCR regularly appears in the CEC, and not only in the jokes, with /t/-elision happening most often. Here are a few examples taken from the casual conversations:

M5: the Cajun dialect […] my last, my last year in the military […] go on to the next one (/t/-elision)
M6: I left, I was supposed to go to Europe (/t/-elision)
M7: the wind (/d/-elision)
M13: too fast of a life for me […] New Orleans East (/t/-elision) […] I was too drunk (/k/-elision)

  • 10 Of course, the alternation between [æsk] and [æks] goes back to Old English, which had both asci (...)

69 A lexico-phonetic specificity often associated with CE is the pronunciation of ask as ax [æks], something that CE shares with AAVE and other non-standard accents of English10. The association of CE with this trait is reflected in the title of Cheramie’s article (1998), “‘Glad You Axed’: A Teacher’s Guide to Cajun English”. In the CEC, Ax is actually used by M3 and M8 in the CEC. A few pronunciation peculiarities are to be found in the speech of the two L2 speakers of the CEC. M6 pronounces the word temperature as [ˈtempərətjʊə] several times. This is an old pronunciation of such French borrowings that does not include the diachronic process of palatalization (e.g. Glain 2013) /tjʊə/ → /tʃə/. It might also be attributed to the spelling of the word, which would point to such a pronunciation for a speaker influenced by French. M17, the other L2 speaker, sometimes pronounces the word carpenter as [kɑːpənˈtuːə], which alternates with the more common [ˈkɑːpəntə]. While this peculiarity is difficult to explain at the level of phonemes, the stress pattern may be attributed to the influence of French, the syllables of which are characterized by a higher degree of prominence when they come at the end of words, the end of intonation units, and more generally speaking the end of utterances.

70 An aspect of CE that probably displays one of the highest degrees of influence from French is suprasegmentals. A number of shifts from regular English stress patterns can be found in lexical words in the CEC. They all display the tendency for the stress to move to the right, thus reflecting the general pattern of French. M6 (an L2 speaker of English, casual conversation) stresses the last syllable of the word Panama [ˌpænəˈmɑː] (vs. [ˈpænəmɑː] in Standard American English). M13 (a semi-speaker, joke) stresses the second syllable in the word perfume, which he uses as a noun. If [pərˈfjuːm] is indeed a common variant of the verb perfume, it is not a stress pattern that is normally found in the noun, which usually displays primary stress on its first syllable. Another example comes from M7 (a monolingual speaker of English, casual conversation), who pronounces the compound noun supermarket with primary stress on the second term [ˌsuːpərˈmɑːrkət], while the usual pattern is with primary stress on the first term [ˈsuːpərˌmɑːrkət]. In the examples of Panama and supermarket, the stress shifts may be attributed to the particular place that the words occupy within their intonation units, as they bear the nuclei of their respective units. It is therefore probable that the shifts are the results of the interaction between “sentence stress” (nucleus placement) and word stress, reflecting a French-influenced pattern of CE, which has sometimes been described as a flat variety of English.

71Walton (1994) uses the terms flat speech or talking flat to refer to the dialect on the grounds that these are the terms used by her informants to describe their own speech. In the CEC, this is also the term used by F1 to describe the Cajun accent. It is interesting to note that the word seems to make perfect sense to her, even if she cannot describe what it means:

F1: A Cajun accent, like a flat, flat voice […] your voice is flat […] it’s just a flat accent […] I don’t know how to explain it […] It’s just that the sound of it is flat to the ear.

72This adjective is in fact used to refer to the specific rhythm and intonation of CE and how they differ from those of more mainstream varieties of English. Walton (1994) notes that the stress and intonation patterns of her informants are similar to those of LF: stressed syllables are not as long as those of Standard American English and the tonic syllable falls more systematically on “the last word or word group of the phrase” (105). This similarity between LF and CE is also described by Scott (1992: 27-28), who notes that the French influence produces “a somewhat clipped, staccato sound with natural emphasis falling at the end of the sentence”. Rubrecht (1971: 149) notes that there is less of a difference between stressed and unstressed syllables in the English spoken in Southern Louisiana than in neighboring varieties. He also quotes his North Louisiana informants, whose perception is that CE “has a different rhythm”. From these descriptions, it appears that CE is characterized by an intonation pattern that resembles that of (Louisiana) French, and that the rhythm of the variety is more syllable-timed and more “French-like” than that of other accents of (American) English. In French, most syllables are typically given approximately the same weight and length and the final syllable of an intonation unit stands out: it is often lengthened, and it bears the tone of the unit. In the CEC, such “French” patterns are more obvious when the informants tell jokes. Carmichael did not study CE rhythm in her 2013 paper on Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes. However, she auditorily perceived “that the rhythm changed when they told the jokes – got more French-like” (personal communication).

73Figures 9 and 10 are meant to illustrate the French influence in CE intonation units. Figure 9 shows the spectrogram and the intonation curve of the utterance He grab the rabbit he start walking down the street (M13, semi-speaker, joke; the second syllable of walking is barely visible as it is compressed into an [n]). The interesting thing is that the utterance looks as if it is treated as one intonation unit, with the final syllable (street) clearly standing out and carrying the tone. In addition, M13 uses a rising tone, as francophones often do when they speak English. Beyond the visual illustration, the intonation pattern of the utterance also sounds French to the ear. Figure 10 shows the spectrogram and the intonation curve of the utterance He’s a carpenter, him too (M17, L2 speaker of English, casual conversation), pronounced as one intonation unit. As the word carpenter marks the end of the information conveyed by the utterance, one would expect the nucleus to fall on the first syllable of this word in a more mainstream accent of English. However, the final syllable too clearly stands out and bears the tone of the unit, thus auditorily giving the utterance a very French quality. The spectrogram also illustrates the relative similar length of stressed and unstressed syllables in CE. For example, the difference between the first two syllables of carpenter is visible with the wave forms, the stressed syllable car- displaying more intensity than the second, unstressed syllable -pen-. However, the length of the two syllables is strikingly similar (0.152 s vs. 0.156 s when they are automatically measured from a Praat script) despite their different status in the stress pattern of the word.

Figure 9. Sound waves, spectrogram and intonation curve of He grab the rabbit, he start walking down the street, M13 (joke)

Figure 9. Sound waves, spectrogram and intonation curve of He grab the rabbit, he start walking down the street, M13 (joke)

Figure 10. Sound waves, spectrogram and intonation curve of He’s a carpenter, him too M17 (casual conversation)

Figure 10. Sound waves, spectrogram and intonation curve of He’s a carpenter, him too M17 (casual conversation)

74As far as rhythm is concerned, determining where exactly someone’s speech stands along the continuum that goes from syllable-timed rhythm (French tendency) to stress-timed rhythm (English tendency) can be done by determining a score called a Pairwise Variability Index (PVI, cf. Lowe and Grabe 1995). This is calculated by dividing the absolute value of the difference in duration of two adjacent syllables by the mean duration of those syllables (Carter 2007: 5). It does not matter whether the result of the subtraction is positive or negative as it is the absolute value that is divided by the mean duration of the syllables. The respective duration of the syllables would be closer to each other in a more syllable-timed sort of rhythm. Therefore, the lower the score, the more syllable-timed the speech. The equation for calculating rhythm with PVI is as follows:

Figure 11. Equation for calculating rhythm with PVI (Carter 2007: 5)

Figure 11. Equation for calculating rhythm with PVI (Carter 2007: 5)

75I compared the casual-conversation rhythm to the joke rhythm in the recordings of four speakers whose rhythm auditorily seemed to be more syllabic when they adopted a joketeller stance (M1, M3, M8 and M13). I selected passages from the speakers’ casual conversations so that there would not be too many pauses and hesitations and so that the flow of speech would be kept going, as was the case in the jokes. For each speaker, the selected passages were approximately the same length as the joke they each told (between 1 mn 30 sec and 2 min 30 sec). I imported the sound files into Praat, where I marked the syllable and vowel boundaries after auditory and spetrographic analysis. I wrote the syllables and vowels thus separated in separate tiers and used the automatic measurement of the length of the vowels established from the Praat script to calculate the mean PVI for the casual conversations and the jokes. I measured only the vowels, as in Carter’s study (2007), because determining whether certain consonants were in onset or coda position proved difficult to do on account of various processes of re-syllabification. The preliminary results show that, for 3 of our 4 speakers (M1, M3, M13), the PVI is effectively lower in the joke, pointing to a more syllabic rhythm when the speaker becomes joketeller. However, it is only slightly lower for one of them (M3) and the last speaker (M8) displays the opposite pattern, with a higher PVI in the joke. In the jokes, I calculated the PVI in the frame narrative and in what I called the “embedded narrative” (the part in direct speech when the joketeller impersonates Boudreaux and/or Thibodeaux; cf. section 2.2) but more data are needed to come to any sort of conclusion regarding the frame narrative/embedded narrative dichotomy. Below are the PVIs for the 4 speakers, accompanied by their ages in brackets. They all belong to the 30-45 age group and therefore cannot represent different generations of Cajun speakers.

Figure 12. PVI for joke and casual conversation

CC

joke

M1 (45)

0.5841

0.4789 (embedded: 0.5369; frame: 0.4279)

M3 (43)

0.6655

0.6501 (embedded: 0.7514; frame: 0.5277)

M8 (43)

0.5422

0.6671 (embedded: 0.5864; frame: 0.7477)

M13 (32)

0.625

0.5419 (embedded: 0.5152; frame: 0.5752)

76The experiment has clear limitations with only four speakers tested and the preliminary results are therefore rather inconclusive. More comparisons are needed, with a greater number of speakers. In addition, speakers of different ages and female speakers would allow for a better reflection of the Cajun community. Of course, the study needs to be completed by statistical analyses if any generalizations are to be made about the effects of the joketelling stance on rhythm.

77In short, there have been changes in CE from the original CE speakers’ variety to that spoken by the youngest generations. These changes, first noted by Dubois and Horvath (e.g. 2000, 2008) can be found in the corpora studied in the differences between a speaker like AT and the youngest speakers of the CEC. It is obvious that the interference from French is higher with AT and, to a lesser extent, the two L2 speakers of the CEC. AT’s speech can be characterized as an interlanguage, with a clear structural interference from French in the fields of grammar (with calque-like constructions) and phonology. With the possible exception of the frequent use of dislocation, grammatical influence is very marginal with the youngest speakers. Absence of be and of inflectional morphemes cannot be attributed to French interference as these features are also present in the neighboring variety of AAVE and other nonstandard dialects. As to the phonological influence, it is of another nature. Dubois and Horvath (2000) explain that typical (Louisiana) French pronunciations like nonsaspiration of /p, t, k/ and heavy vowel nasalization are much less common among younger CE speakers. On the other hand, TH- stopping and PRICE monophthongization have been on the increase with the youngest generations after they lost ground with the middle-aged generations. Given that it is perceived as a CE stereotype among the general public, TH-stopping is clearly a badge of Cajun identity, while PRICE monophthongization may be a manifestation of the influence of SAE and AAVE and of the greater opening of the younger generation onto other communities. However, Dubois and Horvath (2000, 2008) argue that the strict influence of LF phonology diminishes with the emergence of an identity-driven CE pronunciation, as the features that have been on the increase have emerged “from within the Cajun community and cannot be attributed solely to interference from French of the spread of these features from the surrounding English dialects” (Dubois and Horvath 2008: 210). The recycling of features that were typical of original CE features constitutes a form of linguistic rebirth in the wake of the Cajun renaissance.

78The stancetaking that is typical of jokes manifests itself the most through a more frequent use of French lexical items and discourse markers (particularly mais and cher) and with information packaging choices (through the abundant use of a French-influenced sort of dislocation). As far as pronunciation is concerned, the stance adopted leads to higher rates of TH-stopping and nonaspiration, as well as to a manipulation of suprasegmentals that leads to a more “French-like”, syllable-timed sort of rhythm. It turns out that only a limited set of linguistic features are manipulated. Yet, they very effectively index the variety that is targeted, as the result sounds very convincing to the addressee. The (Louisiana) French influence is therefore inextricably linked with the projection of an exaggerated sort of CE, that goes hand in hand with the adoption of a specific joketelling stance. In the following section, I argue that this is the case because French is very much present in the collective imaginary of the Cajun community.

3. Discussion

Being Cajun is not that simple a thing.
Glen Pitre, Cajun film director11

3.1. Ethnicity and the differentiation phase of the Dynamic Model

79 CE can be labeled as an ethnolect, a term which describes:

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 […] (Dubois and Horvath 2008: 209-210)

80 Ethnicity is in fact a rather complex concept. According to Schilling (2016: 31), “ethnicity is related to shared bloodlines and common ancestry. But it also encompasses cultural traditions, values, belief systems, worldviews, and practices—including language”. Milroy and Gordon (2003: 108) note that it involves “a sense of place and of a common history and destiny, a shared religion and social ideology, and a shared language or set of communicative conventions”. Therefore, ethnicity depends as much upon shared mental constructions, ideological representations and daily practices as it does upon common ancestral roots, which is helpful when it comes to defining what sort of social community the Cajun community is (cf. section 3.2). Ethnicity implies of course the construction of a common identity and a sense of belonging to a group. With the Cajuns, this identity cannot be separated from a language that is sometimes not spoken (French) and a place of origin that may never have been visited (Acadia and/or France), and that may therefore be only imagined. This ethnic sense of identity has also been constructed in opposition to surrounding “mainstream” American communities, given the original physical and social distance of the Cajun community. Language change and language shift in the Cajun community may be seen as a history of both convergence and divergence in relation to American English. With the loss of French and the adoption of English, Cajuns accommodated towards the surrounding English-speaking communities, while the Cajun Renaissance and the recycling typical of younger generations partake of an identity-driven process of accommodation away from mainstream American English, and towards former forms of speech. Identity-driven processes of accommodation are central to Schneider’s ‘Dynamic Model’ (DM) of linguistic development (e.g. Schneider 2007, 2011). Even though the DM is primarily meant to be applied to varieties of English at the level of countries, the framework may be of help to understand some aspects of the evolution of CE within the overall socio-historical American context. Explaining the DM in detail is well beyond the scope of this paper. However, the final stage of the model may be used to account for the linguistic aspect of the Cajun Renaissance. The five phases of the DM are foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization, and differentiation. Typically, the differentiation phase occurs in a stable nation, which displays self-confidence and the independence of which is no longer an issue. Then, “internal social group identities become more important and get reflected in the growth of dialectal differences” (Schneider 2011: 35). After the Second World War, the USA began to assume a position of global leadership, both culturally and economically. This went hand in hand with the gradual decline of the British Empire, increasing the prestige and the cultural and linguistic capital of the “new” nation. This new status made Americans more open to the expression of internal diversity in the wake of the civil rights movement:

As its global position and sense of national identity became increasingly secure, America could focus more on its internal diversity. It had always been there, but now it could shine forth. […] So, as each of America’s myriad cultures increasingly asserted their own unique identity, they also asserted their language varieties: their heritage languages, their second-language varieties of English, and the natively spoken American English dialects associated with regional, ethnic, and community identities. In linguist Edgar Schneider’s terms, the 20th century marked the differentiation stage of American English the phase characterized by the recognition and celebration of internal linguistic diversity. (Schilling 2016: 237–238)

81Within this context of ethnic pride, Cajuns became openly proud of their distinctiveness, which helped trigger the Cajun Renaissance. The national dimension cannot be ignored: in addition to the help provided by the State of Louisiana (cf. section 1.3), the movement benefited from federal support:

The federal government embraced the general public’s call for a more multicultural society. For example, the Bilingual Education Act (1968) funded classroom instruction for minority students in their native languages and the Ethnic Heritage Studies Act (1972) provided grants for academic research into American minority groups and cultures. (Bernard 2008: 60).

82Because it makes sense from a nation-wide perspective, the differentiation phase of the DM can be applied to the development of CE, which is not easily the case with the previous phases. Central to Schneider’s framework is the concept of “post-colonial varieties of English” (PCEs), i.e. all varieties except those of the British Isles. Schneider proposes that “to a considerable extent the emergence of PCEs is an identity-driven process of linguistic convergence” (2007: 30) between two strands of society: that of the original indigenous community/their descendants and that of the original community of settlers/their descendants. This hardly works with CE, as the Cajun community and most surrounding American communities all descend from original settler communities. Further, the male drive towards features that are mostly found within the Cajun community (and which could therefore constitute a form of endonormative stabilization for CE) interacts with a female drive towards features mostly found outside the community (a form of exonormative stabilization). This renders the development of CE too complex and too multi-dimensional to be entirely explained within the strict framework of the DM.

83In fact, the variability which is at the heart of CE is emergent; it is the result of complex interactions and identity-driven processes both within the Cajun community and in relation to other communities. In that sense, CE variability cannot easily be reduced to a dominant pattern, as is for example the case with some early sociolinguistic studies, where linguistic variation is correlated with macro-social groups such as socio-economic category, gender, age, or ethnicity. For example, it seems at first possible to explain the gender differences in linguistic behaviors through the fact that women are usually linguistically closer to institutional norms and standard forms. However, Labov (1990: 205-215) makes a difference between stable variation, changes from above, and changes from below. In stable sociolinguistic variation (which does not lead to change), women do use more standard forms. With changes from above, they typically adopt prestige forms, which are also closer to the standard. However, they innovate more than men with changes from below, which originate in non-standard varieties, and which they diffuse into the community at large. With younger Cajun speakers, the common role of women as innovators does not apply and is taken up by men. Whether men’s linguistic behavior occurs below the level of awareness (the second meaning of the Labovian concept of a change from below) is also questionable, as is perhaps the very dichotomy changes from above/changes from below in the Cajun community. Therefore, traditional sociolinguistic patterning does not apply to CE variability. More personal views of social groupings must be considered, as is the case with the second wave of variation studies, which has an ethnographic dimension and focuses on the relation between variation and local, participant-designed categories (Eckert 2012). Even the notion of ethnicity may have its limit to explain the linguistic developments of Cajunness. There is a place-based identity that interacts with an ethnic identity in Acadiana, with Cajuns strongly relating to place as a component of who they are (Dajko 2020: 94).

84Studying identity from an ethnographic point of view, Barth (1969) suggests that it should not be considered as fixed and bound to social categories, ethnicity, and specific cultural traits. Rather, he focuses on the expression of identities and the cultural differentiation that stem from interactions between groups. “Many contemporary perspectives on social identity in different disciplines take this general line, stressing the need for a dynamic approach to identity as an active discursive process” (Coupland 2007: 106). This implies that identity can be emergent in the context and “emergent in discourse” (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 607). This is clearly the case with the modifications that characterize the pronunciations of the CEC speakers when they move from the casual conversation to the jokes, thereby adopting a new stance more intimately connected with the expression of Cajunness. The third wave of variation studies concentrates on the stylistic dimension of variation and studies the social meaning of variables (Eckert 2012). In the Cajun context, linguistic features seem to carry meaning both within and without the Cajun community, a notion which is in fact difficult to define.

3.2. (Re)defining the Cajun community today?

85Dubois and Melançon (1997: 63) argue that

there exists no single definition of the ‘Cajun community’ acceptable to all researchers. For many, the Cajun collectivity includes only descendants of the Acadians deported from Nova Scotia, others argue that it encompasses any white person of francophone origin, and still others claim that it also includes Creole speakers as well as immigrants (Germans, Italians, etc.) who have assimilated to the culture.

86Given the co-existence and the inter-dependence of French and English in Acadiana, it may be wondered if the term speech community may be applied to the Cajun collectivity. Today, most Cajuns continue to think that French is a central element of their culture. Following a perception study centered on young Cajuns, Lindner (2019) found out that “participants were not ready to concede that Cajun culture could go on just fine in English”. Yet, in my experience, this is precisely what happens in a great many cases. Already when I worked in the Deep South in the 1990s, most of the conversations I had with Cajuns were in English. We did not speak French, although we talked a great deal about French, as we did about the French and Cajun cultures. There lies the duality of the Cajun experience today. I recently became a member of a Facebook group called “Cajun French Virtual Table Française” (see Figure 13). With over 36,000 members and a great many new posts every day, it is a very active group, although it is a closed one (membership needs to be authorized by the creator of the group). About 65% of the daily posts of the group are written in English and a significant number of the participants who write in French are actually not Cajuns themselves, but francophones from other parts of the world. Yet, if we consider for instance the period from November 1st till November 12th, 2020, 50% of the original posts (the posts that were not shared from another Facebook page) were about the French language. Most of them were questions about how to translate such and such an English expression into French (or Cajun French, as the participants often write, see Figure 13).

Figure 13. Extracts from the “Cajun French Virtual Table Française” Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/​groups/​cajunfrench)

Figure 13. Extracts from the “Cajun French Virtual Table Française” Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/​groups/​cajunfrench)

87I asked the members of the group if they could possibly give me access to recordings of Cajun English, “as spoken by people whose English is influenced by French or by people who clearly self-identify as Cajuns (even though their English isn't really influenced by French)” (see Figure 14). As shown in Figure 14, which is a reproduction of my original Facebook post, I specifically wrote that I was interested in recordings of Cajun English and not of Cajun French because the latter were much easier to find on the Internet. However, the recordings that were sent to me were almost exclusively recordings of Louisiana French.

Figure 14. Post on the “Cajun French Virtual Table Française” Facebook page

Figure 14. Post on the “Cajun French Virtual Table Française” Facebook page
  • 12 Many thanks to the people of the Cajun French Virtual table Française and the digital library of (...)

88Through the group, I was also able to get in touch with people who work for the digital library of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL Lafayette). I made the exact same request with them but was likewise sent recordings in French12. It seems that Cajuns believe that the way they speak English simply cannot be interesting enough to be worth researching, or that they even deny that it exists. This corroborates the hypothesis of the study by Lindner (2019) that Cajuns find it problematic that the expression of Cajun identity might be associated with the English language. Dajko faced the same challenge in 2010 when she conducted interviews about Louisiana English, as two respondents answered all her questions in French “despite all efforts to redirect them into English. There was no convincing them that English was of interest” (Dajko 2020: 126), certainly because of the focus on French in the popular imagination. This apparent rejection of English, even among Cajuns who do not speak French, is rather paradoxical when it comes to the expression of a culture that cannot be articulated in the language that speakers aspire to speak – that of shared ancestral roots – but only in a language that does not convey adequately a sense of the place where the speakers came from prior to being where they are now.

89Lindner (2019: 123-124) argues that “reconciling the (English) reality with the conceptualization of a culture that is closely tied to French is obviously a challenge”, as claiming the French language as an essential part of the culture undermines Cajun self-identification for non-French speakers. A previous perception study showed that “in general, respondents claim that the necessary criteria to be considered Cajun are just those criteria that they themselves satisfy” (Dubois and Melançon 1997: 63). The criteria were “to have Cajun ancestors”, “to have parents/grandparents who spoke Cajun French”, “to speak some form of French”, “to speak Cajun French”, “to live in Louisiana”, “to live in a Cajun city or town”, “to have learned Cajun French as your first language”. It is interesting to note that the criterion least often seen as a requirement (22%) is to have Cajun French as one’s mother tongue. “The respondents thus recognize the ongoing loss of the Cajun language in Louisiana and accommodate their definition of Cajun identity accordingly” (83). Dubois and Melançon (1997: 63) conclude that, at the end of the 20th century, the Cajun community had probably shifted from “a linguistic to a cultural community” (63). For a great number of Cajuns today, (Louisiana) French seems to have become an aspirational language that is both distant and fantasized, an almost mythical language that they can only refer to or ask about through the medium of English. Yet, they recognize the very special status that it has always had in the history of their community.

90Despite this dual and complex situation, the Cajun collectivity may still be considered a speech community if we follow Labov (1966), who considers that the members of a speech community share linguistic norms and values which contrast with others, situated outside their groups. Members of a speech community may even be considered to share strong feelings of belonging to a local territory (Hyme 1972), and “a sense of symbolic unity” (Fridland 2015: 23). These definitions seem to fit with the reality of the Cajun community in its complexity, as they combine linguistic, spatial, social, and ideological factors. Yet, the various definitions of the speech community make it a rather fuzzy concept. Calvet (2011: 82-85) maintains that the very notion of the speech community is a problematic one, particularly when considering bilingual or multilingual situations. If the notion is to be applied only to people who share a common native language, it excludes de facto a number of speakers in the community studied, which would be the case with the Cajun community. If the notion is applied to speakers who can understand one another through a common language, the difficulty consists in defining a degree of mastery of the language for speakers to be considered as members of the said community. Individuals might also belong to different speech communities (the community of French speakers, that of English speakers, and that of bilinguals in the Cajun context). To avoid these problems, we might define the Cajun collectivity as a social community, following Calvet’s proposition (2011: 86) to define the community from a strictly social perspective. For example, he argues that only the notion of a social community allows the researcher to objectively carry out fieldwork, without overlooking certain individuals or creating artificial boundaries. This does not mean that linguistic considerations are overlooked. Indeed,

  • 13 Original text: “La seule façon d’aller jusqu’au bout de la conception de la langue comme fait so (...)

The only way to fully accept language as a social phenomenon is therefore not to focus on the influence of society on language, or on the influence of language on society, which is tantamount to seeing the sociolinguistic issue as different from the purely linguistic one […]. On the contrary, it implies that the object of study of linguistics is not only language or languages but rather the social community under its linguistic aspect. (Calvet 2011: 86; my translation)13

91Defining the Cajun community as a social one theoretically allows us to recognize all possible accommodation processes and contact phenomena with SAE varieties and AAVE, with mainstream American varieties, between speakers of French and English, as well as within the Cajun community, therefore acknowledging the development of CE and its linguistic renaissance as fundamentally emergent (cf. section 3.3). Because of the different linguistic behaviors of Cajun men and women, it seems that the Cajun community cannot be considered a unified community of practice (Eckert 1989), i.e. a collectivity that emerges in response to shared concerns and thereby develops common practices, including linguistic ones. However, considering male and female Cajuns as belonging to different communities of practice may not be far from the truth. Dubois and Horvath (2000) argue that the Renaissance, with its market implications, has mainly affected male activities, which has led to a shift in local gender roles:

The gender differentiation in the use of Cajun English features (except for the dental stops) in the younger generation can be attributed to the fact that the Cajun Renaissance has largely affected the sphere of traditional male activities, such as boating, fishing and hunting, and the display of Cajun culture associated with tourism (e.g., only men participate in the traditional “courir du Mardi Gras” or take tourists on trips up the bayou). Even Cajun cuisine is displayed publicly as part of the male domain. (Dubois and Horvath 2000: 306)

92In addition, music a central element in the Cajun Renaissance happens to be “traditionally an essential part of the Cajun male culture”, and most Cajun bands are entirely male. It follows from this separation of activities and practices that women have not felt the need to display Cajunness as much as men. This is particularly true when considering their interactions with speakers outside the Cajun community, such as tourists. Given that women have not been involved in activities associated with the commodification of Cajunness as much as men, they have not had as much to gain in terms of social and linguistic capital from opting for a stance that would publicly construct their Cajun identity. Du Bois (2007) argues that social identities may be constructed through stancetaking and that the cumulative effect of stance leads to stance accretion, which contributes to habitus through social interactions. This way, different patterns of pronunciation have probably become fossilized in men’s and women’s speech on account of different habitus promoted by their belonging to somewhat different communities of practice, women almost exclusively expressing their Cajunness through TH-stopping. The exaggeration of CE features typical of the jokes of the CEC is also something that better characterizes men’s practices. Indeed, “joketelling is also traditionally a male-dominated genre of humor” (Carmichael 2013: 387). This is the reason why the CEC only has one woman, as Carmichael only found one female joketeller “who was comfortable enough telling jokes to make it through an entire joke” (387).

93In order to have answers about Cajun identity that were given in a less formal and a more contemporary context than that established by Dubois and Melançon’s study (1997), I asked the “Cajun French Virtual Table Française” Facebook group members what it meant to them to be Cajun today. The most frequent answers were that they were proud to be Cajun and that they had typical Cajun names pointing to their Canadian origins. Other answers were linked to the knowledge of the French language that the members or the members’ parents had. Yet other answers had to do with the members’ love for Cajun music or “well-seasoned food”. The word proud, sometimes written in capital letters, appeared in over 66% of the answers, irrespective of the gender of the group member. In most of the answers in which pride was mentioned, the informants wrote that they were also proud to be Americans, that they could (in the words of one particular respondent) “embrace both identities”. Some expressed a collective sort of language ideology, lamenting that a bilingual French/English education had not been given to all schoolchildren in the 20th century, and that it would have made Louisiana a unique place today. The group members therefore share certain ideologies about their history, their region, their country, and their language. It is worth noting that some of these ideologies and values have to do with what might have happened and are therefore purely imagined. Considering these answers, and given the powerful relationship that Cajuns have with French (whether real, imaginary, or in-between), they may best be considered to form an ideological community. Linguistic markers may be resources enabling the speaker to construct his/her identity in relation to a linguistic ideology shared with others (Campbell-Kibler 2009: 136).

94If we follow Eckert (2008: 454), the social and ideological meanings of specific linguistic markers are not fixed and unidimensional; they constitute an “indexical field”:

I argue that the meanings of variables are not precise or fixed but rather constitute a field of potential meanings – an indexical field, or constellation of ideologically related meanings, any one of which can be activated in the situated use of the variable.

95Eckert and Labov (2017: 4) argue that “the indexicality of a variable emerges in use and can change over time”, following Silverstein’s (2003) notion of orders of indexicality, through which a variable can progress from first- to second-order index, thereby progressing “from indexing a social position (e.g. with a region, a class position, an ethnic group) to indexing some quality apparently associated with the people occupying that social position” (Eckert and Labov 2017: 4). In the move from “a linguistic to a cultural community” (Dubois and Melançon 1997), CE variants such as TH-stopping have progressed from first-order indices of regional and ethnic status to second-order indices of Cajun values and ideologies. This has mostly taken the form of the recycling of early CE speakers by new generations. The question of awareness and speaker’s agency in the process of moving from first- to second-order index remains open to question (Eckert and Labov 2017). However, the fact that the joketellers of the CEC can exaggerate CE variants points to some form of awareness in the Cajun context.

96Given both the stancetaking that is typical of jokes in a given situation of utterance and the phenomenon of stance accretion that comes from the cumulative effect of stance, it seems obvious that CE has been enregistered (Agha 2003). Enregisterment implies “a linguistic repertoire differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register” which has come to index “speaker status linked to a specific scheme of cultural values” (Agha 2003: 231). In other words, enregisterment is centrally concerned with how “particular words, ways of pronouncing words, grammatical patterns, and patterns of intonation come to point to particular identities and activities” (Johnstone 2016: 632). The manipulation of CE features in jokes and the few metalinguistic comments about CE made by the speakers of the CEC are proof that the variety has been enregistered. Enregisterment is a complementary framework to Silverstein’s levels of indexicality. While the latter mostly “relate to individual linguistic forms, enregisterment involves the establishment of a register, a whole set of features which can be used by speakers to project or perform identity, and which evoke the ‘scheme of cultural values’ referred to by Agha” (Beal 2020: 130).

97Constructing or projecting a Cajun identity is exactly what the use of CE allows younger generations of Cajuns to do (Dubois and Horvath 2008: 209), while the process of joketelling has to do with performing identity. According to psychologists, identity “is not so much made manifest from a fixed pattern as performed according to the context at hand” (Stockwell 2011: 16). Young people’s recycling of older features and the exaggerations typical of the jokes may be considered as different “acts” that involve personal perceptions of the Cajun community. They constitute what Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) call “acts of identity”, which implies a process-centered perspective on language and identity: identification with a specific community goes hand in hand with the linguistic projection or performance of the speaker’s identity. Given the complexity of some of the cognitive processes linked to identity, the question of the speaker’s awareness must be raised. Auer (2007: 16) finds that “identity-relevant features may be performed in a context-creating, sometimes intentional way, but they may also be part of the ‘habitus’ of a speaker, which […] cannot be manipulated easily”. In a study of sound change in North-West Yorkshire, Wilhelm (2011: 497) argues that acts of identity can operate below or above the level of consciousness of speakers. He sees awareness as a continuum; as speakers move from projection to construction of an identity, they become less aware that they use variants with strong indexical values.

98I have referred several times to the “imagined” relationship of Cajuns to their language(s). This complex relationship can be explained within the framework of the linguistic imaginary (Houdebine 1982, 2002), which is particularly compatible with a continuum-type conception of speakers’ awareness. In fact, younger generations of Cajun speakers have (re)created an identity-driven variety of English which is partly based on their linguistic imaginary, and which is influenced by a powerful social imaginary (Castoriadis 1975).

3.3. Complexity and the Cajun imaginary

99 The previous section focused on the Cajun community in its complexity, both from a social and a linguistic point of view. It appears that the Cajun community can hardly be reduced to an archetype, just as CE variability can hardly be reduced to traditional patterns of variation and change. This is because, from a phenomenological perspective, the Cajuns’ experiences in the world that surrounds them have been influenced by complex interactions, both within their community and with outside networks. In its complex relationship with French, CE first had all the attributes of an interlanguage before its speakers denied its very existence by rejecting the parent language. Then, it became an identity-driven variety in the post-Cajun Renaissance context. In the words of Dubois and Horvath (2008: 216):

The birth of CE occurred less than a century ago; in that time it developed into a quite distinctive vernacular, came very close to dying and was reborn. In fact, without its rebirth in recent times, we may well have failed to notice the birth at all.

100In its sociolinguistic dimension, CE has all the time been emergent, that is to say that it has developed through “the interaction of large numbers of individuals with feedback and reinforcement and without central control” (Kretzschmar 2018: 226). The interactions and the feedback have been influenced by a social imaginary (Castoriadis 1975). Working within a framework of social constructionism, Castoriadis argues that, in a given society, meanings cannot be analyzed rationally because society imposes “final meanings” on itself, that is to say meanings that do not point to anything else than themselves, and that they only have to be acknowledged by the society in question, as they are beyond the scope of reason. They simply have to do with the ideas and conceptions of the world of the society’s members. Such a social imaginary is at work in the definition of place established by Dajko’s informants (2020: 117-129). Dajko and her students stopped passersby in different public places around the city of Houma, in Terrebonne Parish. They gave them a blank map of Louisiana with only parish names and the corresponding boundaries, and asked them to show “using lines or shading and including labels or other information if possible, where people spoke differently in Louisiana” (118). The exercise was specifically about English. However,

[…] it ultimately showed that French continues to play a large role in the construction of place in Terrebonne-Lafourche despite (or possibly because of) its decline. Even beyond the role that French has had in shaping the English of South Louisiana, however, the symbolic importance of the language carries on. (Dajko 2020: 118).

101Preston (1986) argues that perception exercises of this kind allow us to have a better insight into communities. Of course, the answers given are rather arbitrary, and “the connection of language to place falls under the rubric of language ideology: people’s beliefs about language use […] People tend to map their beliefs about each other – the boundaries of their communities – onto language” (Dajko 2020: 77). The north of Louisiana was often labeled “English”, “Southern” (as in Southern American English), or disparagingly “redneck”. Acadiana bore the various labels “Cajun”, “Creole”, “French”, “bilingual French”, “French and English”, “Cajun French”, sometimes subdivided into several pockets (e.g. “our French”, “Creole French”, “Indian”) (121-125). This shows that, to the people who live there, Acadiana cannot be described without referring directly to French, even in an exercise that is specifically about English. Dajko argues that place has been constructed via language in the Cajun context, that “place is an abstraction, the representation of a community, mapped onto both the physical landscape and the aural soundscape” (vii). She quotes Tuck and McKenzie (2015: 35), who argue that places “do not exist so much as they occur”. As Low (1994: 66) explains, a place is “space made culturally meaningful”. It is clear that the Cajun cultural/social imaginary has made the meaning of the place of Acadiana inseparable from the French language. This highly influences the linguistic imaginary of Cajuns, even when they do not speak the language.

102According to Milroy (1992), linguistic change is the result of a renegotiation of norms following an interaction between speakers with different norms. An exploration of the notion of norms is proposed by Houdebine (e.g. 1982, 2002) in her model of the linguistic imaginary, which is of great help to account for the link between evolving norms and the concept of linguistic identity. The linguistic imaginary is an attempt to characterize the relationship of speakers to their language(s). While this is a relationship of an individual, intimate type, it is also influenced by a cultural/social imaginary, by the opinions and judgments of other speakers, and by the prestige phenomena that may be associated with them. The linguistic imaginary may be used as an analytical framework to address the factors that play a part in the development of various kinds of objective and subjective norms that interact with one another (Remysen 2005). The norms of the linguistic imaginary are divided into objective and subjective ones.

  • 14 Elsewhere (Glain, forthcoming), I have suggested that Houdebine’s model of the linguistic imagin (...)

103Objective norms are based on the actual production of language. They can be statistical, when they are concerned with language usage, or systemic, when they deal with speakers’ systems. Subjective norms, also called evaluative norms, are about speakers’ representations of their language(s). They can be fictive, when they are based on esthetic and emotional judgments and arguments. They can also be prescriptive, when they carry the weight of institutional authority, being for example associated with dictionaries, grammars, usage guides, and places like schools and universities. In a later version of the linguistic imaginary, Houdebine (1997) included communication norms into the category of subjective norms14. Communication norms favor inter-comprehension and they are based on solidarity between speakers. Finally, identity norms were added to the model by Tsekos (2002). They account for the part that language plays in the construction of the cultural identity of a community. Houdebine did not question the importance of identity norms, but she preferred to include them in the category of fictive norms (Remysen 2005).

104The various testimonies of Cajuns related in this paper indicate that French is considered the authentic language of Acadiana. Given the propensity of a great many members of the community to refuse to grant any sort of importance to the variety of English that they speak, it seems that French is sometimes perceived as the only legitimate language of Southern Louisiana, with English speakers imagining what might have been if they had spoken French in what they imagine would have been a perfect bilingual society. With such statements, we enter the realm of fiction and of its correlates, fictive norms. This in-group ideology is also accessible to the public through the many videos found on-line about Cajuns trying to preserve their identity through the use of French15. The fact that it is very difficult to have access to recordings of Cajun English works in the same way: identity norms of an evaluative nature work in favor of French, which is still perceived to be central to Cajun identity. The loss of French as the main language of Acadiana reinforces a desire for French. This is a complete U-turn in the community’s stance, given that French was rejected during the major part of the 20th century, until the Cajun renaissance. The recycling of former CE features and the emergence of an identity-driven variety of English with younger speakers can therefore be analyzed as the result of an interaction between the various norms of the linguistic imaginaries of young Cajuns. Subjective identity norms oriented towards an ideal/imaginary French that is often little spoken (if spoken at all) have influenced the pronunciations of new generations, which has led to a recycling of features that were perceived as authentic hallmarks of Cajunness and to the development of new, objective statistical norms of usage.

105The differences between men and women’s speech can also be accounted for within the framework of the linguistic imaginary. Prescriptive norms associated with the authority conveyed by General American and/or mainstream varieties of American English have contributed to a lesser development of CE features in the speech of women, as “their roles as Cajun torchbearers have been taken over by young men” (Dubois and Horvath 1999: 307). Different evaluative norms have been at work with men on account of the role they have played in the activities linked to the Cajun Renaissance, of their self-identification with Cajunness, and of the positive valuation of their practices. The way they speak has been evaluated positively both by outsiders such as tourists and by members of the Cajun community, as “today Cajuns have a high regard for those young men who maintain […] the Cajun way of speaking English. Those people who reject exonormic standards are today admired for ‘keeping the torch lit’” (Dubois and Horvath 2000: 300). The different linguistic practices of men and women have gradually been fossilized as different statistical norms, through stance accretion and the cumulative effect of their social interactions. The previous rejection of both French and the older generations’ variety of CE by Dubois and Horvath’s middle-aged generation can partly be attributed to a sense of patriotism that emerged in the 20th century and that prompted Cajuns to move towards more national, institutionalized norms. However, it is mostly attributable to linguistic insecurity (cf. section 1.2). From the Southern Reconstruction period (1865-1877) to the 1960s, the Cajuns were looked down upon by many Americans outside their community (cf. section 1.1), partly because of what was considered a lack of English. This set of negative attitudes was associated with the way Cajuns spoke: the negative valuation of both French and CE gave them no linguistic capital and little social capital. Some Cajuns came to “believe in the inferiority of their culture” (Hebert 2000), which prompted them to reject the way they spoke. This was increased by the fact that Standard French was promoted by CODOFIL, which made some Cajuns ashamed that they did not speak “real” French (cf. section 1.3). Linguistic insecurity affected the linguistic imaginaries of Cajun speakers and prevented them from appreciating the richness of their language(s) and culture. It inculcated an inferiority complex which destroyed their linguistic confidence and only began to recede with the Cajun Renaissance. “While older Cajuns experienced their ethnic identity as a source of shame, younger generations of Cajuns have grown up celebrating Cajunness” (Carmichael 2019: 168).

106The exaggeration of features found in the jokes is based on an interaction between evaluative norms of an esthetic nature and on the statistical norms of the genre. As Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes are somehow meant to be told in a Cajun dialect (including specific pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar), stancetaking reinforces statistical norms of usage that are specifically Cajun, which clearly shows in the higher rate of CE features found in the jokes. The exaggeration also constitutes a form of linguistic representation, which for “higher” artistic forms of performance may be considered an esthetic proposition. The fact that Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes are “only” a popular genre does not fundamentally change this artistic dimension. As such, the stance adopted by the joketellers fits well with evaluative norms, as it relies on the esthetic judgment of the speakers, while contributing to the construction of a given identity which corresponds to the expectations of the addressee.

Conclusion

107The central aim of this paper was to analyze the social, cultural, and ideological relationship between the ongoing movement of the Cajun Renaissance and Cajun English, a variety whose features are markers of identity. To do so, I have proposed that this identity has much to do with a strong Cajun imaginary and that it manifests itself in the long-term or temporary stances adopted by CE speakers as a result of interactions and feedback. Despite the tendency towards an ever-increasing domination of English, French can never be taken out of the equation because it is considered by Cajuns as the more authentic, the “real” speech of Acadiana. This article has built from previous studies, while the preliminary results of a study of rhythm have not made it possible to conclude that the deliberate stancetaking associated with traditional Cajun joketelling has an effect on the rhythm of CE. This hypothesis will have to be confirmed or contradicted by a complementary study of more recordings. The history of CE is short but rich, on account of fast-evolving norms among its speakers. This paper has also helped define the complex Cajun community as one which is as much ideologically imagined as it is cultural.

108A theoretical opening may consist in analyzing the emergence of CE from multidimensional situations through the scientific model of complex systems, which can be summed up in just five principles (Kretzschmar 2015): 1) random interaction of large numbers of components (the multilingual situation of Louisiana), 2) continuing activity in the system (Louisiana French and Cajun English never truly died out), 3) exchange of information with feedback (intergenerational interactions and recycling of features, interactions with “outsiders”), 4) reinforcement of behaviors (the different gender patterns), 5) emergence of stable patterns without central control (the still-evolving variety of Cajun English today).

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Notes

1 As a teacher of French in Mississippi in the 1990s, I personally met a number of Cajuns who were approximately my age (I was in my early twenties at the time). None of those I got acquainted with spoke French beyond a few set phrases learned by heart. I was really surprised to find out that most of their parents did speak perfectly fluent French when I met them. It seemed to me that French had indeed been lost in the course of one single generation.

2 The program is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijL31NmPiKw [last accessed on November 8th, 2021].

3 The interview is available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EfsHJ0zwFc [last accessed on November 8th, 2021].

4 Many thanks to Janice Fabregas for kindly giving me access to a rare recording of one of the early CE speakers.

5 Many thanks to Katie Carmichael for giving me access to the Cajun English Corpus and for answering my questions. I am truly indebted to her.

6 A sketch about couillons by Cajun comedian Kent Gonsoulin may be watched at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO4zcAH1-wo [last accessed on November 8th, 2021].

7 My definitions

8 In fact, dislocation seems to be a very commonly used feature in all stereotypical renderings of CE. For example, it is often used in the TundaMinous animated web series, a parody of the animated television series Thundercats with a Cajun twist. The pilot can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DASA7x7ezg4&list=PLOL4OLomVFK1j-pA1ZhOtlnzm6xl5Isql [last accessed on November 8th, 2021].

9 My emphases.

10 Of course, the alternation between [æsk] and [æks] goes back to Old English, which had both ascian and acsian for Contemporary English ask. The pronunciation with [æsk] was even considered what we would today call standard until the 17th century.

11 A documentary on Cajun identity directed by Glen Pitre can be watched at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2o83jYbaM&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR0skBvtjG3QvqjaXwa_GKrxonR4DWiw1IBZENUKCwfw5KeCPrYHEm-kno0 [last accessed on November 8th, 2021].

12 Many thanks to the people of the Cajun French Virtual table Française and the digital library of the UL Lafayette who sent me material. Even though they were not what I asked for, the recordings they sent me were a great help in improving my knowledge of Louisiana French.

13 Original text: “La seule façon d’aller jusqu’au bout de la conception de la langue comme fait social n’est donc pas de se demander quels sont les effets de la société sur la langue, ou de la langue sur la société, ce qui une fois de plus consiste à poser le problème sociolinguistique en aval du problème linguistique, comme un problème différent, successif ou ultérieur. Il s’agit au contraire de dire que l’objet d’étude de la linguistique n’est pas seulement la langue ou les langues mais la communauté sociale sous son aspect linguistique.”

14 Elsewhere (Glain, forthcoming), I have suggested that Houdebine’s model of the linguistic imaginary should be slightly altered to make communication norms more central and to make them objective norms, because they have as much to do with the actual production of language as statistical and systemic norms, and because they often interact with systemic norms in linguistic variation and change.

15 Here is an example with a video featuring Jourdan Thibodeaux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOfq0cbgRSI [last accessed on November 8th, 2021].

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List of illustrations

Title Figure 1. 100 lines of “I will not speak French” in the classroom (pictures taken at the Vermilionville Living History Museum and Folklife Park in Lafayette, Louisiana)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-1.jpg
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URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-2.jpg
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URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-3.png
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Title Figure 3. Spectrogram of [a] and [ɑ̃], LF male speaker
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-4.jpg
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Title Figure 4. Scott, LA, source: http://www.boudincapitaloftheworld.com
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-5.jpg
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Title Figure 5. Spectrogram of to go, M1
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-6.jpg
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Title Figure 6. Spectrogram of one day, M3
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-7.jpg
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Title Figure 7. Spectrogram of cook, M1 (casual conversation)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-8.jpg
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Title Figure 8. Spectrogram of comes, M1 (joke)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-9.jpg
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Title Figure 9. Sound waves, spectrogram and intonation curve of He grab the rabbit, he start walking down the street, M13 (joke)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-10.jpg
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Title Figure 10. Sound waves, spectrogram and intonation curve of He’s a carpenter, him too M17 (casual conversation)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-11.jpg
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Title Figure 11. Equation for calculating rhythm with PVI (Carter 2007: 5)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-12.jpg
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Title Figure 13. Extracts from the “Cajun French Virtual Table Française” Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/​groups/​cajunfrench)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-13.jpg
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Title Figure 14. Post on the “Cajun French Virtual Table Française” Facebook page
URL http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/docannexe/image/4049/img-14.png
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References

Electronic reference

Olivier Glain, The Cajun Renaissance and Cajun English. The Social, the Linguistic, the ImaginaryAnglophonia [Online], 32 | 2021, Online since 21 December 2021, connection on 17 February 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/4049; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/anglophonia.4049

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About the author

Olivier Glain

Université Jean Monnet de Saint-Étienne, ECLLA (Études du Contemporain en Littératures, Langues et Arts)
olivier.glain@univ-st-etienne.fr

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