Cajun French in Louisiana

Angela

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Just for fun...

 
It seems closer to some kind of creole of the standard french than to any old oil french dialect.
Funny all the way.
 
Cajun French is closer to standard European French than to Québec French. It's very easy to understand but sounds a bit boorish. In contrast I have been to some villages in Québec where I couldn't understand half of what people were saying.
 
I heard, long ago, a Cajun I could not understand, too. It depends also on individuals.
Rural Québec French even more than the towns one, retained phonetic traits of Poitou dialects, diphtonged* when compared to highly monophtonged modern standard French, plus evolution of the group 'ti' towards 'tsi', surely enough through the stage 'tchi', present in Poitevin dialects.
*: not only Poitevin but a lot of Oil dialects had kept diphtongs, not strictly the same as in Poitevin. They are a relatively recent Oil evolution heritage, and are not conservation of old Latin diphtongs, lost since long enough time (# here from Occitan).
 
I listened to more than a Youtube Wikitongues bands, and I have to say the people who speak then, often enough, don't seem being very deeply immersed and since a long time, in the dialect they illustrate, supposedly.
 
Cajun French is closer to standard European French than to Québec French. It's very easy to understand but sounds a bit boorish. In contrast I have been to some villages in Québec where I couldn't understand half of what people were saying.

The Cajuns descended from the exiles from Acadia, deported by the British after the 7 Years War. The development of "Canadien" French and Cajun French has been very different. If people from different parts of France went to different areas of Canada, that could also be a difference. From everything I've seen most linguists define Cajun French as a dialect, whereas the rest are "creoles".

There's Louisiana "French" as distinct from Cajun French, the prior of which is or was the French of the settlers directly from France. That was mixed with Spanish, as the Spaniards also owned Louisiana for a time. Cajun was and is "rural", mostly spoken in the bayous etc or by descendants of those people. I don't think very many people still speak "New Orleans" Creole.

The last variant is a language defined by everybody as a Creole language:Louisiana Creole, spoke by people with a lot of African American ancestry, usually about 50%.

I don't think there are very many fluent Cajun speakers who aren't quite elderly. What is happening is that there's a resurgence going on, with younger people trying to learn it.

That was all going on my memory. Then I did what I should have done in the beginning: look it up. :)

"Hosea Phillips, in his article titled "The Spoken French of Louisiana"[1], identifies three varieties of French spoken in Louisiana: Standard Louisiana French, Acadian French, and Creole French.What Phillips refers to as Standard Louisiana French is not too dissimilar from what we will refer to as International French. This Standard Louisiana French resembles International French and differs only slightly in pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, and grammar from International French. The sources of the difference can be identified in the following ways: Standard Louisiana French (1) retains many of the "archaic" French that would have been standard in the 17th century, and, (2) because of its long interaction with Acadian French, has adopted many of its forms and pronunciations. Phillips gives a number of examples in his article to support his point.
Acadian French, as described by Phillips, is closer to what we have in mind as Louisiana French. Phillips stresses that Acadian French isn't a dialect of French, but is "a common language which has assimilated certain dialectal elements, but, on the whole, resembles the French spoken in the villages and rural areas of northern and western France."[2] Phillips's Acadian French is the French imported by the Acadians from Nova Scotia, but which has experienced a great deal of internal normalization through interaction with the many languages and cultures that have settled in Louisiana in the past three hundred years. Phillips briefly outlines how Acadian French has developed through "phonetic accidents" such as metathesis, assimilation, dissimilation, and agglutination, which combined has contributed to the modern pronunciation of Acadian French. Even though there are regional flavors of Acadian French that differentiate the French spoken in one parish from another, Phillips emphasizes that the differences aren't so great as to make difficult the communication of Acadian French speakers from different parishes.
The other major variety of Louisiana French identified by Phillips is Creole French. Similar to Phillip's Standard Louisiana French and Acadian French, Creole French primarily is a spoken language and has been handed down from generation to generation orally without formal instruction. Also similar to Acadian French, there are wide regional variations in Creole French.
Apparently, speakers of Standard Louisiana French and Creole French historically have been able to shift to Acadian French for daily communication (when necessary or when social customs demand it)."

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Louisiana_French/Introduction

There's a representative list of words from Cajun to International French to show the difference.
 
valuable precisions, Angela.
I 'm not to knowledged about the French languages of the USA, knowing only 'Cajun' is a deformation of 'Acadien'.
 

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