Professor Collaborates to Produce Louisiana French Dictionary

Newswise — In the southern parishes of Louisiana, French is still spoken, both among the elderly Cajuns, Creoles and Native Americans and among a new generation reawakening to the rich cultural and linguistic heritage of the area.

Dr. Michael D. Picone, professor of French and linguistics at UA, has talked with many French speakers to document their vocabulary and distinctive styles of speaking before the local French language vanishes.

“A couple of hundred thousand individuals or more speak French in Louisiana based on the last Census that we have, but the problem is that most of them are elderly, and they’re not being replaced by very many native speakers of French in Louisiana,” Picone said.

“There are immersion programs in Louisiana schools that produce people who speak French, but not necessarily authentic Louisiana French. The French that’s learned in immersion programs is a new kind of French that combines elements of Cajun French but is also evolving.”

To preserve Louisiana French, Picone served as an assistant editor of the reference work “Dictionary of Louisiana French as Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities.”

The 900-page book, published recently by University Press of Mississippi, inventories French vocabulary as spoken today in five key regions of “Acadiana” – the Francophone regions of contemporary Louisiana. The senior editor is Dr. Albert Valdman, professor emeritus at Indiana University.

The dictionary, according to the publisher, features entries that “include the word in the conventional French spelling, the pronunciation (including attested variants), the part of speech classification, the English equivalent and the word’s use in common phrases.”

According to Picone, a Frenchman and a Cajun can understand each other today, but they may run into some problems negotiating the two forms of French. Louisiana French speakers preserve some of the archaic features of the older, regional French of France – for example they maintain the “H” sound that has disappeared in standard French.

They also introduce new features that are unknown in France – for example, since they are all bilingual, they often mix in English words and phrases, especially when they don’t know the French word for some modern object.

“Someone who speaks Louisiana French and someone who speaks today’s standard French in France can negotiate a conversation and understand each other for the most part,” Picone said. “There will be some things that they will throw at each other and that will take some mutual maneuvering to figure out, but it can be done.

“Pronunciation-wise, Louisiana French harkens to a kind of regional French that retains some of the things that are considered archaic in France today but were once widespread in regional dialects.”

Picone has done fieldwork all over French-speaking Louisiana. For the dictionary, his contribution comes mostly from fieldwork in the St. Landry and Vermilion parishes. But he also went farther afield, into areas on the periphery of Acadiana. For example, he recorded speakers in Plaquemines Parish and on Grand Isle who had their own way of speaking.

“In Plaquemines Parish, there are French communities there that have a different dialect of French that maintains some elements of plantation-society French,” he said. “And Grand Isle used to be the resort area for the elite of 19thcentury New Orleans, so some of the linguistic traits are there.

“The sad thing is, Plaquemines was completely devastated by Katrina. I’ve tried to call since then, and I’m not getting through to any of those people, so I’m sure they’re displaced. I’m afraid the community that was there is pretty scattered.”

To gather data, Picone uses a combination of free conversation and elicited responses. To compare the linguistic traits of different areas, he tries to get the French speakers to say certain words and phrases, sometimes prompting them with pictures and sometimes asking them to translate certain concepts or expressions from English into their variety of French.

“We do engage in some free conversation to warm things up and get friendly,” Picone said. “That will provide you with a textual database. But we also had an elicitation protocol to get them to say things or name different local fauna and flora so that we could see what kind of variety of dialect we were hearing.

“We used pictures of insects, fish, garden vegetables, tools and household items to see how much of the vocabulary they had retained and to see if the words and pronunciations were going to be the same all over. Also, since they’re all bilingual, you can use that as a tool. You can say something in English and ask them to translate that into French.”

After transcribing their field work and inventorying the vocabulary, Picone and his co-editors, particularly associate editor Dr. Kevin Rottet of Indiana University, built the entries for the dictionary, including a rich selection of contextual examples illustrating words and phrases in real usage.

Some of the assistant editors are native Louisiana-French speakers and are well-known figures in the Cajun renewal: Barry Ancelet, Amanda LaFleur and the late Richard Guidry. They invested much time and energy into verifying and enriching the content of the entries, Picone said.

Along with Picone, the other assistant editors are linguists Tom Klingler, Tamara Lindner and Dominique Ryon. Picone also credits Valdman, the senior editor, for leading the project.

“Valdman is the one who had the reputation and the vision to get a bunch of other researchers together to do a dictionary,” Picone said. “He launched the idea, and he’s the principal investigator. He kept us on track to get the job finished. We owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude.”

The dictionary has been well received by the Cajun community in Louisiana and is already into its second printing.

“As a linguist, a lot of the research that I typically do ends up in a scholarly journals that are read by a relative few,” Picone said. “In contributing to the creation of this dictionary, it is very gratifying to be part of something that gives back to the community.”