The study of Cajun French in Louisiana sponsored by NSF (SBR-9514831) has revealed a central fact about French-speaking communities: language shift has been taking place rather dramatically over the last three generations. These communities have moved from monolingual French to bilingual French-English and are now moving rapidly to monolingual English. Situations of shift offer a unique opportunity to study language change in progress. The Louisiana French communities are interesting for two reasons: 1) shift to English began when both French and English were heavily stigmatized but the attitudes towards things French changed to positive during the course of the shift and 2) the social differences between Cajuns (white) and Creoles (African-Americans) leads language change and linguistic identity along separate paths.
The sociolinguistic effect of language shift has been the development of two ethnolects (Cajun English and Louisiana African American Creole English), i.e., varieties of a language in which the expression of ethnic identity is maintained in an adopted language after loss of the ethnic language. Preliminary analysis of Cajun English has revealed four change processes in the development of selected sociolinguistic variants in the ethnolect: the origination of the variant in the accented English of the oldest generation; the adoption of local regional variants of English by the middle generation, the recycling of the accented English by the young and/or the persistence of particular features over two or more contiguous generations. The sociolinguistic patterns associated with these processes are complex and intimately tied to the sociohistory of these communities.
The Cajun and Louisiana African American Creole French communities of southern Louisiana provide a unique opportunity for a comparative sociolinguistic study of the process of language shift. There are many points of comparison between the Cajun and Creole communities: they are from the same locale (Southern Louisiana), have the same languages interacting during the same historical period; many commonalities in their sociohistory (long term occupation of the land; oppression by English-speaking whites; both are stigmatized social groups; both have a recent history of linguistic integration under government pressure (no French in schools) followed by belated attempts to encourage the use of French, largely for tourism/economic reasons.) The major difference between the two groups is race; the developing ethnolects - Cajun and Louisiana African American Creole English - will help to sort out the problem of the linguistic origins of ethnolectal variants (in the accented variety of second language learners or adoptions from the same or different regional variants).
The social setting of the Cajun and Creole communities which has led to the development of English dialects will be compared through the examination of their recent sociohistory in order to identify the similarities and differences in the social forces guiding language change and dialect development. The overall goal of the study is to construct a model of the development of ethnolects which takes account of geographical location, ethnic/racial identities, sociohistory and linguistics and to compare this model with the current understanding of language change in progress.
