When a young child named Earlene Broussard Echeverria attended her first day of school in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, in 1956, she didn’t understand anything. Not a single word. Earlene spoke only French, the same French her parents and grandparents had spoken, the French of Sunday Mass, the bayou, and the kitchen table. The teacher spoke English. She was not an immigrant from another country. This is where she was born. She still didn’t fit in.
One of the most iconic and often overlooked tales of American assimilation is that picture of a young girl silenced in her own country. Based on the Acadians who were driven from Nova Scotia by the British between 1755 and 1763, Louisiana had a functioning French-speaking society with its own churches, laws, and culture for well over a century. In the American South’s swamps and prairies, these people—who had no country left—built something new. The state then made a slow, deliberate attempt to eradicate their language.
French-speaking children lost more than just a class when Louisiana made English-only education mandatory in 1910; they also lost a portion of their identity. They were penalized for using their native tongue. embarrassed in front of peers. “You can’t even ask how to go to the bathroom without being punished,” says Echeverria, who currently teaches Cajun French at Louisiana State University.” As they watched all of this, parents made a silent, devastating choice. They ceased instructing their kids in French. The stigma had served its purpose.
When you sit with that fact, it’s difficult not to feel heavy. A living language that was spoken by hundreds of thousands of people was reduced to whispers at family get-togethers and coded jokes that grandchildren who couldn’t follow along couldn’t understand within a generation or two. Growing up in the small town of Ossun in southwest Louisiana, Janice Prejean, 64, recalls that exact feeling. She needed French in order to comprehend what the adults were laughing about. She thus discovered it. Many children her age either didn’t have that opportunity or their parents didn’t make an effort.
Repairs have been attempted. The Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, or CODOFIL, was established in Louisiana in 1968 with the goal of advancing the language in public and educational settings. It was a serious, even ambitious, idea. CODOFIL pushed for a count of the state’s French speakers in the 1990 census; the findings, which showed that over 450,000 households still spoke the language at home, shocked many. Since then, that number has most likely decreased. Over time, CODOFIL has been reduced to three full-time employees, its budget has been slashed, and it has been moved like a relic into the Office of Tourism. According to reports, a number of board members don’t even speak French.
And yet. Something quietly amazing has been developing in Arnaudville, a small town situated where two bayous meet. For about 15 years, Mavis Frugé, now 83, has been hosting French Tables, which are group dinners where the only requirement is that everyone speak French. Whatever your level of French. It matters whether you’re Cajun, Creole, broken, or hesitant. 125 people attended their first event. Frugé is genuinely “negotiating with God for an extension” in order to finish the project. 39 residents of nearby nursing homes passed away during the pandemic. It’s possible that each of them carried some of the language with them.
People in Arnaudville and other parts of southern Louisiana seem weary of silently lamenting a language. The Saint-Luc French Immersion and Cultural Center in Frugé is being constructed to accommodate researchers, students, and inquisitive tourists from all over the world. Classes for adult literacy are starting. The long-standing differences between “authentic” Louisiana French and the standardized French brought in by educators from Belgium, France, and Canada are gradually being worked out, if not completely eliminated. Frugé’s stance is straightforward: all French is good French.
It’s still genuinely unclear if Cajun French can be revived on a large scale. Echeverria feels that while the more difficult tasks of literacy and everyday speech receive less attention, the culture has shifted toward music, including Cajun and Zydeco bands, fiddles, accordions, and lyrics that older speakers instantly recognize. She claims that “music is a universal language,” but that statement has a bittersweet quality. A culture on borrowed time is one that is reduced to performance, even exquisite performance. She maintains that French “is a part of Louisiana.” It completes the body.That may be the most sincere justification for keeping it: wholeness rather than utility or worldwide relevance.
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