re: What Institute of Higher Ed in Louisiana is doing the best job of preserving Cajun French

UL literally specializes in it. They have a PhD. program for Francophone studies.

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Cajun French is old French that developed or didn’t evolve because it existed in a vacuum away from the rest of the Francophone countries

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Thats a very romantic way of describing it

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Thats a very romantic way of describing it

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It’s factual. It is French that was frozen in time and lived isolated in America far away from the language evolution of Parisian French.

Making fun of it would be equivalent to making fun of an isolated tribe’s language. I’m not romanticizing but describing it accurately. Portraying it as junk or invalid is ignoring how languages form and evolve.

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Its factual it was also spoken with poorer less educated Francophones and was established as dialect of exactly that Not very disabled to very rural country dialect, or urban dialect today of English

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You think the Cajuns had access to the Parisian French? Rural country folks and urban dialect developed in shared space with modern American English. One was in total isolation, the others chose not to participate in the ongoing language development around them

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This just isn’t true or equal. Cajun French is old French that developed or didn’t evolve because it existed in a vacuum away from the rest of the Francophone countries. It is more a snapshot of French linguistic history (and technically a true dialect) than some sloppy lazy language bastardization.

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Asked AI about this just for fun:

Cajun French and the French spoken in France share the same root language, but they’ve diverged over centuries in vocabulary, pronunciation, and even grammar.

Here’s the short historical arc:

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1. Common origins
• Cajun French descends mainly from Acadian French, which was spoken by French settlers in Acadia (now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) in the 1600s.
• These settlers originally came from regions in western France (Poitou, Brittany, Normandy, Anjou), bringing their local dialects. At the time, there wasn’t a single “standard” French — regional dialects were the norm.
• So the French spoken in Acadia in the 17th century was already different from Parisian French of the same period.

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2. Divergence
• In 1755, the British expelled the Acadians (the Grand Dérangement), and many ended up in Louisiana.
• In Louisiana, Acadian French blended with:
• French from other immigrants (Parisian soldiers, traders from the Caribbean)
• Spanish (Louisiana was under Spanish rule for a period)
• African languages (through the influence of enslaved people and Creole culture)
• Indigenous languages
• Meanwhile, in France, spoken French became increasingly influenced by the standardized Parisian form due to centralization, education reforms, and media in the 18th–19th centuries.

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3. Modern differences
• Pronunciation: Cajun French often has a more nasal quality, drops certain final consonants, and sometimes stresses syllables differently.
• Vocabulary: Retains old French words that have disappeared in France (e.g., char for car, piastre for dollar), and includes many loanwords from English and Spanish.
• Grammar: Some old constructions survive (like using moé and toé for “me” and “you”), and verb tenses may be used in older or simpler ways than in modern standard French.
• Idioms: Many expressions are unique to Louisiana or directly trace back to 17th-century rural France.

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Were they ever “the same”?

They were never identical to modern French from France, but in the mid-1600s the Acadian dialect and the rural French dialects of western France were essentially variants of the same language family. That’s the last point in history when speakers from each side could have understood one another with little trouble.
From that point onward — especially after the late 18th century — Cajun French evolved separately from European French, preserving many old features while also adding its own.

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If you like, I can put together a side-by-side example of a Cajun French conversation and the modern Parisian French equivalent so you can see the differences in action.

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They beat it out of the population about 100 years ago.

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There are people in their 70s now, who were kids in school when they were forced to speak English.

I remember one of my friends mom telling us she used to get "licks" for speaking CF at school and then get the belt for speaking English at home. She said her parents were completely against her speaking English and despised the state politicians who were forcing everyone to learn and speak English. So I guess within 15-20 years maybe? Maybe before.. There will no one left who grew up speaking cajun french as their first language..

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finish the sentence

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This is America, speak English or leave

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