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| The French language has
maintained a presence in what is now Natchitoches Parish since at least
1714, the year that French Canadian Louis de Juchereau, Sieur de St.
Denis founded Fort St. Jean Baptiste des Natchitoches. The earliest
French-speaking residents came from various regions of France and from
Quebec. Immigration from these areas continued in the ensuing years, as
did migration of French speakers from Mobile, New Orleans, and other
parts of the Louisiana colony. It can be said, then, that the European
component of the founder population of the Cane River Valley was
similar in its geographical origins to the European population of the
rest of early colonial Louisiana. This, along with the continued
contacts between the Natchitoches post and the other settlements of
colonial and post-colonial Louisiana, no doubt explains why the two
French-related varieties spoken in the Cane River area today, Louisiana
Creole and Louisiana Regional French, do not differ greatly from their
counterparts spoken elsewhere in the state. One French-speaking group that are conspicuously absent from the settlement history of Natchitoches Parish are the Acadians, about 3,000 of whom made their way to Louisiana between 1764 and 1785, after their expulsion from Nova Scotia by the British. Most of the Acadians settled in areas far to the south of Natchitoches Parish, and there is no evidence that significant numbers of their descendants relocated there in following years. It is unlikely, then, that the French of the Acadians had much direct influence on the French spoken in Natchitoches Parish. Because of the regular contact maintained with other parts of francophone Louisiana, however, Natchitoches Parish probably participated in many of the linguistic developments affecting Louisiana as a whole, including those that may have been influenced by Acadian French. Just when and how Louisiana Creole came to be spoken in the Cane River Valley remains unclear. Klingler (2003) argues that the Louisiana Creole language arose first on the large Mississippi River plantations near New Orleans and later spread to other parts of Louisiana when Creole-speaking slaves were sold or their owners moved. The Creole language was most likely imported to Natchitoches Parish, then, when slaves from plantations along the lower Mississippi were brought there to work on the plantations of the Cane River. The use of French as a written language, well attested in documents from the colonial period and well into the nineteenth century, had died out by the early twentieth century. It was a casualty of the general shift to English in Louisiana that was helped along by a provision in the 1921 constitution making English the only permissible language of instruction in the state's public schools. This effectively put an end to literacy in French, except among those who could afford a private French-language education or those who chose to pursue the study of French in high school or college. References: Klingler, Thomas A. 2003. If I
Could Turn My Tongue Like That: The
Creole Language of Pointe Picone, Michael D. 1998. Historic French diglossia in Louisiana. Paper read at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana, 26-28 March. |
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