Lâche pas les Langues de la Louisiane

Decades ago, state laws and socio-economic pressures almost eradicated the heritage languages of Louisiana French and Creole, known in south Louisiana parishes as Kouri-Vini. But today, through education, art, music, and food, locals are working to keep the languages alive and nurture a new generation of local French and Kouri-Vini speakers. Jonathan Olivier, a journalist who grew up there and now works the land as a farmer, ponders what’s in store for his culturally distinct region of the South.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Every section subheading below is rendered first in French, then in Kouri-Vini, then in English.

Story by Jonathan Olivier | Photographs by Rory Doyle

March 10, 2020

Louis Michot is the front-man fiddler with the Grammy-winning Lost Bayou Ramblers. He grew up speaking English and a few words in French. He says, “As soon as I started singing in French, I found my voice.”

Michot, 41, has split his time between Louisiana and the road since after high school, when he struck out to Europe and then busked around Canada. He and his brother Andre started the Lost Bayou Ramblers in 1999. They’ve spent much of the last 20 years on the road touring, playing traditional Louisiana music infused with contemporary sounds. The six-member group has been at the forefront of highlighting not only south Louisiana culture but also the languages that meld it together.

The band has piqued the curiosity of a new generation craving to understand the French lyrics. 

“When we can connect with younger generations through music, it pulls them into the French because they want to learn what we’re saying and they want to feel a part of it,” Michot said. “Especially ones from Acadiana, like this is my music, and they want to own it and, they want to be a part of it.”

Michot is among the first generation who grew up with English as a mother tongue. Even still, he routinely heard French as he played upright bass or triangle with his family band Les Frères Michot all across Acadiana. Along the way, he picked up little phrases like allons for “let’s go” or danser for “dance.” Sayings like those can be second nature for many south Louisianans. Although most of us today grew up anglophones, we still retain phonetic vestiges from our heritage — nasal vowels or deleting final consonants on words — manifesting in a distinct, regional dialect. 

It wasn’t until Louis was 19, when he attended a five-week French immersion program at Université Sainte-Anne in Church Point, Nova Scotia, that the language took over his life.

“When I went to Sainte-Anne I brought the fiddle with me,” he said. “That was really when I finally started learning how to play, when I could hold a tune. So, I started playing fiddle and singing in French at the same time. As soon as I started singing in French, I found my voice.”

Since no French-immersion programs for adults exist in Louisiana, in the last two decades alone thousands of Louisianans have made the trek to Canada or France to learn. The trip is morphing into a pilgrimage, a deliberate effort to reclaim one of our heritage languages. Upon returning to Louisiana, many have gone on to advance the language in new ways. Some create art, such as painter and writer Jonathan Mayers, while others, like Louis, have highlighted French through music and introduced it to a wider audience. 

In summer 2018, I made a pilgrimage myself, spending more than a month in Quebec as a farm intern. I became reacquainted with my familial language, and when I got home it became an obsession. I dedicated countless hours to learning — language apps, movies, and talking with locals. Like so many others, last year I went back to Canada, this time to attend the five-week immersion program at Sainte-Anne. It has allowed me to now use the language with confidence, as well as go on to begin learning Kouri-Vini. As I started an organic vegetable farm in July 2019, I named it Le Potager d’Acadiana. At the farmer’s market in Lafayette where I sell my produce, I greet each customer with bonjour, making it a point to include bilingual signs and provide service in French or English, because, at this critical time, our heritage languages deserve visibility in the public sphere. Either with neighbors in the unincorporated village where I live, called Frozard, or with my grandparents, parents, friends, or clients, I speak the languages every day.

Although many millennials are not learning French as native speakers in the home, thanks to immersion programs the language is starting to again become more visible. Meanwhile, speakers of Kouri-Vini are using the internet to connect to one another in a way never before possible, providing spaces to study, share words, and disseminate new information.

The fact still remains that the state continues to lose scores of elderly native speakers — the last generation who truly grew up speaking Louisiana French or Kouri-Vini at home. The future of the languages now rests largely with younger folks who learned at school or in an immersion program, and who speak with a dialect you’d more likely hear in France or Canada. Even though I’ve learned as much of the local dialect as I can, incorporating it into my vocabulary, my grandparents still tell me I speak “the good French from France.” Instances such as that lead some to say the languages are dying and will never be the same in Louisiana again.

But I am among those who tend to think the future has never been brighter. Languages have always evolved, and it appears Louisiana is headed in that direction. Nonetheless, our languages are here if you choose to look for them — and plenty of people are searching.

Louis Michot’s home is on an old sweet potato field, secluded by rows of towering oak trees, encircled further by scores of bushes locally called manglier that for generations have been used medicinally to cure colds. The cottage, built in 2004, rests in the small community of La Prairie des Femmes. It’s continuously being remodeled with the help of family and friends, but still retains a distinctly regional style that’s noticeable anywhere you look. 

The walls are comprised of reclaimed cypress lumber, the ones in the living room stuffed with traditional Louisiana bousillage, an 18th century practice that mixes Spanish moss and mud between wall studs to act as a thermal mass to retain heat in winter and stay cool in the summer.

“We had actually run out of Spanish moss, and we only made it halfway up the wall,” Louis told me as we sat around his dining table late in 2018. “I had to go out and get another few hundred pounds of moss to finish it.”

Louis’ wife Ashlee navigated around the kitchen, their son Marius on her hip, past jars of canned vegetables on the counter and under drying herbs near the roof rafters.   

“Où est cette bouteille?” Louis asked Ashlee after positioning Marius in a high chair.

Marius, now 2 years old, smiled as Louis scooted a bottle across the table. As he spoke more French in a softened tone, young Marius’ face lit up. He was already saying frère, when he saw his brothers Louis, now 8, or Julien, now 11. Although the boys haven’t attended any formal French classes, they’re hearing it at home every day and are very much native speakers.

“Time’s coming where we’re going to start teaching them to read and write in French,” said Ashlee, a 39-year-old from Ville Platte.

“We would rather teach our boys the French we know, which is Louisiana French,” Louis added.

That means sticking to the local dialect, not the French that’s heard in France or Canada. The colony La Louisiane, or Louisiana, was founded by the French in 1682 and remained in their control for roughly 80 years. Then the territory was handed over to Spain for 40 years, and back to France until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. But even then, the language survived long after Americans began settling the swampy lowlands. Louisiana French is an older version of French. Because of isolation and a bit of borrowing words from other cultures, it became a different dialect — just as folks in Appalachia speak English a bit differently from Californians. But regional variances of the dialect exist, even between towns.

Kouri-Vini, on the other hand, is its own language that developed anywhere sugar cane grew on high ground near bayous and rivers in the heart of Acadiana — historically where Africans were enslaved on plantations. It’s mostly French vocabulary, with African influences, mutually intelligible to some speakers of Louisiana French. It’s been compared to other Creole languages in the caribbean, but it originated only in Louisiana. Over time, scores of people near bayous, white or black, spoke Kouri-Vini; it was tied to geography and not to race.

Before returning to teach high school French in 2019, Ashlee cared for the boys at home in Prairie des Femmes for years, teaching them French while passing along her familial knowledge of Louisiana: Roman Catholicism, foodways, local lore. 

“That relationship at the home of learning French from your mother has been interrupted a little bit or translated into English a little bit,” she said. “It’s really important to me to remember that it’s the women that are the culture keepers a lot of the time.”

She, too, attended the French immersion program at Sainte-Anne in Nova Scotia, just a few years after Louis did. She’s also an author, photographer, radio host, and artist. The constant through it all is her dedication to using French while learning as much as possible about the local dialect to incorporate into her vocabulary. 

“Our family members lived in that language,” she said. “Their whole expression was in it. So much of our information in our culture is in this language.”

She’s also somewhat of a local historian, documenting Louisiana French by recording and transcribing hours of radio broadcasted via Ville Platte station KVPI, where, during the program “La Tasse de Cafe,” you can still hear news and musings in French.

“People call in from all over Evangeline Parish with all these stories and these home remedies and memories of town, you name it,” she said. “It’s just going out to the airwaves — it’s just like ‘poof.’” Then, callers she had grown to adore began passing away. Sifting through her notes, she’d try to unearth colorful bits of folklore treasure these old-timers had shared. She hopes to keep those stories alive by compiling the recordings into a book called “Platte Vernacular.”

Through her work, she’s come to understand the array of expressions that exist in Louisiana French or Kouri-Vini that she’s never heard. While on the one hand an incredible learning experience, it’s also highlighted the wisdom that’s dying with the ones who hold it.

“It’s not a quick loss of language,” she said. “It’s a slow loss of language. When you listen to stories or things from the past or talk to an older person — they know all these synonyms, all these expressions that are not as common, or words that you don’t hear as often — you realize how much we have lost. How much our language has gotten diluted.”

Life slows to a crawl in Pecanière, Louisiana, where the only urgencies in this collection of scattered farms seem to be sowing seeds in the spring and harvest in the fall. Not much has changed, save for the crops — soybeans grow now, but decades ago homesteads were peppered between the bayous, where you’d find persimmon and fig trees, squash, corn, and blackberry vines. 

“My grandmother said for the Great Depression, they never knew they had a depression because they were used to living off the land,” my 83-year-old grandmother, Betty Olivier, told me. “It didn’t bother them.”

Betty and my grandfather, Leland Olivier, live in the same early 19th century home where she was raised. The outside is adorned with white-washed cypress boards sitting upon stilts — a nod to a time when floodwaters were a danger. We sat in the dining room on a warm day in October 2018, the sun hanging high in the sky, each of us sharing our own cup of coffee and a slice of cake. She relayed tales she had heard of the Great Flood of 1927, when her father and uncles lived in barns 12 miles away in Opelousas until high water receded. When she was a child in the 1940s, she rode to school in horse-drawn carriages with other kids because folks couldn’t afford cars. In those days, poverty meant subsistence farming and, in Pecanière, the community meant everything.

“Every week, someone made a boucherie in the winter,” she said, referring to the old practice of slaughtering a pig to share with neighbors. “Over here, Momma would give everyone cracklins, boudin, and meat. That would do for the rest of the week. Next week, someone else did it.”

As we finished our coffee, the conversation’s focus shifted to her native Louisiana French. She told me, as was common in those days, Louisiana French and Kouri-Vini were the only languages for miles around. Those who did speak English, often from outside of south Louisiana, were dubbed les Américains. That all changed when she went to school. 

“We weren’t allowed to speak French,” she said. “If we did we were punished. So, I just didn’t talk because I didn’t want to be punished.” As she spoke, the wrinkles around her eyes deepened and I could hear the hurt in her tone. “If they caught you speaking French, the teacher would put you on your knees or whip you. They had a dark room they would put you in, too. I never went in it, but I was scared to death of it.”

Some kids were forced to wet themselves because they didn’t know how to ask for a bathroom break. Others spent hours writing, “I will not speak French on the school grounds.” In 1921, the Louisiana Constitution made English the official language of education in public schools. Teachers were ruthless in ridding the children of their native tongue.

During the height of World War II, my great-grandfather moved the family to Orange, Texas, while he worked in a shipyard. There, Betty learned English without a fear of punishment, enough so that when they returned to Pecanière after the war, she could avoid speaking French in school. But the ridicule continued, as even fellow francophones took to calling her and others who were poor les pauvres ’cadiens.

“We were looked down upon,” she said. “I didn’t want my children to go through what we had to go through. I didn’t want them to be punished, so I didn’t teach them French. I’m sorry now I didn’t.”

Betty and Leland Olivier at their home in Pecanière, not far from Bayou Teche. Group photo shows (left to right), Belinda, Betty, Jonathan (author), Leland, and Darrell Olivier.

My maternal grandmother, Annette Quebedeaux, was raised in Cecilia, just a few miles south of Pecanière along Bayou Teche, where she and most everyone else spoke Kouri-Vini. Neither she nor Betty passed on much of their languages to my parents, who never grasped more than basic phrases. 

“They were told that their French wasn’t even worth saving because it wasn’t real French,” said Barry Ancelet, a musician and also a professor emeritus of folklore and francophone studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “If you’re told that sort of thing when you’re six years old by an authority figure like a teacher you have no reason to not believe it. A lot of people internalized that.”

Despite the role that schools played in discouraging Louisiana French and Kouri-Vini, Ancelet said we can’t blame the decline of the languages on that factor alone. Throughout the 20th century, Louisiana was consumed by the Americanization rallying cries of nationalist politicians like Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1919 penned a letter that read, “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.” English was the language of employment. The ’40s and ’50s brought prosperity to those who embraced Anglo values. As a result, Louisiana French and Kouri-Vini started to diminish among families.

“When I grew up, I was part of a last generation to have access to grandparents and parents who actively spoke French,” said Ancelet, who is 68 years old. “Most of the people who are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s today, or younger, have had to learn French on purpose.”

It wasn’t until the Louisiana Constitution of 1974 was passed that the state government abolished the English-only provision. A few years before, in 1968, Le Conseil pour le développement du Français en Louisiane (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana - CODOFIL) was founded by the state government with a mission to preserve Louisiana’s French and Creole languages. In the years since, CODOFIL and local school boards have introduced French to youth through immersion programs in schools, the largest of their kind in the nation. The pilot program was adopted in 1981 in Baton Rouge. Now, there are 34 immersion programs in 14 parishes across Louisiana with more than 5,000 students enrolled. Today, kids are learning in French at school, when just two generations ago schools forced French out of them.

Before I left Pecanière, I brought up immersion schools to my grandmother, as well as the efforts to breathe new life into Louisiana’s languages. I asked her if she thought it was a good thing. She supposed it was, but was quick to say that an effort by the state government to advance French is hypocritical, in a way.  

“It was a mistake,” she said, “but we had to suffer that mistake.”

When Tia LeBrun was only a girl, her grandmother Malvina Dardar reverted to French after a brain episode left her impaired. Not knowing any French herself, at times LeBrun felt hopeless, unable to communicate with her grandmother in the final months of life.

“I didn’t speak French very well at all when I was younger because they didn’t teach us,” said LeBrun, who is 41 years old. “I was just dead set that would never happen again because all of my grandparents’ first language is French.”

LeBrun was raised around the coastal parishes of Terrebonne and Lafourche and is a Houma Native American. Her uncle Thomas Dardar Jr. served as a past chief of the 17,000-member United Houma Nation. After being displaced by Europeans, the Houma people resettled in coastal marshes and swamps — where others saw little value — to live off the land by hunting, fishing, and trapping. Their lives remained virtually unchanged until the 20th century, when oil and gas were discovered in the surrounding marshes, which led to further exploitation of tribal members.

“When everything was segregated, there were white areas and black areas, but there were no Native American areas,” LeBrun said. “They were kind of treated as less than both. They had really few opportunities.”

Although not federally recognized, the Houma people are proud of what survives of their cultural heritage, such as basket weaving with palmetto plants. Little is left of their own native language and what survives is in songs and a few words passed down through the years. But the group is among the largest group of French speakers in the state, with some estimates claiming as many as 40 percent of tribal members still speaking the language. 

“That’s the language that we feel is ours now,” LeBrun said. “Even though we don’t have our Houma language anymore, we still have one that’s precious.”

The tribe is working to establish a cultural center and French immersion school in Terrebonne Parish. It’s called L’Crevisse, which means crawfish, and it will serve as a place to preserve Houma culture and continue the tribe’s connection to their adopted language.

LeBrun began her own path to French not long after her grandmother died. “That just got me started on this journey to learning French and ignited a whole lot of passion about culture and heritage along the way that’s made it stay important in my life.” She went on to Louisiana State University, majoring in education but focusing heavily on French — including studies in France. In Louisiana, she taught second-grade French immersion, then at the high school level. Along the way, she ensured her four biological children always heard French in the home, and they are now native speakers.

Today, she’s the world language immersion program manager for the Lafayette Parish School System, which boasts the most expansive collection of immersion programs in the state, with 1,200 students enrolled across four elementary schools, and one middle and high school. Myrtle Place Elementary School in Lafayette will soon only offer classes in French.

Typically, every class in immersion schools is taught in French, except for English and perhaps physical education.

“The teacher starts in French with greetings, and the kids catch onto those really quickly,” LeBrun said. “They have toddler language skills by the end of the year.” 

Beyond providing proficiency in French, educators are discovering that immersion-school students tend to perform better when compared to monolingual students from the same economic status, population, and even the same school.

With the help of CODOFIL, most of the immersion teachers are contracted from Canada, France, Belgium, Senegal, Mali, Niger or the Ivory Coast. In the past, the fact that teachers from other countries were influencing local dialects created a rift among some people. CODOFIL’s answer was Escadrille Louisiane, a program to recruit homegrown talent, then help them learn French and stay in the state so they can teach immersion. Although immersion incorporates standard French, educators are encouraged to include Louisiana French whenever possible. The Louisiana Consortium of Immersion Schools and CODOFIL offer language workshops for foreign-born immersion teachers that instruct on local dialects.

Tia LeBrun, world language immersion program manager for the Lafayette Parish School System , teaches a lesson in French. Beyond providing proficiency in French, educators are discovering that immersion-school students tend to perform better when compared to monolingual students from the same economic status, population, and even the same school.

Although there aren’t yet French universities in Louisiana, since 1998 LSU has offered Louisiana French courses. Professor Amanda LaFleur, now retired, designed the class, taught it for 17 years and in turn influenced an entire generation who now carry on the local dialect. LaFleur also created Sur les Deux Bayous, a five-day immersion program where students interact with local francophones in Arnaudville. There, the students engage in workshops and cultural exchanges — such as crawfishing with a local or taking cooking classes. Over the years, other institutions heard about the program and, before LaFleur knew it, Arnaudville was hosting students from universities such as NYU, Tulane, Indiana State, and Bucknell.

Only problem was the program wasn’t ready to take off into something bigger without a physical space to house students or educate them. Locals ended up boarding students in their homes and tapping George Marks, the founder of NUNU Arts and Culture Collective, to use his art gallery as a classroom. 

“We couldn’t advertise what we were doing, because we didn’t have anything,” said Mavis Arnaud Frugé, an 81-year-old native Louisiana French speaker from Arnaudville, who has been crucial to making the immersion program work. 

More than a decade ago, Frugé and Marks concocted a plan to use the St. Luke hospital in Arnaudville, which has sat vacant since 2008, and turn it into a French immersion school. The idea was to host all of those college students, but also adults, similar to the program at Sainte-Anne. Local politicians stalled progress for years, but Frugé and Marks used that time to build a coalition of support for their cause. They gathered enough folks to constitute a board for a nonprofit. The board came up with a name — the St. Luc French Immersion and Cultural Campus — and its business plan was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

In November 2019, after years of negotiating with local policiatins, Frugé, Marks, and the other board members announced the non-profit had purchased the hospital. It will be the first adult French immersion school in the country, and will also offer courses in Kouri-Vini, and other Louisiana heritage languages. Renovations are expected to begin this year, with a scheduled open date sometime in 2021. 

Frugé sees the development as an economic boon for her small town along the banks of bayous Teche and Fuselier, home to around a little more than 1,000 residents, many of whom still speak French. Most of them are elderly, retaining the local dialect. Frugé says they have been an essential part of the Sur les Deux Bayous program thus far, and will continue to be as Saint Luc opens.

Even still, English is the predominant language around town, and French or Kouri-Vini infrastructure is virtually nonexistent. The idea is to partner with the town’s businesses to hire bi- or trilingual employees, and to create signage to cater to the expected influx of students, so that staff at Saint Luc can create a true immersion experience. Discussions include new business development by those who speak a heritage language, too. Frugé and Marks see Saint Luc as part of a greater plan to transform Arnaudville by visibly showcasing French or Kouri-Vini as part of the town’s identity. 

Local adults will finally have the chance to attend a French immersion program in their backyards without having to leave the country. Making it easy for adults to learn Louisiana dialects, Saint Luc’s founders believe, the dialects will endure, in some capacity, and Acadiana will not lose the linguistic elements that make them unique. 

As elders pass away, it’ll be up to my generation to continue the legacy they left behind. We too will one day be crucial to the programs at Saint Luc, to these gifts elderly residents have offered us, and pass them along.

Ever since returning home from Sainte-Anne, Ashlee Michot has been on a quest to deepen her knowledge of the local Louisiana French dialect. She was inevitably drawn to Cajun music because she said that’s where much of the language survives in popular culture. It didn’t take long before she noticed a phrase cropping up — Ô Malheureuse. In this context, it means figuratively, “Oh, unhappy woman.” It’s been recited in classic ballads for over 100 years, exemplified in the 1928 recording of “La Valse Criminale” by Leo Soileau and Mayuse Lafleur. 

“Malheureuse, si t'écoutes ton papa et après ta maman, tu s’ras jamais heureuse.”

“Unhappy woman, if you listen to your dad and also your mom, you'll never be happy.”

“You always want to know what Cajun music is saying, but when you figure it out, some parts are talking bad about women,” Ashlee said. With a modern outlook, she knows to take it all with a grain of salt, viewing the phrase as a benign relic of the past. But she couldn’t help but notice how male voices saturated the music and culture. She got the idea to provide a new space for women to express themselves in Louisiana French and Kouri-Vini, so their voices could also be captured. Through her blog, she invited women to submit writing — songs, poetry, stories, haiku — calling the project “Ô Malheureuse!”

“There’s no blame in this project at all,” she said. “It’s a way to honor women’s voices.” Women from across Acadiana, from age 20 to 91, have taken part, mostly in French. Although Ashlee invited submissions in any language, she believes the most importance lies in the expression of south Louisiana culture, documenting voices of the region that she feels should be celebrated. In October 2019, the writings were published in a first-of-its-kind collection called Ô Malheureuse: French Writings by Louisiana Women.

Eclectic expression is pervasive in the Michot household. Ashlee is also a musician, singing and playing the triangle with Louis and Corey Ledet in a band called Soul Creole. And Louis, who describes himself as someone who “wanted to be a farmer, but I’m not a good farmer, and I’m a natural musician,” has a certification in permaculture design. Another of his side projects is the Cultural Research Institute of Acadiana, an ongoing effort to catalog and preserve heirloom seeds from Acadiana in hopes of continuing the wealth of knowledge from south Louisiana farmers.

But even with all of his talk of cultural preservation, Louis is one to experiment. The Lost Bayou Ramblers have mostly adhered to tradition, but band members never shied away from blazing a new path. 

“We pissed a lot of traditionalists off by releasing music that they thought was too progressive or didn’t fit in what they wanted to hear,” Louis said. “But in doing so, we attracted a whole lot of new people that maybe would’ve never loved the music.”

Louis also plays with Michot’s Melody Makers, a band he started a few years ago that mashes up traditional Louisiana instruments, like the fiddle or accordion, with electronic flairs. The first single “La Lune Est Croche,” from the 2018 debut album “Blood Moon,” is fresh and eccentric while holding onto south Louisiana’s melodic signature.

In 2018, he founded a music label called Nouveau Electric Records with the explicit mission to provide a space for French or Kouri-Vini music that doesn’t fit traditional molds of either zydeco or Cajun. 

“People want something new, and they want something in French because they want to learn,” he said. “They also want to be inspired by new music. So that’s really Nouveau Electric’s vision: bringing new music that’s not embraced by the traditional movement, but still has a place within all these extremities of south Louisiana culture.”

The first release from the label was the single “Bé” by the Levee Bandits, a collaboration between the Lost Bayou Ramblers and IMAGINE I AM, a local vaporwave artist. Electronic sounds interweave with voiceovers of French lyrics. It’s sure to drive the traditionalists crazy and incite interest among a younger crowd. 

“I’m trying to bring beats that make you dance and rhythms that our generation connects with and appreciates,” Louis said. “And mix it with these amazing old songs and tunes in a way that allows the original composition to breathe without turning it into a house remix of a traditional song.”

New Iberia is less than an hour’s drive from the Gulf of Mexico, where sugarcane fields seem to stretch to the horizon. Winter here feels more like spring with fewer frosts than hills — one of the only bumps in the terrain is nearby Avery Island, where Tabasco is made. Christophe Landry was raised in this deltaic plain by his grandparents, learning to speak French from a young age. 

“I didn’t realize there was anything special about knowing it until I came to high school,” said Landry, who’s 40. “I thought everyone spoke like that.”

Landry speaks Kouri Vini, too, with ancestors who were Native American, Acadian, French, Spanish, and African peoples like the Mandingo, Fulani and Wolof. Over the years, Landry realized that because of his “wheat-colored” complexion, labels like mixed-race or Creole were applied to him, while his lighter-skinned neighbors identified as Cajun. To Landry, something didn’t add up. Here was a similar group of people, likely with similar ancestral backgrounds, that had two very different labels attached to them simply because the color of their skin differed. 

“That’s the norm here,” he said. “Cajun French, people think white.”

Landry, who now lives in Salt Lake City, has been doing his best to dispel that misconception. During his Ph.D. program at the University of Sussex, he specialized in 20th century history and later wrote his dissertation on how Louisiana Creoles and their culture bifurcated racially into white Cajuns and black or mixed Creoles. Historically, Creole meant anyone born in the Americas, derived from the Spanish word criollo, but that started to change in the 19th century. While no one at that time yet identified as Cajun, English speakers began ushering in divisions — French Creole, black Creole, white Creole. “And then it starts to change when Creoles started learning English because identity for Anglo-Americans was and still is based on race, mostly binary racial identification, black and white.”

Even as my grandparents grew up in the 1940s, Cajun was a pejorative jab aimed at poor francophones, the word derived from Acadian. But fast forward to the Louisiana French revival and civil rights era of the 1960s, and on a larger scale whites began calling themselves Cajun, even though they may have had no Acadian origins at all. People began using the history of the Acadians to represent scores of whites in south Louisiana. This is despite the fact that, as Landry notes, in 1790 there were a little more than 2,000 Acadians among 30,000 Creoles living in Louisiana. In 1800, the only Louisiana parish with a majority population of Acadian ancestry was St. James. In other words, Acadian influence on Louisiana culture was likely small.

Some white families who had spoken Kouri-Vini for generations began saying they spoke French because it better represented a white identity, while Creole identity was firmly stamped as black. 

“It’s not just people of color that speak the language,” Landry said. “All of St. Martin Parish with the exception of the very northern part closer to Arnaudville speaks Kouri-Vini. You go to Catahoula, Henderson, it’s literally all over the place.”

While Creole more accurately encompasses the culture of south Louisiana, today, Acadian history and the Cajun designation are still applied to represent much of the area. The label continues to be used to attract tourists from France, Canada, and other French-speaking countries hoping to catch a glimpse of the Cajun culture they’ve seen advertised in brochures. 

Folks who today identify as Cajun aren’t doing so due to white supremacy, but rather because it’s grown to represent a shared culture in south Louisiana. But Landry says the racial undertones surrounding whiteness and Cajun, as well as blackness and Creole, are still alive. While people still separate the races into those two categories, he does see attitudes changing as some begin to embrace Creole identity and Kouri-Vini again.

In the town of Parks, locals host “La Table Creole,” a gathering where black and white folks speak the language with pride, as well as teach beginners. Entities are starting to shed the Acadian-only narrative, such as the Festival Acadiens et Créoles in Lafayette, which added Creole to its title in 2008 after decades of excluding it. 

“Now you have more Louisianans who are going back to Creole identity,” Landry said. “You’ll see discourse on this pop up in places you would never imagine, people who five years ago were die-hard Cajuns who are now saying, ‘Well, actually, my family identifies that way but we are really Louisiana Creoles, and documents and old timers show and say that we identified as Louisiana Creole up until the '60s and '70s.’”

While immersion schools have expanded the visibility of French in the region, it had been harder to do with Kouri-Vini as it’s only found in south Louisiana, meaning there are fewer educational resources. Landry has chipped away on both of those fronts, offering Kouri-Vini classes online through his business, Louisiana Historic and Cultural Vistas, or on Facebook so that anyone around the world can learn. “After they learn online they go into communities and use it.” He also spearheaded the project to create “Kouri-Vini: Guide to Louisiana Creole Orthography,” creating a writing system independent of French, English, and Haitian Creole. The same system was used for the online Louisiana Creole Dictionary, as well as in the Kouri-Vini practice group on Facebook that Landry helps monitor. 

“If you would’ve asked me 20 years ago, I would’ve said Kouri-Vini will be dead by 2020,” he said. “Because there just was nothing really substantial going on to teach people the language and to relearn it. But now things are very different.”

Tiffany Guillory Thomas, 48, first learned about Kouri-Vini in late 2018 after attending a potluck at NUNU in Arnaudville. Despite growing up with French-speaking grandparents originally from Opelousas, she had never known another language existed in Louisiana. 

“Someone told me there was a Louisiana Creole class,” she said. “I signed up the next day.”

Once a week during Herb Wiltz’s introduction to Creole course, Thomas began learning Kouri-Vini basics. She had a foundation in French, learning it in school as a girl, but this was something different altogether. A phrase like je t’aime was instead mo linm twa, and comment vas-tu was komen to yê. There was a familiarity for her in that she could hear the French roots, but also the African influences in the inflections of the older, more fluent folks in her diverse class. 

“We had young and old people,” she said. “There were all different shades of skin colors there.” She began visiting the practice group in Parks and polishing her new linguistic skills online via Landry’s Facebook practice group.

In the past, Thomas identified as black, but today she says she is Creole. She told me it has nothing to do with the shade of her skin, but has everything to do with the culture from which she comes from.

I had always identified as Cajun because it’s what I was told I was. I had been led to believe that my ancestry comes from Acadie and France. While that’s true, a few years ago after searching online I also found roots in Spain, Germany, England, Ireland, and Africa. It was clear to see that I was a Creole, too. Thomas’ family and mine all share the same origins, despite the fact that we look different. We all have a boucherie in the winter. Our religion has long been Roman Catholicism. The languages that bond us have always been French and Kouri-Vini.

“It’s a collective culture,” Thomas said. 

She told me that her hope is to further advance not just Kouri-Vini and French, but also the idea that many south Louisianans are Creoles — not white Cajuns or Creoles of color — to set the record straight by shedding the narratives that began due to white supremacy and were perpetuated by Jim Crow.

“If we do this right — be as open, honest and loving as we should — we would be a beacon,” Thomas said. “Ensemble, on avance.”

Food is a sacrament in south Louisiana, sometimes literally: Bell peppers, onions, and celery are often referred to as “the holy trinity.” Here, it transcends sustenance to exude culture and a history that’s tied back to each ingredient. A mix of French, Spanish, African, German, and Native American elements, a lovely cauldron of cultures that amalgamate into something unique to Louisiana. Passed down from mom or dad, and their parents before, and theirs before.

Boudin is one of the most beloved of them all. It’s a morsel of sausage that’s stuffed with rice, pork, liver, onions, peppers and green onions. Specialty meat shops advertising boudin cram street corners. It’s found in nearly every gas station and grocery store in Acadiana, with household names like Billy’s, T-Boy’s, or Don’s. 

“You have these places that are right next to each other that have a totally different recipe, and they don’t talk to each other about their recipe,” said Jo Vidrine, a Lafayette local. “It’s like this really weird little world.”

Vidrine has been making boudin for years the old-fashioned way, by hand. He’s done boudin workshops, cooked it many times for friends, but for the last few years he’s been catering local events. Boudin is almost always on his menu. “I call it a cultural exchange through food,” said Vidrine, who’s 30. “It’s Cajun delicacy cooking — so, anything that your mom and dad would cook at home.”

Vidrine is a freelancer who cooks, plays as a musician with local bands, and works as a photographer. The lifestyle gives him a flexible schedule to delegate most of his work to the warmer months and, come winter, he’s free to hunt waterfowl. 

“I could go out and shoot one bird in the whole season,” he said. “And if I woke up at 3:30 all those mornings and I saw the sunrise all those mornings, or got rained on some of those mornings, that’s what matters to me, just being out there.”

Vidrine learned French in Lafayette Parish’s immersion programs, from kindergarten to 8th grade. His dad, who now knows French thanks to the Sainte-Anne program, thought it was a no-brainer to enroll his son in an effort to bring back the languages. 

“I’m a new generation that can continue speaking French, not necessarily preserve one way or another of speaking,” Vidrine said. “The way that I speak French is, I kind of make a gumbo of it. I’ve had teachers from Belgium, France, Africa, from here, from Canada. I try and mix all those Frenches.”

Every year, scores of kids are graduating from immersion programs and join Vidrine as a growing sect of young francophones. Now, discussions are focusing on how to provide economic incentives for them and the thousands that are soon to join them.

Vidrine calls himself the Freelance Cajun, a business that allows him to cook, play as a musician with local bands and work as a photographer.

In October 2018, Louisiana took a step in that direction as it was inducted into the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), which is comprised of 88 French-speaking countries, provinces, and governments. Although an observing member without voting rights, Louisiana could now have access to funding and has a place at the international table to make relationships with French-speaking businesses. The idea is to attract more companies like Montreal-based CGI, which already has a presence in Lafayette, to provide jobs for local francophones.

But the hope is to encourage the growth of local French or Kouri-Vini businesses, as well. The same month of the OIF induction, 25-year-old Will McGrew and 34-year-old Brian Clary founded Télé-Louisiane, the state’s first and only media company dedicated to producing content in Louisiana heritage languages. Since then, it has partnered with local businesses, such as Lafayette-based Stine Home and Yard, to produce content on television and online in French. 

“The next big step is to make sure that French is not something that exists just in the school system but exists out in the wider world,” said Matt Mick, who works in communications for CODOFIL. “I think the easiest way to demonstrate the value of the French language is to demonstrate its value economically.”

Mick, a 29-year-old from Florida, moved to Baton Rouge when he was 10. He studied French in high school and college, adopting the language, then made Lafayette his home. He believes the economic growth stemming from the OIF induction could include educational components like more funding for immersion or French and Kouri-Vini classes, perhaps even one day a French university. Louisiana, already a destination for francophones from all over the world, can attract even more tourists.

After my own travels in Québec and Acadie, I had been curious if south Louisiana could one day resemble those provinces, with French road signs or Kouri-Vini menus at restaurants. I also wondered if the languages would continue to grow so that Acadiana could be a place where people can use their languages virtually anywhere. 

“That’s the goal,” Mick said. “Those physical indicators are important, especially to announce to our population, to sort of show them the French. But when you’re really in it, the thing is the lived experience and being able to greet a friend on the street in French.”

As Mick and I walked around downtown Lafayette, he chatted in French to a barista, then later bumped into an old francophone classmate. Even walking back to CODOFIL’s office a few blocks away, a group of French tourists passed us by. 

“Voilà,” Mick said, smiling. “You hear it everywhere.” We didn’t need French street signs to tell us the language was around us. And even though English might prevail today in south Louisiana, French and Kouri-Vini are never far away.

All it takes is a simple conversation starter to unveil it.  

“Bonjour. Comment ça va?" 

"Bonjou. Konmen to yê?"

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