Honte means shame, har.

So La Prairie des Femmes blog has started up a forum, appropriately titled The Prairie des Femmes Forum. The blog itself is essentially about all things Cajun, which fairly regular includes French related topics. The forum sounds equally broad.

I wouldn’t be surprised if people started posting in French which would be great, not only for the practice, but also for connecting people from various regions of Louisiana so that they can share regional words and grammatical constructions with each other. I have a hunch that part of the lack of standardization in the local varieties of French stems from lots of isolated usage. For instance, it’s difficult to maintain vocabulary when the only two people you know that can speak the language also forget the word you’re looking for. This sort of thing could lead to isolated neologisms, English borrowings, or just the abandonment of the language all together even though there might be ten people in the next town over who remember the word(s) you need. Widely accessible public spaces for communication would probably go a long way to ruling out such a problem.

(I once joked with a friend of mine, who speaks imperfect Spanish, that we could just end creating our own special code if we practiced often together since we’d have to make up words and constructions without knowing if they make sense to the rest of the Spanish speaking world.)

Anyway, check it out, whether you’re interested in language or just Louisiana in general:

The Prairie des Femmes Forum