Josh McNeill

Tag: louisiana french (Page 2 of 3)

And every singer will still sing about broken hearts, continued.

May 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

I wrote about Feufollet’s new album Two Universes recently, essentially just to say that their switch from being a band that sings strictly in French to one that sings mostly in English is unique. It isn’t unheard of for musicians to begin using different languages, particularly if the change is to English, but Feufollet’s history and the niche they’ve carved out for themselves make this feel more pronounced.

The implications for this linguistic decision may also spread beyond Feufollet’s own personal sound and image. Arguably the most popular band in Cajun music at the moment, they’re quite possibly in a position to redefine what Cajun music is. Much like zydeco, French could become an occasional occurrence instead of a defining feature if others decide to follow their lead. One could even see this simply as strong support for the more regular tendency of a few other well-known Cajun music acts, such as The Pine Leaf Boys or The Red Stick Ramblers, to sprinkle English language songs throughout their albums.

I didn’t mention this tendency in my last post as both The Pine Leaf Boys and The Red Stick Ramblers generally use English in songs that aren’t of Cajun origin. The former can be heard singing Jerry Lee Lewis tunes in English during concerts but they never translate classic Belton Richard numbers, while the latter seems more at liberty to use English when playing western swing songs. In fact, western swing has been sung in both English and French in Louisiana since the 1940s by people like Harry Choates, to the point where the term Cajun swing is sometimes used. It’s almost as if the less strictly Cajun the other musical aspects of a song are, the more freedom a band has to abandon French, which may partially explain why Feufollet is moving in the same direction as their sound becomes less and less centered on tradition.

We speak English primarily, as our first language, so to write songs in English is not that crazy. But a lot of the way we’ve built our careers was attached to the French cultural preservation side of the music, so we’ll see if people get upset about our singing in English. We’ve done the cultural preservation thing for a very really long time, and right now we just want to be songwriters and musicians and make art first and foremost. –Chris Stafford of Feufollet speaking about singing in English in an interview in Oxford American

It is also possible that the members of Feufollet are coming to the conclusion that French is not a necessary component of Cajun music, or perhaps of even being Cajun, or perhaps they simply no longer view their music as Cajun music. It is interesting to note that Stafford would still describe the action of singing in French as preservation after doing it for so long, with at least two members of the band having grown up in French immersion schooling. Why isn’t this their primary language? Why hasn’t it become a normal aspect of their lives? Are songwriting and language preservation mutually exclusive activities? And what does this say for the future of French in Louisiana when even people who went through immersion schooling and use French professionally view using the language simply as preservation?

The lyrics of the title track Two Universes, quoted partially in the title of this post, may be evidence of the idea that Stafford & Co. are re-evaluating what it means to be a Cajun from Louisiana. At one point, Louisianians could speak of the state almost as its own country, with those from other places simply being referred to as “les Américains,” but these two universes certainly have collided, and maybe that’s just how it should be. For those of us still hoping to see French regain strength in Louisiana, however, this sentiment is particularly sobering.

The way you speak is beautifully correct.

April 29, 2015 / / 0 Comments

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had the “discussion” with people. It’s the one where that dreaded word “dialect” comes up and, suddenly, a whole host of misunderstandings and prejudices come spewing forth. This word is so convulated in its associations for those who don’t explicitly study language as a science that it’s often even taken as an attack on one’s linguistic faculties when the opposite is really what’s meant. This regularly happens when explaining to native Louisiana French speakers that their language is a dialect of French, so as to make it an equal in value to any other variety of French, including Standard French, and their response is outrage that one would demean something they care so much about.

But perhaps the clearest case of unfortunate misconceptualization is the case of African American English (AAE), whose name itself can lead to heated debate. I feel it would be impossible to cover and explain this whole mess in a single post, even if I focused purely on AAE, but a good starting point might be the paper I wrote during my first semester in college and somehow forgot to post, entitled Ebonics and Prejudice under Writings above. I personally work with this issue daily as a tutor at a community college and it’s leading me to the conclusion that schools that serve mostly speakers of non-standard dialects should be treated the same as those who have to deal with large numbers of students whose first languages are not English as far as financial support is concerned.

For those who grew up speaking dialects (of any language) which are non-standard: learn other ways of speaking so that you can write for newspapers or give lectures at academic conferences, but don’t abandon the way of speaking you grew up with. It’s perfect just as is.

And every singer will still sing about broken hearts.

April 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Rejoice! Feufollet has finally released a new album after five years and an important lineup change. This first single goes a long way towards summing up the result:

The first thing you might notice, certainly the first thing I noticed, is that the newcomer Kelli Jones-Savoy is singing in English. Jones-Savoy is no newcomer to Cajun music in general, though, having played in T’Monde, a band specializing in traditional Cajun songs, since 2011. She’s more than capable of singing in French and in fact does so on three of the four French language tracks on this eleven track album. Numbers like that are surprising themselves when one considers that the only songs Feufollet has recorded in English since their inception over 10 years ago were three lowly songs on the Color Sessions EP, which themselves were written by the psychedelic rock band Brass Bed, also from Lafayette.

Seeing as my own study of the subject found that French is a highly ranked indicator for Cajun music, meaning this isn’t only a notable development because it’s different for Feufollet, but also because it’s different for this style of music altogether. They certainly aren’t the first Cajun musicians to make this change–Zachary Richard recorded songs in English as far back as 1977 and swamp pop has essentially always been sung in English. Feufollet’s situation is different for several reasons, though.

Zachary Richard, for instance, essentially recorded English language music regularly since his career began, almost as if he was suggesting right away that he didn’t want to be pigeonholed into Cajun music conventions. In fact, his career didn’t even start in Louisiana, nor has he ever seemed to come back for very long. In a way, he successfully distanced himself from the music and culture, to the point where one can expect reasonably expect traditionalists to scoff at the mention of his name. None of this is true for Feufollet, however, who have been firmly planted in Lafayette throughout their career and who spent their first years playing nothing but traditional songs, even including them prominently on their later major releases Cow Island Hop and En Couleurs, so that, even when experimenting, it’s easy to imagine that everything they do is derived from that initial seed of respect.

And while Feufollet are well known for their experimentations, their music almost always includes many of the highest ranked indicators of Cajun music. They wield accordions and fiddles and swing to two-steps and waltzes, as any good Cajun artists would do. These features have been progressively dropped from Zachary Richard’s repertoire to the point where his version of the traditional song Colinda in 1979 was essentially straight reggae. This is also where swamp pop becomes a poor comparison to Feufollet. Swamp pop is nearly indistinguishable from any other R&B to come out of the 1950s, except that it was performed by people from Louisiana who might identify as Cajun.

It’s clear that Feufollet are doing something unique with the release of Two Universes, but discussion of the implications will have to wait until another post.

Let’s not break the tree into a million pieces.

April 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Glossaire des communions

A couple weeks ago, I posted about the prize that the Académie française awarded Louisiana writer Kirby Jambon for his book of poetry, Petites communions: Poèmes, chansons, et jonglements. I received my own copy of Mr. Jambon’s book almost the day after posting, and was instantly drawn into his style of writing. It’s easy to see why this work was recognized. The book is organized as a cohesive whole while also providing poems that feel fulfilling on their own. Form plays an important role in many pieces, sometimes with whole sections being written in particular styles, such as haikus about the weekend. Even the language itself feels fresh and modern, while still retaining its local identity, as it ranges from Louisiana Creole:

Mo gain pou couri
I have to go

To a sort of parodic literary Standard French:

Voici les paroles que le prophète Aïeux adressa à toute Descendance
Here are the words that the prophet Where addressed to all of Posterity

from Un passage du deuxième livre de l’Ancienne nouvelle
A passage from the second book of the Former news

Something that immediately caught my eye, though, was the glossary I found in the back of the book. Definitions of lexical items and grammatical forms are listed that may not be familiar to French speakers from, say, Paris, and what was chosen to be included is interesting from a linguistic standpoint.

Grammatically, one finds the first person plural imperative form using allons instead of simply the first person plural present conjugations (i.e. allons danser vs dansons). This form isn’t unheard of outside of Louisiana, though perhaps the regularity of it here makes it somewhat of an indicator for this variety of French.

Morphologically, the infix -aill- is given to show a sort of negative, or more negative, sense to a word, as touched on by Thomas Klingler, professor of French at Tulane University (The Lexicon of Louisiana French 1997). For instance, casser (to break) is already inherently not a positive action–one would be hard pressed to think of instances where breaking something results in feeling happy–but cassailler suggests not only breaking something but breaking something valuable into a million pieces then stomping on it. Although I’m not certain how widely used this form is in other varieties of French, I have personally come across it in a popular video game (this is a topic that I intend to write about later on).

Of course, lexical differences themselves show up in the glossary as well, bois being one of them. This isn’t a completely unique word, rather it’s a word whose semantic extension goes beyond the normal usage, meaning forest or woods. In Louisiana, bois can refer to a single tree, particularly in Southeast Louisiana, where Mr. Jambon resides.

These three particular examples can add up to a phrase such as allons pas cassailler le bois, translated in the title of this post itself, which is an attempt to say something possibly unintelligible to many francophones while also taking poetic license to suggest that maybe we shouldn’t be so explicitly segregating Louisiana French from other varieties of the same language. Who is this glossary really for if not other francophones? Why is it necessary? Are we saying that our French is so incomprehensible to someone from Switzerland, for example, that we need to literally translate for them?

Personally, I feel like this is a rather unnatural way of creating (reinforcing?) mutual intelligibility. I remember at one time attempting to learn some Spanish by reading a collection of short stories entitled La increíble y triste historia de la Cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada by Gabriel García Márquez and often coming across words and phrases that I could not make heads or tails of using translators and a Spanish textbook. To my surprise, my perfectly fluent Mexican friend who lent me the book also didn’t understand some of the words and phrases Márquez used read in isolation, yet a glossary was not provided. It must have been assumed that context alone would be enough to get Márquez’s ideas across to those unfamiliar with his dialect, which is exactly how this played out for my friend.

Of course, poetry is a different discussion. It is almost by its very nature vague, suggesting that we either need to have a deep understanding of each element being used to get the whole picture, or possibly that the whole picture requires that we don’t fully understand anyway. Perhaps this renders the issue moot from the get go in the case of Petites communions.

It’s in the Jam.

March 15, 2015 / / 0 Comments


That is to say, Kirby Jambon. I recently spoke about the importance of music in Louisiana, concerning language maintenance, and I spoke about the importance of using French in commerce. A recent article, in The Advertiser, brings these ideas, not rare, to the forefront, as well as the increased participation of CODOFIL. All of this is really great, and must continue, but it must not be forgotten that it’s also necessary to increase the domain of usage of the language. As Barry Ancelet, celebrated folklorist from Louisiana, says in the article:

There’s two basic ways that language preservation or regeneration can happen and one of them . . . is to produce stuff of such interest that people want to come to it. They’re interested, they’re attracted to it.

What better way to highlight a creative work than to award a prize to someone, as the Académie française recently did when it awarded the Prix Henri de Régnier to Kirby Jambon for his book of poetry, Petites communions: Poèmes, chansons, et jonglements. In my opinion, the moment when Dewey Balfa returned to Louisiana after having received a standing ovation at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 is very much comparable to this. In the former instance, external validation was found for Cajun music, then in the latter instance, it was found for Louisiana French literature. This moment could be pivotal for literature in Louisiana. It wasn’t so long ago that the belief that one couldn’t write Louisiana French was common, which is an idea that persists even today, but now, we not only have proof that it’s possible to write it, but that the world values the art that one can create when they write this language.

Vietnamese, everywhere in the East.

March 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

So, I was a bit behind on posts because of Mardi Gras. I had to create a costume with pinwheels, attend daily parades and, maybe the most important activity, eat king cake, like this one here. This cake comes from Dong Phuong in New Orleans East, where I went with my friend so that she could buy one.

Despite having lived here for more than two years, I’ve never gone to the East, where there’s a large Vietnamese population. What I found there was writing everywhere in Vietnamese, on advertisements, on the windows, on the stores, on the products in the stores. Vietnamese is a language of business in the East. The cashiers speak it by default as if one must understand it if one wants to do business there. It seems to me that Vietnamese is maybe more institutionalized there than French is elsewhere in Louisiana, but it’s difficult to say that for me, seeing as I haven’t traversed the state all that much.

I intend to find out if on can speak French there also, as part of the project to create a map of the francophone businesses in Louisiana. While I was working at AT&T, I met a Vietnamese woman who spoke French, better than English. She was somewhere older, so maybe that is still common among the old. I’ve heard that this would happen in Terrebonne-Lafourche, that francophones were able to speak with the Vietnamese better in French than English. It would be interesting if the Vietnamese became the newest francophones in Louisiana, helping to preserve the language. I doubt this would happen, but who knows.

Let’s talk about umbrellas.

February 27, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

This past Monday night, I watched a film call Les Parapluies de Cherbourg at Cafe Istanbul. This film was presented by the Ciné Club of the Alliance Française de la Nouvelle-Orléans. It was fun and the host directed a conversation about the film afterward. He started with something like, “Any questions, thoughts, commentaires?” Commentaires. This was almost the only word of French that he and the attendants used. “It’s weird,” I thought, “Is it always like this? With the discussion in English?” Fortunately, I brought my friend who sometimes attends a Ciné Club in Spanish. I asked her if they do the same thing after the films, if they talk about them in English. She told me no, everything is in Spanish.

It seems to me that this is a commun thing in Louisiana when it comes to French. It’s nice to thing about a state where we can speak French every, but the idea is nicer than the realization of the idea. One can see this in the Facebook Group Cajun French Virtual Table Française. As of today, this group has 6,591 members and grows every day. It’s the perfect forum for one to get accustomed to using French daily, but this doesn’t happen too much. Usually, even the members that speak and write it fluently decide to post in English. It’s a shame, and I can’t stop myself from thinking that a lot of them simply like the idea of French, that French exists in their minds as nothing more than a romantic apparition.

But it’s hard to learn a language, and really easy to speak in a language that one knows that everyone will understand. Yet even people who are in a region where French is common often choose English. Last summer, I was in an immersion program in Liege in Belgium. I won a scholarship from CODOFIL in order to afford it. I wasn’t alone, there were other people from Louisiana that had done the same. We stayed in a hotel outside of the university where we were taking classes. Every day, we’d spend the morning speaking French in at the university and every day nearly everyone would start speaking English again immediately after class, at the hotel. It wasn’t that they couldn’t speak it, nor that there wasn’t a good reason to speak it, but no one finished the program without using English.

This is a problem for the maintenance of French in Louisiana. It’s necessary that the language be more than an idea, more than just a skill that one can use while on vacation in France. One must decide that the language is living, that if one uses it every day, everywhere, the people around them will decide that they should learn to use it, too.

Reading, the Cajun way.

September 21, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I use flash cards for everything, like this. So, I created a deck to help you all learn to read and write in French, Louisiana French to be exact.

The details are in the link. You will need the program Anki, available for Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone, and the deck itself: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1725941306.

It’s easy to start. Install Anki, create an account, download the deck, then open the deck in the program. If you have any questions, let me know.

The Widows’ Table.

August 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

This is a play from Louisiana that didn’t exist on the web before. It was written and recorded by Le Théâtre Cadien around the 70s or 80s with the help of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL). CODOFIL did these things in the past but, today, the majority of their efforts are in the schools. It’s a shame because I think the usage of Louisiana French in the arts is as important as teaching it in school, especially if the arts contribute to the economy. That’s why Cajun music has been around since so long ago.

Anyway, watch and enjoy.

He knew.

January 30, 2014 / / 0 Comments

“I hope this Acadian music and language too doesn’t ever die out because it’s too beautiful. People think that just because America is mainly English speaking that everything should be English speaking but I think that we’d lose something if we lost this.”

I gotta admit, I know next to nothing about Pete Seeger and I’m really not fond of the whole “now that he’s just died, lets all suddenly be his biggest fans” thing. However, I think it’s pretty great that he was not only aware of the culture of southern Louisiana even back in ’60s but that he enjoyed the music enough to put it on TV.

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