Michael D. Picone

The Lexicon of Louisiana French

We chose to entitle this chapter “The Lexicon of Louisiana French,” rather than “The Lexicon of Cajun French and Louisiana Creole,” to underscore the dilemma faced in the description of the lexical resources available to speakers of these languages. The line of demarcation between the two languages is even fuzzier for the lexicon than for the grammar and the phonology. As the review of the literature will show, the information currently available on the lexicon of the two languages remains too incomplete and fragmentary to help one determine whether speakers draw on a common lexical stock, whether they have access to a relatively well delimited lexicon specific to each of the two languages, or whether they have at their disposal a lexical stock that varies from region to region but is shared by the speakers of a particular regional variety of Cajun French (CF) and Louisiana Creole (LC).

Lexicogenesis and language vitality

AbstractAs exemplified in the case of Contemporary Metropolitan French, spontaneous indigenous lexical creativity is a natural adaptive survival strategy for a language in the earlier (and intermediate) stages of its domination with regards to a competing language and culture. Indigenous lexicogenesis can also include convergent types, as exemplified in the case of Malinche Mexicano, where borrowings are subjected to indigenous processing using native inflectional and derivational morphology. For declining languages, on the other hand, the circumstances of language shift correlate with indigenous lexicogenetic failure and very often to its replacement with a ‘peripheral’ type, namely reliance on code switching (which, in some cases, may actually be ‘code-intermediate’ in nature) as the main strategy for generating vocabulary, as exemplified by Louisiana French. In some cases, however, even in the midst of general decline, in order for the language to function in its remaining registers, some indigenous ‘c...