Dictionary of Louisiana Creole (review)

Louisiana is home to North America’s only homegrown creole language with a French lexifier. Louisiana French Creole is spoken in some fashion by some 40,000–50,000 residents, most of African origin. The language differs substantially from Acadian French and bears striking syntactic similarities to the French-derived creoles of Haiti and the Lesser Antilles. This dictionary, which combines contemporary field research with historical documentation of earlier stages of Louisiana Creole (LC), is the most comprehensive dictionary of any language of the United States other than English and is arguably the most extensive and complete dictionary of any creole language. The book consists of a grammatical introduction to LC, a users’ guide, nearly 500 pages of entries, and shorter English-Creole and French-Creole glossaries.

The introduction sketches the origin of LC, claimed to be indigenous to Louisiana despite the influx of thousands of French planters and their slaves following the Haitian slave revolts at the end of the eighteenth century. The authors assert that LC was essentially formed prior to the arrival of other French creole speakers; left unaccounted for are such marked parallels between LC and Caribbean French creoles as definite determiners postposed to entire NPs, a postposed plural marker identical to the third person plural subject pronoun, postposed possessors, homologous interrogative words, and circumlocutions. Despite these unexplained parallels, the argumentation in favor of a Louisiana origin for LC is well-crafted and cannot be lightly dismissed. The grammatical overview identifies at least three dialects of LC which are differentiated in the dictionary entries. Most of the differences are lexical, and the basic grammatical structures hold for all varieties of LC.

The dictionary entries are lengthy; most contain examples of actual usage, dialectal variation and phonetic variants, English and French equivalents, and earlier attestations when appropriate. The totality of the examples constitutes a considerable corpus of earlier and contemporary LC usage.

LC has no written tradition other than outsiders’ representations of the spoken language, usually written with French orthographic conventions. The LC dictionary uses a combination of phonetic spellings (particularly the use of the letters k, y, and z), French spellings (e.g. gn, ch, and the vowels ê and ò), and orthographic norms developed for Haitian Creole (e.g. lamen < [la] main ‘hand’, lanm < [l’] âme ‘soul’). Given the frequent alternation between front rounded vowels (in Frenchified LC) and front unrounded vowels (in basilectal LC), many entries show both spellings (e.g. [di]felfeu ‘fire’). This may seem confusing, but the orthographic representations reflect available corpora of LC usage, which nonsystematically span all the above-mentioned possibilities, and other less coherent patterns as well.

This dictionary provides an invaluable resource in the study of a language which was despised or ignored during most of its existence and which is rapidly disappearing from the American linguistic landscape. It provides an excellent benchmark for future dictionaries of creole languages, endangered languages, and languages with a scarce written literature.