If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That: The Creole Language of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana (review)

The Creole language in Louisiana had long coexisted with two other French-related speech varieties, Cajun French and Plantation Society French (also called Colonial French by many authors). The three varieties have been displaced by the most widely used language, English, but there are still small Creole and Cajun French communities. The number of Louisiana Creole speakers is constantly and rapidly shrinking, and most of them are over sixty-five, and nearly all of them are bilingual.

This book is the first comprehensive grammatical description of the Creole spoken in Pointe Coupee Parish. It is divided into three parts, preceded by a short section containing maps and an introduction.

Part 1 (1–133) consists of three chapters. Ch. 1 presents Colonial Louisiana, its exploration, and early settlement. Ch. 2 examines the origin and development of Louisiana Creole. In the author’s opinion, it was not imported from elsewhere but is instead an indigenous language that had its genesis on the plantations bordering the Mississippi and subsequently spread to the regions where it was or still is spoken. Ch. 3 looks at the demographic and social history of Pointe Coupee Parish and describes its current sociolinguistic situation.

Part 2 (135–372) provides a thorough description of the major Creole grammatical structures. Ch. 4 presents the methodology and the speakers consulted for the study and contains a survey of the phonological system of Louisiana Creole. Ch. 5 describes the noun phrase (nouns, determiners, adjectives, and pronouns) and Ch. 6 the verb phrase (verb morphology, preverbal markers, auxiliary verbs, copula, reflexive verbs, impersonal expressions, passive, comparison, negation, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.). Each is illustrated with abundant sentence-length examples drawn from over 150 hours of recorded interviews with Creole speakers. The structures of Pointe Coupee Creole are compared with Breaux Bridge Creole variety, and selected grammatical features (agglutination, demonstrative and possessive determiners, personal and possessive pronouns, long and short verb forms, copula, etc.) are compared with the other French-lexifier creoles.

Part 3 (373–517) presents excerpts of transcribed conversations with Creole speakers. They allow an observation of the language in a broader context and are a valuable complement to the illustrations of the grammatical description in the preceding part. Their contents also offer a view of traditional and social relations and cultural practices in Pointe Coupee Parish. The book ends with a very comprehensive bibliography and a glossary containing all the Pointe Coupee terms encountered in the preceding study, along with their attested variants and references to the pages in the text where they occur and are discussed.

This encyclopedic work is a precious resource for researchers in the field of creolistics and Francophony. It is useful too for those who want to understand the present Louisiana sociolinguistic situation. It will become a basis for further descriptions of Louisiana Creole.