Dictionary of Louisiana French: As Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities ed. by Albert Valdman, Kevin J. Rottet (review)

the second half of his book to this peculiar scholar and to the organizations and legislation that his work inspired. Are Anglicisms a problem? Every language includes words from other languages. The metaphors used to describe the phenomenon are reflective of the ways such words are considered: borrowing, lending, and indebtedness, from the sphere of the marketplace; “intrus” (68), “titre de nationalité” (18), and “droit de cité” (66), from the naturalization and citizenship of immigrants; “résistance” (71) and “défense” from the language of war; “santé de la langue” (134) from medicine and particularly epidemiology; “métissage” (149) from the discourse of race. The prevalence of such terms, even occasionally by Bogaards himself, reveals just how difficult it is to approach this topic with scientific objectivity. Much of the metaphoric creativity applied to this subject can be attributed to Etiemble. Bogaards traces Etiemble’s career as a sinologist, noting the paradoxical relationship between his embrace of Confucian ideals and his fanatical and unbalanced anti-Americanism. Some people travel abroad to learn about another culture from the inside; others go simply to have their preconceived prejudices confirmed. Etiemble’s six-year stay in the United States was clearly in the latter category. Indicative of his odd sense of values is his preference for the Nazis over the Americans, because at least the Nazis wrote their horrible decrees in good French (131). Etiemble had no use for linguists, whose disinterest in prescriptivism made them fellow travelers of the evil Yankee imperialists. Prescriptivism deserves a place as an object of study in linguistics, but Etiemble is a good example of why linguists try to avoid the issue. Despite his tenuous relationship to rationality and lack of scientific method, Etiemble’s work led to the institutionalization of efforts to create alternatives to English words. A variety of organizations, both public and private, are enumerated in chapters 12 and 13, along with the two major pieces of anti-Anglicism legislation (Loi Bas-Lauriol [1975] and Loi Toubon [1994])—all to little effect. Overall, the lack of impact is rather striking, given the millions of Euros spent in terminological commissions and Francophone summits. For every success (e.g., logiciel), there are hundreds of failures. This short and readable presentation provides a concise and wellreasoned summary of the research to date, along with a few nuggets of original scholarship, particularly word-frequency studies based on corpora now available. University of Illinois Douglas A. Kibbee Methods and Materials edited by Sarah Jourdain VALDMAN, ALBERT, and KEVIN J. ROTTET, eds. Dictionary of Louisiana French: As Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010. ISBN 978-1-60473-403-4. Pp. 892. $38.00. This edited book is an indispensable reference tool. It provides the most complete inventory of French vocabulary in the five broad regions of Louisiana (the coastal marshes, the banks of the Mississippi River, the central area, the north, and the western prairie). The vocabulary presented accurately reflects the speech of this region from 1930 to the present day. 826 FRENCH REVIEW 84.4 Beyond the fact that the Dictionary of Louisiana French has the largest number of words and expressions available in this type of reference dictionary, what distinguishes it is the detailed information provided for each entry. Each entry contains the word in its conventional French spelling, the word’s pronunciation and attested variants, its parts-of-speech classification, its English equivalent, and its current usage in common phrases. The introductory three-page “A User’s Guide to the Dictionary” (XV–XVII) illustrates the organization of each of the dictionary’s entries. The headword is in boldface, the spelling variants follow the headword entry in parenthesis, then come the phonetic transcription, part of speech, information about the connotations of certain words, the English equivalent, an example sentence of the headword used in context, translation of the example sentence, the code for the source of the example, and the list of parishes and textual sources where the headword was found. For example, the following is provided for the adjective “soûlard, soûleuse (souleur, -euse)”: “[sular, suløz, suloer] adj. habitual drinker, drunkard, alcoholic Il a eu le malheur de...