LANGUAGE CHANGE AND LANGUAGE DEATH : SOME CHANGES IN THE PRONOMINAL SYSTEM OF DECLINING CAJUN FRENCH

1. Introduction

The gradual abandonment of a language by a cultural minority

group in favor of a socially more prestigious and more useful language is by no means a new phenomenon. Throughout history there are numerous examples of languages which ceased to exist because their speakers came to adopt some other tongue instead, such as Hittite, Sumerian, Coptic, Geez, and Oscan, to name a few. Indeed, declining languages can be found all around the globe at the present day : Occitan, Breton, Scottish Gaelic, Basque (in Europe), Dyirbal, Bandjalang (in Australia), Cherokee and Tuscarora (in North America), are but a few examples.

French-speaking Louisiana is the scene of several ongoing

language shifts, and yet surprisingly little has been written about its

declining language varieties. The purpose of this paper is to examine some data from speakers of Cajun French within the context of language death studies. Data for this project were collected as part of a larger project carried out in the Lafourche Basin (Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes) in southeastern Louisiana. I will focus here on developments in the pronominal system of declining Cajun French, examining the data in light of some proposed properties of the process of language death as observed in other situations of language decline.

In section two I will briefly discuss the study of language shift and language death, examining the demographic facts which suggest that Cajun French is indeed a declining language, as background for the

discussion of specific morphosyntactic changes in Cajun French. In section three I will outline the pronominal system of Cajun French in the Older Fluent Norm, i.e. the speech of the oldest generation of speakers