At the heart of this monograph is the intertwining of land and language. In this work, Nathalie Dajko investigates the place-making function of language and the roles that the French language and South Louisiana environment play in the identity construction by residents of the Terrebonne-Lafourche parishes. The study culminates in a description of how the loss of French and increasingly disastrous storms have led to cultural and coastal damage to the area.
Chapter 3 details the spread of French in Louisiana. Linguists traditionally distinguish three different varieties of French spoken in Louisiana: Colonial French, Louisiana Creole, and Acadian/Cajun French (38). These three varieties are differentiated by various characteristics—for example, Louisiana Creole has limited or no verbal inflection, isolating morphology, limited case-marking in personal pronouns, and agglutination of nouns and their determiners (39). Chapter 4 delves into the lexical differences that distinguish Terrebonne-Lafourche speakers from those from other parishes. The most frequently occurring lexical idiosyncrasy is the ‘use of a single interrogative pronoun, qui, for animate and inanimate referents’ (55). Terrebonne-Lafourche French also has distinctive phonetic and phonological characteristics—for example, the phoneme /ʒ/ is often replaced with /h/ in casual speech in certain social contexts (58–59). In addition to these regional variations, there is ethnolectal variation between the types of French spoken by indigenous and Cajun residents of the Terrebonne-Lafourche region—for example, the use of the pronoun il for both male and female referents, progressive nasalization, and three-way alternation between /ʒ/ with /h/ and /z/ (65).
These variations form the basis for the research described in chapters 5 and 7. In cultural domain tests (pilesort and freelist), participants identified variation in the spoken French of residents from different parishes and of different ethnic identities. In a map-drawing survey, participants identified linguistic regions of Louisiana. In the cultural domain tests, prominence of the regional variation was significantly more than the ethnic variation (89). In the map survey, the Lafourche Basin was identified as French-speaking, with participants ‘convinced that their own home region [was] more French than anywhere else in the state’ (126).
Dajko's discussion of environmental erosion in South Louisiana is based on interviews conducted with residents of the lower bayous, rather than on climate change data. Chapter 8 consists of first-hand accounts of the land destruction in the Lafourche Basin. Multiple interviewees focused on the ‘abandonment of older areas of settlement and the movement of towns upstream’ (142). Many interviewees also noted the loss of trees throughout the bayou, with some directly comparing the loss of land to that of the loss of French: ‘just as we hear about disappearing trees now replaced by open water, we hear that everyone used to speak French, but now there's English everywhere’ (144).
Dajko's study documents the linguistic evolution of the French spoken in South Louisiana, particularly in the Terrebonne-Lafourche parishes; the research lends itself particularly to historical linguists and those interested in phonetics and phonology.
