Lafayette LA Male Conversation
Conversation
Most Cajuns don’t really speak that way anymore unless they don’t speak very much English and there are very, very few – there are less and less Cajuns that speak little English, and it’s mostly an intonation than a, more an intonation than a, than anything, you know it’s an intonation in some of the south, for example we don’t say ‘four’, we say ‘fawr’ but that’s kind of Southern - I think too though, like my – I had a cousin his name is, his name was – he’s deceased now – but his name was G O R D O N. Well, there’s no difference in pronunciation between that and where you plant your cabbages. He’s name was Garden. You plant your cabbages in a garden. It’s the same thing and my cousins from San Antonio’s used to say well that’s not his name – his name’s not Garden, it’s Gordon and I said we’ve always called him Garden. So that like ‘and what do you want that ‘fawr’ rather than ‘for’, you know, that kind of thing or sometimes the ‘r’s’, especially in New Orleans – the closer you get to New Orleans the more the ‘r’s’ disappear at the end of a word. We tend to have them a little more for the west, as you get closer to Texas, but we still have closer and –
It’s another thing that Cajuns do is we’ll go back and forth – we’re going to use – in fact, I’ll tell some of my friends sometimes, I’m not completely at ease with somebody that I have to speak just French to nor am I completely at ease with somebody I have to speak just English too. I’m most at ease to somebody that I can speak, go back and forth any time I want. If I’ve said something that I have trouble saying in one language I’ll say it in the other one and Annabel comes and visit a long time over here and we go back and forth between French and English all the time.
I was going to say my brother is six years older than me and mom and daddy lived across the street from my great grandmother – I barely knew her, she was – I was six years old when she died – but my, so my brother was 12 when she died so that meant he had plenty time to know her, and any time he was with her, and in those days, like I said, I grew up in a little bitty town, so my brother very young learned how to opened the gate and walk out across the street. There was no danger of anybody running over him – he’s sixty-some years old – there weren’t no cars going to run over him, you know – if, the few cars there were weren’t going fast enough that they wouldn’t have seen him and so he’d walk after he take his nap, sometimes my mother might have dozed off in the afternoon or something because in the summer time that’s one of the things you got up early, you did your work and sometimes you took a little nap in the afternoon because it’s so hot and so he’d – after – he’d wake up before she would or she’d be busy and she wouldn’t notice he woke up and he’d walk out across the street to Grandmaw-T-maw’s and he’s at Grandmaw-T-maw and well so mamma every time they were together he would speak English to Grandmaw-T-maw and Grandmaw-T-maw would talk to him in French. Okay? Now Grandmaw-T-maw was born around the time of the Civil War – that’s how old, much older you know – that’s how far back she was going. So when my – one day my mother was doing her work and he was, he went out to visit with Grandmaw-T-maw and she walked up to the house and they were having a conversation and she was a few feet from the door and she heard him – he was speaking to her in French. So from that point on she knew he spoke French but whenever she was around he always spoke to her English. It was like in his mind I guess mamma don’t want me to speak French so I won’t speak French in front of her but when I’m alone with Grandmaw-T-maw I speak French to her, and then he quit speaking French when he went to school, he stopped altogether...or when Grandmaw-T-maw died probably because he probably spoke French to her but I don’t remember and then after he graduated he came to work at the university here in a lab – he was in charge of a mechanical engineering lab, and all the janitors and all the other technicians their language was French, so he started speaking French again and now we speak French to each other a lot.
I learned French from my mother’s mother – he learned French from my mother’s grandmother on her father’s side. He’s a country boy. Yeah, that’s the difference, that’s the main difference. She grew up in town. People in town spoke more English. They had – First of all they had to for the stores and stuff like that because the people with money didn’t live in a country – the people with money lived in town. So the people that live in town had to work next to or with or for the people who had money and so they spoke English because they had, and a lot of the, a lot of even the rich Creoles who, and the old Cajun families, they might have – they’re French but that doesn’t mean they spoke – once they became educated and went to school and got – became wealthy they quit speaking French, you know.
Now Breaux Bridge, Cecilia, also on the other side of the Atchafalaya in Kraemer or Bayou Boeuf and also in Pointe Coupee Parish they speak Creole, which they would translate as – you’re going to have some black students I’m guessing - they would translate it as Nigger French or nègre, France nègre. And that’s the way the slaves spoke and the whites learned how to speak like that, too. In fact, in Pointe Coupee Parish around New Roads, they speak – the blacks and the whites there’s no difference between the way they speak at all. Here in Cecilia you can tell if it’s a white person speaking neg or a black person speaking neg because they don’t pronounce the same way, but in Point Coupee they all pronounce it the same and [speaking French].
Well in Pointe Coupee Parish it’s just like the blacks and I knew a guy who lives in Cecilia, he married a girl from that area and he says, “I still don’t understand the whites around here too well but I say, ‘Boy, I understand what the blacks say.’” He’s white. Because he speaks the Pointe Coupee French.