Anglophone Slaves in Francophone Louisiana

Regional differences in low SES African-American children's speech in the school setting

“…This indicates that children vary within their use of individual features, but overall, the children's patterns represent a greater use of features based on region. This finding supports the assertions made by Labov (1998) and Wolfram and Schilling Estes (2005) among others: that the use of core features of AAVE are similar across speech communities, but that their frequencies and their relative acceptability in the local community may vary. While this type of variation may be seen because the speech samples produced by the children are alike (the children are for the most part producing the same words), spontaneous speech would, by most indications, show a greater range of internal constraint differences.…”

“…C H A R I T Y social class, categories that sociolinguists generally treat as external features, are further complicated in New Orleans by the unique and diverse history of the founding and the continually evolving demography of New Orleans. Picone (2003) noted that African-Americans were often the first speakers not to be francophone in and around New Orleans. Picone noted that after the Louisiana Purchase, it became fashionable to have American slaves as opposed to the indigenous Francophone-or Creole-speaking slaves.…”

“…Speakers of AAVE have long attested the ability to distinguish regionalisms in speakers, especially along a Northern/Southern continuum (Labov, 1998), but the exact makeup of the regional variation has not been thoroughly examined in comprehensive cross-regional sociolinguistic studies. Moreover, the intersection of region and stylistic variation has rarely been investigated in comprehensive studies, although comparisons can be drawn across studies from the analysis of like populations that have been documented in the earlier sociolinguistic literature such as Wolfram (1969), Labov (1972a), and Baugh (1983) and in accounts of more recent work including Alim (2005), Childs (2005), and Green (2002).…”

Just What is “American Speech” Anyway?

“…15 I can give a personal example, one that is pertinent insofar as it connects with American Speech publications and an ADS presentation of mine, and potentially a future publication (still in preparation at this writing). My prior research on massive domestic slave migrations of Anglophone slaves into Francophone Louisiana, in the context of the post-Purchase boom and the nearly simultaneous federal interdiction against foreign-origin slave trade beginning in 1808, showed that such migrations reinforced and accelerated from below (that is, among the underclass) the dynamic of language replacement from French and Creole to English and helps to explain some aspects of feature transfer (Picone 2003(Picone , 2014. This in turn led me to initiate an exploration of a similarly massive dynamic, as a direct consequence of the Cotton Boom (by 1860, the South was producing two thirds of the world's supply in the face of the surging demand accompanying industrialization), bringing together slaves from the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry (including, in the latter case, speakers representing the full gamut of the Gullah continuum) into the Black Belt of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as into other locations in the South, especially along the Lower Mississippi and in the vicinity of the mouth of the Lower Brazos in Texas; hence creating a dynamic having significant potential for mixing features and for subsequent dialect leveling in relation to widespread features of African American English, such as copula absence, which is associable with the Lowcountry, as a point of origin, much more so than the Chesapeake, but which may have subsequently generalized when populations came together, thereby masking origins (Picone 2019).…”

Jazz À La Creole: The Music of the French Creoles of Louisiana and Their Contribution to the Development of Early Jazz at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

“…It seems that access to manumission continued for a while, but prior to the Civil War, legal restriction increased in order to limit and eventually ban it (Dollar 2011, 3). In one of the few articles speaking only about the life of the slaves after the Louisiana Purchase, Michael Picone (2003) has gathered evidence that Francophone planters purchased American slaves and that eventually Franco-, Anglo-and Creolophone slaves did work together in the fields and in the households. 37 Indeed,…”