Cajun Vernacular English. A study over a reborn dialect

Abstract

Cajun English is as dialectal variety of English spoken in the western areas of Louisiana which shows a strong influence of French language. It appeared a century ago when French speakers were forced to change their language to English. Yet, after the 1950s and because of racial segregation (Dubois and Horvath, 1999) and a political standardization of English language as the main language for American speakers this dialect was about to disappear. Despite this fact, the current situation of Cajun English is positive in the sense that it has been recovered by the youngest generations of speakers, who are proud of being Cajun. The aim of this paper, thus, is to present the linguistic and social characteristics of Cajun Vernacular English. Concerning language, it presents peculiarities such as i) the elimination of final consonants, which involves grammatical consequences in the conjugation of verbs, ii) a reduction or absence of glides in the four long stressed vowels (Thomas, 2004), iii) a heavy nasalization of vowels, iv) the dropping of the aspirated consonant aitch and the replacement of interdental fricatives by stops, producing what is called "the paradigm 'dis, dat, dese, dose'" (Rubrecht, 1971) among others. Concerning social characteristics, this paper explores the reasons why this dialect is mainly used for tourism purposes as stated by Dubois and Hovarth 2003.