[4] Also known as Kouri-Vini,[1] it is spoken today by people who may racially identify as white, black, mixed, and Native American, as well as Cajun and Creole.
[6][7] Colonists were large-scale planters, small-scale homesteaders, and cattle ranchers; the French needed laborers, as they found the climate very harsh.
[7] Two-thirds of the slaves brought to Louisiana originated in the Senegambian region, speaking Malinke, Sereer, Wolof, Pulaar, and Bambara.
In fact, the Pointe Coupee slave revolt in 1731 was organized by the Bambara who were purportedly speaking their ancestral languages to plan the coup.
Ultimately, Louisiana Creole did develop, with West African languages becoming the substrates to a varied French lexifier.
Neither the French, the French-Canadians, nor the enslaved Africans were native to the area; this fact categorizes Louisiana Creole as a contact language that arose between exogenous ethnicities.
[11] Once the pidgin tongue was transmitted to the next generation as a lingua franca (who were considered the first native speakers of the new grammar), it could effectively be classified as a creole language.
To remedy this, language activists beginning in the 2010s began promoting the term Kouri-Vini, to avoid any linguistic ambiguity with Louisiana French.
By the time of the Louisiana Purchase by the U.S in 1803, the boundaries came to include most of the Central United States, ranging from present-day Montana; parts of North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado; all of South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas; part of Southeast Texas; all of Oklahoma; most of Missouri and Arkansas; as well as Louisiana.
This was prior to arrival in Louisiana of French-speaking colonists and enslaved Africans from Saint-Domingue; the whites and free people of color (also French speaking) were refugees from the Haitian Revolution, which had established the first empire in the western hemisphere.
Like South Carolina, Louisiana had a "minority" population of Africans that greatly outnumbered the European settlers, including those white Creoles born in the colony.
Over the centuries, Louisiana Creole's negative associations with slavery stigmatized the language to the point where many speakers are reluctant to use it for fear of ridicule.
The promise of upward socioeconomic mobility and public shaming did the rest of the work, prompting many speakers of Louisiana Creole to abandon their stigmatised language in favor of English.
Because of this, Louisiana Creole exhibits more recent influence from English, including loanwords, code-switching and syntactic calquing.
[21] Zydeco musician Keith Frank has made efforts through the use of social media not only to promote his music, but preserve his Creole heritage and language as well, most notably through the use of Twitter.
[26] These efforts have resulted in the creation of a popular orthography,[27] a digitalized version of Valdman et al.'s Louisiana Creole Dictionary,[28] and a free spaced repetition course for learning vocabulary hosted on Memrise created by a team led by Adrien Guillory-Chatman.
[32] A December 2023 article in The Economist highlighted revitalization efforts with the headline "Louisiana Creole is enjoying a modest revival," focusing in particular on language activists Jourdan Thibodeaux and Taalib Pierre-Auguste.
[33] There once were Creolophones in Natchitoches Parish on Cane River and sizable communities of Louisiana Creole-speakers in adjacent Southeast Texas (Beaumont, Houston, Port Arthur, Galveston)[12][34] and the Chicago area.
[19][18][37] Some speakers of that variety display a highly variable system of number and gender agreement, as evidenced in possessive pronouns.
Nouzòt Popá, ki dan syèl-la Tokin nom, li sinkifyè, N'ap spéré pou to rwayonm arivé, é n'a fé ça t'olé dan syèl; parèy si latær Donné-nou jordi dipin tou-lé-jou, é pardon nouzòt péshé paréy nou pardon lê moun ki fé nouzòt sikombé tentasyon-la, Mé délivré nou depi mal.