I can remember the first time that I ever heard Cajun/Creole music. It was while I was studying at City College of San Francisco. I took a class on American music and a portion of the course was about Cajun/Creole music. My professor put on some Amédé Ardoin et I was captivated, without a doubt thanks to the language as much as the raw sound. It was mysterious, something that made me imagine an exotic world that yet was part of the United States. The image was strong, powerful, like the idea of bayous and voodoo doctors (at that time, I didn’t know much about the differences between the culture of New Orleans and the rest of South Louisiana).

As for language maintenance, this power helps so much. My thesis on the use of language in Cajun music (which I might post soon) showed that Louisiana French is so pervasive in the music that it’s almost its most important defining feature, to the point of being the only characteristic that’s needed to define the music as Cajun. For this reason, you find many people who have learned French due to a love of the music. It’s that, a love that is intimately connected to the language, that can save endangered languages. That is also a reason to preserve them: you lose more than a language when you can no longer speak it.