Josh McNeill

Author: Josh (Page 4 of 19)

I'm currently a PhD candidate in sociolinguistics at the University of Georgia.

Je suis actuellement candidat de doctorat en sociolinguistique à l'University of Georgia.

And every singer will still sing about broken hearts.

April 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Rejoice! Feufollet has finally released a new album after five years and an important lineup change. This first single goes a long way towards summing up the result:

The first thing you might notice, certainly the first thing I noticed, is that the newcomer Kelli Jones-Savoy is singing in English. Jones-Savoy is no newcomer to Cajun music in general, though, having played in T’Monde, a band specializing in traditional Cajun songs, since 2011. She’s more than capable of singing in French and in fact does so on three of the four French language tracks on this eleven track album. Numbers like that are surprising themselves when one considers that the only songs Feufollet has recorded in English since their inception over 10 years ago were three lowly songs on the Color Sessions EP, which themselves were written by the psychedelic rock band Brass Bed, also from Lafayette.

Seeing as my own study of the subject found that French is a highly ranked indicator for Cajun music, meaning this isn’t only a notable development because it’s different for Feufollet, but also because it’s different for this style of music altogether. They certainly aren’t the first Cajun musicians to make this change–Zachary Richard recorded songs in English as far back as 1977 and swamp pop has essentially always been sung in English. Feufollet’s situation is different for several reasons, though.

Zachary Richard, for instance, essentially recorded English language music regularly since his career began, almost as if he was suggesting right away that he didn’t want to be pigeonholed into Cajun music conventions. In fact, his career didn’t even start in Louisiana, nor has he ever seemed to come back for very long. In a way, he successfully distanced himself from the music and culture, to the point where one can expect reasonably expect traditionalists to scoff at the mention of his name. None of this is true for Feufollet, however, who have been firmly planted in Lafayette throughout their career and who spent their first years playing nothing but traditional songs, even including them prominently on their later major releases Cow Island Hop and En Couleurs, so that, even when experimenting, it’s easy to imagine that everything they do is derived from that initial seed of respect.

And while Feufollet are well known for their experimentations, their music almost always includes many of the highest ranked indicators of Cajun music. They wield accordions and fiddles and swing to two-steps and waltzes, as any good Cajun artists would do. These features have been progressively dropped from Zachary Richard’s repertoire to the point where his version of the traditional song Colinda in 1979 was essentially straight reggae. This is also where swamp pop becomes a poor comparison to Feufollet. Swamp pop is nearly indistinguishable from any other R&B to come out of the 1950s, except that it was performed by people from Louisiana who might identify as Cajun.

It’s clear that Feufollet are doing something unique with the release of Two Universes, but discussion of the implications will have to wait until another post.

Let’s not break the tree into a million pieces.

April 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Glossaire des communions

A couple weeks ago, I posted about the prize that the Académie française awarded Louisiana writer Kirby Jambon for his book of poetry, Petites communions: Poèmes, chansons, et jonglements. I received my own copy of Mr. Jambon’s book almost the day after posting, and was instantly drawn into his style of writing. It’s easy to see why this work was recognized. The book is organized as a cohesive whole while also providing poems that feel fulfilling on their own. Form plays an important role in many pieces, sometimes with whole sections being written in particular styles, such as haikus about the weekend. Even the language itself feels fresh and modern, while still retaining its local identity, as it ranges from Louisiana Creole:

Mo gain pou couri
I have to go

To a sort of parodic literary Standard French:

Voici les paroles que le prophète Aïeux adressa à toute Descendance
Here are the words that the prophet Where addressed to all of Posterity

from Un passage du deuxième livre de l’Ancienne nouvelle
A passage from the second book of the Former news

Something that immediately caught my eye, though, was the glossary I found in the back of the book. Definitions of lexical items and grammatical forms are listed that may not be familiar to French speakers from, say, Paris, and what was chosen to be included is interesting from a linguistic standpoint.

Grammatically, one finds the first person plural imperative form using allons instead of simply the first person plural present conjugations (i.e. allons danser vs dansons). This form isn’t unheard of outside of Louisiana, though perhaps the regularity of it here makes it somewhat of an indicator for this variety of French.

Morphologically, the infix -aill- is given to show a sort of negative, or more negative, sense to a word, as touched on by Thomas Klingler, professor of French at Tulane University (The Lexicon of Louisiana French 1997). For instance, casser (to break) is already inherently not a positive action–one would be hard pressed to think of instances where breaking something results in feeling happy–but cassailler suggests not only breaking something but breaking something valuable into a million pieces then stomping on it. Although I’m not certain how widely used this form is in other varieties of French, I have personally come across it in a popular video game (this is a topic that I intend to write about later on).

Of course, lexical differences themselves show up in the glossary as well, bois being one of them. This isn’t a completely unique word, rather it’s a word whose semantic extension goes beyond the normal usage, meaning forest or woods. In Louisiana, bois can refer to a single tree, particularly in Southeast Louisiana, where Mr. Jambon resides.

These three particular examples can add up to a phrase such as allons pas cassailler le bois, translated in the title of this post itself, which is an attempt to say something possibly unintelligible to many francophones while also taking poetic license to suggest that maybe we shouldn’t be so explicitly segregating Louisiana French from other varieties of the same language. Who is this glossary really for if not other francophones? Why is it necessary? Are we saying that our French is so incomprehensible to someone from Switzerland, for example, that we need to literally translate for them?

Personally, I feel like this is a rather unnatural way of creating (reinforcing?) mutual intelligibility. I remember at one time attempting to learn some Spanish by reading a collection of short stories entitled La increíble y triste historia de la Cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada by Gabriel García Márquez and often coming across words and phrases that I could not make heads or tails of using translators and a Spanish textbook. To my surprise, my perfectly fluent Mexican friend who lent me the book also didn’t understand some of the words and phrases Márquez used read in isolation, yet a glossary was not provided. It must have been assumed that context alone would be enough to get Márquez’s ideas across to those unfamiliar with his dialect, which is exactly how this played out for my friend.

Of course, poetry is a different discussion. It is almost by its very nature vague, suggesting that we either need to have a deep understanding of each element being used to get the whole picture, or possibly that the whole picture requires that we don’t fully understand anyway. Perhaps this renders the issue moot from the get go in the case of Petites communions.

Creole, like 20th century African-American spiritual opera from New York.

April 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Opera Creole. It’s an intriguing name for a musical group that conjures up numerous possible meanings. Do they sing opera standards in Creole? If so, is it Haitian Creole or Louisiana Creole? Or do they sing music written by Creole people? If so, which definition of Creole people are they going with? Have any Creole people written operas in the first place? But Opera Creole isn’t really any of these things; it’s more like this:

Not that I have anything against Scott Joplin, and Treemonisha is certainly a hidden musical gem, but what does the work of the originator of ragtime, a native Texarkanian, have to do with anything Creole?

I saw this group a couple weeks ago at the Rayne Memorial United Methodist Church in New Orleans and what I discovered was an attempt to paint a portrait of the musical life of Creole people in the city during the 19th century. The program has headings that touch on favorite arias, compositions by Creole composers, and.. African-American 20th century spirituals?

Again, how does Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or Bernstein’s Mass fit in with Creole musical life in 19th century New Orleans? Why include music from an entirely different century in an entirely different styles, particularly when the name of the group, Opera Creole, suggests that the music they perform will be operatic? This sort of disparate arrangement of sources creates an incoherence that’s really a missed opportunity to focus on some of the things mentioned above, which to my knowledge are entirely absent from any group performing today.

Opera Creole verges on some truly unique programming choices, though. The set begins with E tan patate and Fais dodo (Go to Sleep) and ends with Cher, mo lémmé toi (Dear, I Love You), three Louisiana folksongs arranged by musician Camille Nickerson. This was the first time I had ever heard, or even heard of, classically-oriented music sung in Louisiana Creole. One would be hard pressed to find examples of the language in Cajun music, la-la, or Zydeco, let alone orchestral music. The group also had the audience sing two repeated lines from the last piece, providing an opportunity to learn a common Creole phrase (Mo lémmé toi kòm ti kochon lémmé labou [forgive the spelling], I love you like small pigs love mud). A whole program dedicated to this type of thing would go a long way towards giving the group a unique twist while also helping to maintain an endangered local language, yet these songs acted simply as bookends to a very different collection.

Little-known Creole composers, such as Edmond Dédé and Samuel Snaër, also fit into the program. In this case, I mean Creole as in 19th century concept, which essentially included anyone born in Louisiana. This confuses the matter even more as Opera Creole seems to be going by the more modern definition of Creole, meaning anyone of African and French descent born in Louisiana, or perhaps just anyone of African descent period. Ultimately, I’m not sure what Opera Creole is really about, but this idea of the changing definitions of Creole may be worth a follow up post.

Super Dimanche.. Super Sunday.. Dimanche Magnifique?

March 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Louisiana presents an interesting problem when it comes to neologisms. There are cultural events that are well known with titles in English, but what does one refer to these as in French when everyone already understands English? For example, Super Sunday just passed in New Orleans. This festival is one of Mardi Gras Indians’, where they parade through the Central City neighborhood, but what does one call this? “Le Super Sunday” is clear, yet it’s English. “Le Super Dimanche” is pretty much French, but it’s the French of France. “Le Dimanche Magnifique” could work, it’s local, but the signification isn’t completely the same. In a country where English is a foreign language, this problem would be fixed by considering whether the name is so strong that it’ll be recognized without being translated or whether the name requires a translation in order to be understood. In Louisiana, every single person will recognize it without translating because English is the dominant language.

Maybe an example that’s even more difficult is “le second line,” or “la deuxième affilée.” This is a traditional parade in New Orleans and, at the same time, a the title is a compound noun that doesn’t clearly denote what it means, but nearly every that lives in the city will understand it in English. So, should it be left in English or changed into French? How would this change ever happen if no one truly needs to find a French version of the word in order to understand it? I don’t have the answers to these questions but I suppose that this is one of the reasons that words like “drive,” “peanut-beurre,” and “gone” came about in Louisiana French.

In any case, I’d like to leave y’all with these videos of Super Sunday.. or Dimanche Magnifique.. whatever.

It’s in the Jam.

March 15, 2015 / / 0 Comments


That is to say, Kirby Jambon. I recently spoke about the importance of music in Louisiana, concerning language maintenance, and I spoke about the importance of using French in commerce. A recent article, in The Advertiser, brings these ideas, not rare, to the forefront, as well as the increased participation of CODOFIL. All of this is really great, and must continue, but it must not be forgotten that it’s also necessary to increase the domain of usage of the language. As Barry Ancelet, celebrated folklorist from Louisiana, says in the article:

There’s two basic ways that language preservation or regeneration can happen and one of them . . . is to produce stuff of such interest that people want to come to it. They’re interested, they’re attracted to it.

What better way to highlight a creative work than to award a prize to someone, as the Académie française recently did when it awarded the Prix Henri de Régnier to Kirby Jambon for his book of poetry, Petites communions: Poèmes, chansons, et jonglements. In my opinion, the moment when Dewey Balfa returned to Louisiana after having received a standing ovation at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 is very much comparable to this. In the former instance, external validation was found for Cajun music, then in the latter instance, it was found for Louisiana French literature. This moment could be pivotal for literature in Louisiana. It wasn’t so long ago that the belief that one couldn’t write Louisiana French was common, which is an idea that persists even today, but now, we not only have proof that it’s possible to write it, but that the world values the art that one can create when they write this language.

Purim, New Orleans style.

March 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

. . . the Sages of the Talmud stated that one should drink on Purim until he can “no longer distinguish between the phrases arur Haman (‘Cursed is Haman’) and baruch Mordechai (‘Blessed is Mordecai’).” – Wikipedia

It’s not clear if they were drunk enough for that, but they were having a good time nonetheless. I’m not Jewish and I’ve never even heard of Purim, but I enjoyed a glass a wine myself.

Purim is a holiday when Jews celebrate that fact that they survived Haman’s plot, that which would have killed off each and every one of them. During the holiday, it’s common to read the megillah, donate to the poor, eat, and drink (as already described). I did find one video of a parade, including costumes, be I believe that this is not the norm. But, in New Orleans, would there ever be another way a day like this? Of course not.

The culture of New Orleans, the requirement to parade, makes all that would be private, public. It creates the opportunity to express our differences in a way that is a part of the culture of everyone. That is what convinces me that this place is special. We rejoice in our differences, but we do it together, creating a unique gumbo, as they say.

Vietnamese, everywhere in the East.

March 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

So, I was a bit behind on posts because of Mardi Gras. I had to create a costume with pinwheels, attend daily parades and, maybe the most important activity, eat king cake, like this one here. This cake comes from Dong Phuong in New Orleans East, where I went with my friend so that she could buy one.

Despite having lived here for more than two years, I’ve never gone to the East, where there’s a large Vietnamese population. What I found there was writing everywhere in Vietnamese, on advertisements, on the windows, on the stores, on the products in the stores. Vietnamese is a language of business in the East. The cashiers speak it by default as if one must understand it if one wants to do business there. It seems to me that Vietnamese is maybe more institutionalized there than French is elsewhere in Louisiana, but it’s difficult to say that for me, seeing as I haven’t traversed the state all that much.

I intend to find out if on can speak French there also, as part of the project to create a map of the francophone businesses in Louisiana. While I was working at AT&T, I met a Vietnamese woman who spoke French, better than English. She was somewhere older, so maybe that is still common among the old. I’ve heard that this would happen in Terrebonne-Lafourche, that francophones were able to speak with the Vietnamese better in French than English. It would be interesting if the Vietnamese became the newest francophones in Louisiana, helping to preserve the language. I doubt this would happen, but who knows.

Let’s talk about umbrellas.

February 27, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

This past Monday night, I watched a film call Les Parapluies de Cherbourg at Cafe Istanbul. This film was presented by the Ciné Club of the Alliance Française de la Nouvelle-Orléans. It was fun and the host directed a conversation about the film afterward. He started with something like, “Any questions, thoughts, commentaires?” Commentaires. This was almost the only word of French that he and the attendants used. “It’s weird,” I thought, “Is it always like this? With the discussion in English?” Fortunately, I brought my friend who sometimes attends a Ciné Club in Spanish. I asked her if they do the same thing after the films, if they talk about them in English. She told me no, everything is in Spanish.

It seems to me that this is a commun thing in Louisiana when it comes to French. It’s nice to thing about a state where we can speak French every, but the idea is nicer than the realization of the idea. One can see this in the Facebook Group Cajun French Virtual Table Française. As of today, this group has 6,591 members and grows every day. It’s the perfect forum for one to get accustomed to using French daily, but this doesn’t happen too much. Usually, even the members that speak and write it fluently decide to post in English. It’s a shame, and I can’t stop myself from thinking that a lot of them simply like the idea of French, that French exists in their minds as nothing more than a romantic apparition.

But it’s hard to learn a language, and really easy to speak in a language that one knows that everyone will understand. Yet even people who are in a region where French is common often choose English. Last summer, I was in an immersion program in Liege in Belgium. I won a scholarship from CODOFIL in order to afford it. I wasn’t alone, there were other people from Louisiana that had done the same. We stayed in a hotel outside of the university where we were taking classes. Every day, we’d spend the morning speaking French in at the university and every day nearly everyone would start speaking English again immediately after class, at the hotel. It wasn’t that they couldn’t speak it, nor that there wasn’t a good reason to speak it, but no one finished the program without using English.

This is a problem for the maintenance of French in Louisiana. It’s necessary that the language be more than an idea, more than just a skill that one can use while on vacation in France. One must decide that the language is living, that if one uses it every day, everywhere, the people around them will decide that they should learn to use it, too.

The problem with Cajun music.

February 27, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Is the name. Cajun music. This title demands that the music is only played by cadiens, but that’s not the case. Even if one were to define a Cajun as an inhabitant of Southern Louisiana, this word wouldn’t work because there are, for example, some groups like The California Cajun Orchestra who play it. Cajun music is no always so Cajun. The big question: “How important is it for the musicians who play Cajun music to be Cajun?”

Here’s a song played by real Cajuns that has few of the characteristics that one would expect from this genre:

In fact, Amazing Grace is a Christian hymn composed by a British man. There’s almost nothing about this song that suggests that it’s something Cajun save the language.

Likewise, this group here plays songs from time to time that are without a doubt of Cajun origin, even including a violin, an very important instrument in the music, but I doubt that they would call their sound Cajun:

They often sing in Louisiana French, another defining feature of Cajun music, which is a language that’s sometimes called Cajun French. This is a similar problem: speakers of Cajun French are not at all always Cajun, regardless of how on defines a Cajun. For example, one common definition est that a Cajun is someone white who comes from Southern Louisiana while a Creole is someone black from the same place, yet Canray Fontenot speaks Louisiana French, not Louisiana Creole, even though he is usually considered a Creole who played Creole music or la-la music:

I here nothing in his music that’s particularly different from Cajun music, but it’s not according to some people. But maybe one decides that a Cajun is someone with Acadian roots, then Mr. Fontenot could be Cajun, but who really knows?

I tried to determine exactly who Cajun music is, among other things, in my honors thesis that I wrote at the end of my undergraduate career. I adapted a tableau from linguistic optimality theory in order to do it and the ethnicity of the musicians turned out to be one of the most important constraints. There are of course problems with my study, so y’all can figure out yourselves how all that works as I’m uploading my whole thesis to this site. Click Writings and look for The Use of Language in Cajun Music to read it.

For what it’s worth, I really like the name la-la. Maybe we can bring it back.

Mysterious music.

February 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

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.

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