John LaFleur

Speaking In Tongues John LaFleur

Inspired from a larger and earlier work, Louisiana's French Creole Culinary & Linguistic Traditions: Before & Since Cajunization, 2012, this book, Speaking In Tongues: Louisiana's 'Cajun' & Creole Languages Tell Their Own Story reveals Louisiana's Old World French language traditions alongside the diverse ethno-historical layers of her creolization, or cultural diversification. Louisiana French (misnomered "Cajun French") and Kouri-Vini (relabeled "Louisiana Creole") are the two related franco-creole forms of French. They are the result of a long marriage of diverse peoples who, together, over 300 years, created the larger cultural traditions of "lower Louisiana" -the ultimate and present-day center of which is southern part of the American State of Louisiana. These languages are tied to a much older and larger tradition which is still found and heard across the former international and interracial French Colonial world-her colonies of Québec to the French Antilles and the Latin Caribbean to West Africa, to Réunion and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean across to old Vietnam, in its own diversifications.