Take a visit south and come pass a good time in Lafayette and all the towns in the Acadiana heartland. The people, music and especially the food are wonderful.
Why should it be preserved exactly? It's like Latin. It's a dying language. Preserving just to preserve it seems pointless, especially in areas where no one speaks French or it's dying out in favor of dominant languages. The French colonies were mostly wiped out in the US. Save for a select few. The only reason Canada has a large french population is because the British couldn't afford another war.
@Fernando Cunha It pretty much was. Parisian French had some pronunciation changes during the 18th and 19th centuries (some of which also happened in Danish around the same time, interestingly), while Cajun French diverged during the 1600s. Some rural dialects are still similar to Cajun
@@BroadwayRonMexico Yes the gutteral r for an example is a recent innovation that spread rapidly in the French speaking world, in Quebec it spread later with French-speaking media, though a few dialects still preserve the front rolling r. In Cajun French the front trill is the still the norm.
I am French and it's interesting how the Louisiane accent is perfectly understandable for my ears while the Quebec one is harsh (but i understand them also)
Hey genuine question, what makes his accent more understandable than ours (Quebec)? I feel like his dialect is closer to ours than to yours, no? Also older generations roll their r's here too :)
@@Kulara il parle moins vite que les québécois, et l'accent est doux, léger, pas "brutal". Quand un québécois fait une phrase ça peut etre les montagnes russes dans la prononciation des mots. Ici on le retrouve moinq
Unfortunately for my Cajun family, this dialect is dead. It really dwindled down starting with a great great grandmother. To put it in perspective, her granddaughter is my maternal grandmother who was born in 1921.
@@shieldfaith1 My grandmother who was born in 1922 spoke it, but only one of her children speaks French fluently (and then again, he speaks more France French than Cajun French). None of the grandkids speak French. I took it in high school (once again, France French), and I learned a decent amount, but I would really like to get back to it. It's sad how much it's dying out.
@@madelynmelancon I am self employed providing taxi service for horse buggy Mennonites and currently staying at a Mennonite house due to doing an out of state drive (reside in Missouri, drive was to Wisconsin). I played the video of Amazing Grace sung in Cajun French to my host, she was really wowed by it.
It’s so sad too! my grandparents had to translate what my great - grandmother said to me and when I asked my grandparents why they didn’t teach my dad cajun French they said because they were taught it was wrong and also because they didn’t want their kids to know what they were saying so now none of us do
Jocelyne Jourdan Désolé, mais non. Le Cadien est 100% d'origine Acadien, qui vient des dialectes du nord et nord-ouest de la France. Les dialectes créoles, par contre, sont certainement d'origine afro-caribienne.
g aznar Yup Acadiens were deported by the english were sent back to france and the US colonies. Some hid with the natives, some that were deported came back, others settled in some states, others travelled to the french colonies of Louisianna and became what we know as Cajuns. Creoles are the ones with haitian, descent.
@@Songbirdstress tout à fait et ça a donné le "too" en anglais qui veut dire aussi et qui a été importé dans l'anglais à l'époque de Guillaume Le Conquérant.
Jackie Who? Biggest thing regarding Acadiens and Cajuns would be the Great Expulsion in the mid 1700s of Acadian settlers by the English, deported to many places including Louisiana. Cajuns are an offshoot of Acadians, makes sense with the name as well as it's a sort of shortening/slang form of the word 'Acadien'
This makes me sad. I sure wish I had learned when I was a child, but my dad didn’t push it on us because he didn’t want us to struggle with English. When my grandfather was dying from cancer in the hospital I was staying with him for comfort. He was on morphine and was dreaming about his youth. He began talking to his brothers in French and was so happy. I wish I could have understood his conversation better.
❤️❤️❤️I am sorry for your loss, but glad to hear that your family has such an interesting heritage and he seemed so happy. I think it is never too late to honor the legacy by learning some family language. My family is Russian and I am not the best Russian speaker but I do hope to preserve the language so I will try to strengthen it before I raise kids hopefully :)
I'm a little surprised and saddened by some of the comments. My family has roots in south Louisiana's cajun and redbone history. My great grandparents on both sides spoke Louisiana French. I do not because there is no one left in my family to teach it, and I now live in San Antonio. The language here is heavily Spanish so there is no need for French. But that doesn't mean we should let it die! To many of us it isn't just a language but part of our cultural heritage. The older generations hold onto it because it is one of the parts of their culture that sets them apart. It is a different way of life in many aspects. Anyone who passes it on should encourage that to continue. I feel the same about other languages like gaelic dialects. It is part of where we came from
Hey, fellow Texan here, I'm learning French instead of Spanish, bevause I want to! There's a rich history behind French, and it flows like the softest silk. You should do what you want, if it interests you. Almost three months in and I'm loving it, even if I currently have nobody to talk to. But I'll talk, live, dream, and explore in French, can't wait for my next language! Adieu
It’s the same story in the Midwest as well. My great grandparents spoke low German primarily, but their children and my grandparents were discouraged from their language and culture by government programs in the First World War. Graves where I live are written in German until about 1917
I love seeing the Cajun culture alive & well. My grandmother teaches me a new French phrase or two whenever I visit. I love hearing her stories of my relatives talking mess about people in French. Keep it going y’all! Be proud of our heritage!
@@thequal1 Po boys are good too :-( I've lived in Asia 4 years. I'll return to U.S, this month! Guess what's the first thing I'm going to do? Eat Cajun and Mexican food! I don't like Philippines food, where I live, haha
I wish My mom would have felt that way about teaching us kids French. She was from Ville Platte La. We spent a lot of our younger years in La. But she didn't see the need to teach us the langue. I think that it's great they are letting their kids learn both.
What's the point...my family hails from the Netherlands but they never saw the point in teaching us a language we would never have to use...people are oddly sympathetic about dying languages. I've never once thought to myself, wow I wish I could speak Dutch, because I've never needed to. Even in the Netherlands almost everyone speaks English. Same with French. It's a secondary language. There's no point other than sentimental value. Anyone can learn the language. Hell, you could learn Latin if you wanted to, but much good it would do you if you don't live anywhere you can actually use it. Which is why languages die in favor of more commonly spoken. there's nothing wrong with admitting the language doesn't have a wide use anymore.
@@Chin00k0 clearly not smart enough to realize correlation doesn't equal causation. are trilingual people 3 times as smart? just curious as to the standards we're using and to what degree the fluency with the language has to be to count towrads someones added intelligence. if I can count to 20 in 20 different languages does that make me Stephen Hawking?
@@amythibodeauxclemons511 That's really cool! I hope you become fluent and then one day pass it on to your own children. I don't know your dad but I bet that would make him happy
@@amythibodeauxclemons511 I'll give you a bit of advice from my own experience learning English from a purely Quebecian (French Canadian) point of view. Many consonants sound extremely similar or only slightly different between English and French, or even different accents of the same language, but are actually pronounced using a completely different vocal posture. I didn't know this for the longest time and always wondered why I still had an accent in English despite pronouncing all the vowels correctly. They're the secret of how to acquire the proper sound of the language you're trying to learn. If you want to become fluent in a language, you have to learn these, otherwise you'll always sound off and won't be able to properly carry on the legacy of the language.
It has died a lot because not too long ago we weren't allowed to speak it in school. And some of our parents didn't bother teaching it to us for whatever reason. But some schools in Southwest Louisiana have French immersion even in prek and that's definitely where I'm sending my kid.
@@mangersavoir4213 they did not want to teach it for the same reason our parents in new-brunswick went to school and it was nuns..... to expensive. in New-Brunswick about 40 years ago French schools were handled by the catholic church were kids would get beatings and other stuff until a French school district was enforced because of how bad French people dropped out of school ate the time.
I remember. I was raised here in Louisiana. Even in the 90s, I would get fussed at in school for speaking french until I hit middle school. Then new languages was a choice in class. My grandpa spoke nothing but cajun french but grandma spoke both english and french. So we, my sister and I, learned by way of my grandparents. My other grandparents are Brazilian, so I knew Portuguese as well. I still speak french here though. If you live in Louisiana, it will come up. It helps practice
My parents didn’t teach me Cajun French so when family was over they could talk all the shit they wanted and I wouldn’t understand because they were speaking in French 😂 I do know a lot of it mostly because I grew up around it. Something I heard the most was and understood fully is “get your ass of the counter before I throw you in with the ‘gators” (I don’t know how to spell it out in French but you get my point)🤦🏻♀️
I'm definitely late to this video, but it's amazing that the Cajun French is still pretty similar to French in France. It's great that there are still those who speak it on a daily basis! I hope they keep it going!!!
@@orangecobraEU Well it's Just like how English in the U.S is not the same as it is in England. Or Spanish in Mexico is not the same as Spain. Pretty much the same thing.
I'm from Louisiana, I speak French and some of my family does, too. I took a trip to a small town in Nova Scotia and it felt so much like home for me. Their accents, their French, their culture and behavior were so much like Louisiana. And nowhere else in N. America is really like that.
not true the province connected to it same thing except a larger French population also the only bilingual province in Canada, New-Brunswick. there are Acadian flags every were also the lobster capital of the world and also the fundy bay between New-Brunswick and Nova scotia are the highest tides in the world. another thing a lot of people in the USA don't realize there are other Acadians in the USA in the state bordering New-Brunswick, Main a lot of the population have duel citizenship over here and married with people from the USA many of the French populace that arrived here during the start of colonization mixed with the Mi'kMaq first nation that saved early Acadians from the first Canadian winter.
Je reviens à cette vidéo de temps en temps, c'est assez intéressant d'entendre le français de Louisiane. Honnêtement, je souhaite que mon pays préserverait ces langues, d'une façon ou d'une autre.
Awwww This warms my heart. Monsieur Thibodeaux Garder la belle langue Francaise! :). We are losing a lot of our french over in the maritimes I find. So many of my friends kids dont speak french and it breaks my heart. I married an anglophone newfoundlander but if I have kids he will have to learn to speak french because my children will be raised in french
I'm an anglophone Newfoundlander myself, and my only French is the small amount of Parisian French I was taught in High School (this was before the NL gov was forced to adopt Quebecois French as the educational standard). I don't know enough to speak French, but I was able to understand about 90% of what Mr. Thibodeaux was saying. He had good separation between his words, which was a huge help. I often can't understand Quebec or New Brunswick French as well because in comparison to Parisian French, the words sound slurred to my ears.
Or, you know, you could just raise them in both languages. Considering the US is primarily an English speaking country it doesn't seem like a great idea not to teach them proper English even if you are in Louisiana.
@@someoneuppingdudetechnical6320 ....... You do realise that Newfoundland and the Maritimes are in Canada, not the US. The overall point stands, but it's not the US
You know if louisiana rejoins its true country its culture would be conserved by state organisation. So aren t you for some territorial change in the us ?
As a French Albertan this is quite interesting to hear this specific dialect of french. It's almost like Albertan french but without all the heavy slang and world slurring, far easier to understand than ones in Quebec and France.
i hope this doesnt die out. this was so interesting to hear. he definitely has a completely different french accent. he pronounces things in french so differently.
@Jamon’e M Finally, someone says it. It's the same for the Quebecian language, people call it French, but it really isn't anymore. If the language spoken in France today is French, the dialects in North America sure as fuck can't be called French. We should embrace our culture and define our dialects as their own languages. When the people who speak French from France can't even fucking understand what you're saying, I think that's enough justification to separate the two. Because of this bullshit, European immigrants are slowly watering down Quebec with their accents, it is now extremely rare for you to hear a person speak Quebecian in big cities like Montreal and Quebec, and those who do speak it, all over the Province, usually speak a watered down version which is almost unrecognizable. Schools are even teaching French in QUEBECIAN SCHOOLS, we don't even fucking learn our own language, they're actively trying to render our language extinct by brainwashing the new generations to use French instead.
@@EnigmaGameMaster Linguistically speaking Cajun French is not linguistically different enough from other French dialects to be considered another language. Although they are pretty damn different. Creole French on the other hand is different enough to be considered a patois.
@@arvyknowsbest See, the problem is, who exactly defines how different languages have to be before they're considered different languages? Like, when 90% of two dialects are different in some way, yet not entirely alien from each other, is that not enough to classify them as separate? Really think about it, in the case of the Quebecian dialect, almost every single pronunciation of every single vowel, consonant, word and the vocabulary, etc. is different from European French. We have vowel sounds which are literally missing from French, and those who speak French usually can't even understand us.
@@EnigmaGameMaster it's usually once the two languages are so far apart that they are no longer mutually intelligible unless both speakers slow down and greatly simplify their word choice. When that happens. Even Spanish and Portuguese speakers can sometimes understand one another, but at full speed and using complex word structure and vocabulary this cannot be the case.
@Mani M the Louisiana Creoles are Acadians too and they come in all colors. He’s speaking Louisiana Creole and also called Louisiana French and also called Cajun French The Acadians are the original Louisiana Creoles
il est bon a voir plus de personne parler français aujourd'hui, notamment dans le région de Bayou. Je voudrais voyager aux le région quelque jour a bientôt.
c'est impressionnant. ça fait plaisir à entendre de la France.... Merci cher cousin de la Louisiane. Prends bien soin de toi ;-) it’s impressive. it’s nice to hear from France.... Thank you dear cousin from Louisiana. Take good care of yourself ;-)
I certainly am no expert in the French language but, to me, Acadian has a more poetic/musical sound than does Euro French. Hopefully, folks there in Cajun country will be inspired to preserve and promote this beautiful language.
I think it flows a lot better, mostly due to the forced standards in France it sounds a bit too formal to me. Think pomme de terre as opposed to patate, if that makes sense, it seems more natural to me but maybe it's the lack of exposure to mainland french
@@JM-nt5ex it's because you re imagine that European French is the same everywhere, but listen to an old angevin speaking French, or even a young occitan, it's just wonderful
@@elbarone9749 I am aware of the differences, I am just not well versed on them. My family immigrated from Southern France but only ever spoke standard french because I'm pretty sure my family was rich in France, funny because in America we became poor as fuck, immigration is confusing
@@JM-nt5ex lol, and I was I informed that if I spoke French the way I learned, it would sound like a dictionary or I would sound like the gentry instead of an every day person! Too funny!! I'm working on French again after 24 years and it's so fun, but I'm learning everyday French as well.
I'm cajun and sadly the only people who knew how to speak cajun french in my family have already passed on. I've heard stories of my great pawpaw getting slapped on the hands with rulers if he spoke french in school, he would get made fun of for being cajun as well. Our family still uses some cajun french words such as "couillon" and "frissons", but other than that no one speaks it fluently anymore. It's sad because cajun french is a dying language and I wish I could learn the language of my culture, but it's too late. I love m y culture and my people and I'm proud to be a full blooded Cajun.
Je suis de california (lieu de naissance est connecticut) et j'aime la langue français et un jour, je voudrais visiter a louisiane....Salut monsieur =)
I am Cajun,but have been away for 60 years,no longer do I speak are have the accent,however,I remember not being allowed to speak French on school grounds,how sad,what an injustice they did to us.The people of Louisiana are special in every way.
Cajun Creole sounds almost Mauritian Creole, I love it! I was first generation born in the U.K. from Mauritian parents, my mother was Mauritian-Creole and my father was Asian-Mauritian. So Mauritian-Creole was my first natal language, heavily laden with English, and I loved that mixture. Unfortunately, since my parents passed away, I’ve not had that constant occasion to speak Mauritian Creole, however, with my siblings and myself, strangely we can subconsciously think in both Mauritian and English. My Mauritian Creole can orally be a little rusty at first but within a short period I’m fluent with my British cockney accent, it’s like riding a bike, you’ll never forget, but I am very british, very proud to be a british-Mauritian. Listening to the old guy speaking his native Cajun Creole is like listening to my favourite song, and I find it easy to understand everything he is saying. Just like Mauritian Creole, Cajun Creole isn’t so strict with the French continuous need to arrange each spoken words into either feminine or masculine set sentences, depending on the sex you are speaking to and/or about the gender you’re referring to. Admittedly, I’m not a major fan of the Americans but, just like I fancy going to experience the life in New Orleans and their old, romantic and majestically old French quarters, after listening to the old guy in this video, I’m fancying visiting y’all in Louisiana, the place sounds very homely and fascinating, very different and a lot more friendlier then the usual images you usually get of Americans being so brash and loud, almost suffocatingly overbearing. Louisiana folks come across as very friendly and have that warm creole-ness about them, which I guess only other Creole would get, we love family and togetherness
This is soo true. My grandmother rip told a story of two friends, boy and girl, who were overheard speaking cajun walking home from school. They were disciplined by the principle the next day.
When speaking with people around , it is always a good surprise to hear people giving a try in french... and i love accents ! Differents expressions , differents ways - See the smile on his face , he is happy :) Mes meilleures salutations a tous !
My parents didn’t teach us French in south Louisiana because they wanted to keep secrets, and talk about things around us without us knowing, or they were just to lazy about it.
Andrew Hartford they beat the French out of our grand parents to make them "American" . My grandfather told me that if the nuns from school caught them out of school speaking French, they'd get paddled when they showed up to school. I know a little bit of cajun French. But if you want to really hear it still being spoken among the locals, you'd have to travel to a small town called Dulac. If you don't know French, you're gonna have a tough time as a fisherman out there.
Jason deLaloire Take French classes online or in public school, they surely cannot punish you anymore. That would go against modern anti discrimination laws.
Un bonjour de France. Merci pour cette vidéo qui montre une autre variété de français que l’on connaît mal. J’aime beaucoup explorer différents langages du monde francophone. Quoi que l’on dise, ça reste large ! Vive la Louisiane et les cajuns !
Aw! I saw the interview with his son and I thought this might be a relative! They look so much alike. Such lovable people! I don’t speak much French, but I know enough to spot the accent... It really is a friendly and more “down home” accent. I would give anything to be able to hang out with these folks and learn their dialect. I’m up for adoption! 😂
Il s'est passé la même chose avec l'Occitan en France, mes grands parents ont été battus par leur professeurs pour avoir parlé Occitan dans l'école, on leur a apprit que leur langue n'était pas une langue mais un patois et qu'il ne devait pas le parler. Aujourd'hui mes grands parents ne considerent pas leur langue maternelle comme une langue mais un patois qui ne doit pas etre parlé. On parle souvent de l'independance linguistique de régions de notre pays mais l'occitan a été tué à la racine par le gouvernement français et aujourd'hui la langue Occitane est en train de périr. Alors je comprends parfaitement le combat des Cajuns, je le salue aussi.
foutu république, à vouloir mentir sur l'énorme diversité de peuple qu'il y avait en France avant de tout mélanger pour au final ne mené à rien d'autre qu'un anéantissement des cultures françaises, tout ça pour une élite bourgeoise déraciné
This warms my heart even though I'm the furthest thing from a Frenchman. Just something about the preservation and survival of small cultures in the vast ocean that is America. Feels like rooting for the underdog.
Sadly it's a dying language because our grandparents got beat by the teachers in school when they spoke it. So to save their kids and grandchildren from the beatings.... they decided to not teach them. (At least that was my grandparents reasons.) I can only understand some words and phrases but not all. It was natural to hear my grandparents speaking our native language to each other and their friends growing up... but we never understood. It truly breaks my heart that we weren't taught to be fluent in it.
Merci Monsieur…I didn‘t know how much citizens of the US feel themselves as French speaking people. Mais j‘ai tout compris…formidable Monsieur…incroyable/ incredible
I find it very fascinating that this dialect is still alive... the people in Louisiana seem really nice... (french is my first language).... I don't want to be a hater but to my ears, Cajun French is like a dying french. They skip SO many words and they use a lot of English ones. You could almost never write down a Cajun speaker's sentence and have it make grammatical sense... this really makes me wonder... Do the kids go to school in french? and can Cajuns *write* french properly? does the governement do anything to help preserve French in Louisiana?..... but hey, they look really happy speaking their dialect so props to them!!
Unfortunately the schools/government are shoving spanish down our throats like most other places. The little cajun-french we (the younger generation) know is from hearing our grandparents and very little from our parents. However, we ALL have the accent. 20 years from now, my culture will die.
xHylianLegendx I don't think it will "die" I believe it will continue to suffer the Americanization of our language and culture. The music, as long as it is sung as it was recorded years ago will be one of the key components of keeping the language on life support.
T0rche, moi je parle francais aussi. My mom is from South Louisiana and is about the same age as M. Thibodeaux. They belong to the last generation to speak French in the home; as he says in the video, when they went to school they were forced to speak English. When she speaks French she sounds a lot like M. Thibodeaux. There are a lot of people (admittedly must of them are older than M. Thib) who speak Cajun French in Louisiana who sound more fluent than he does. I suspect he is more fluent at times than he is here; sometimes my mom sounds really fluent and other times not so much. They don't get many opportunities to speak it so they rely a lot on childhood memories that surface as they speak, and I suspect he felt a little self-conscious with a camera in his face. My grandma and her siblings (now all passed; they would be in their 80s and 90s) could speak it very fluently. Each generation has lost a little bit, sadly. To answer your question - no, most Cajun French-speaking people don't know how to read or write French, unless they've learned in school. It's almost exclusively an oral language, and its grammar is much looser than that of standard French, but they have no trouble communicating with each other. They are the warmest and friendliest people I know, and their language is legitimate, even if it sounds strange to a French or French-Canadian person.
It's not as simple as that, torche. Louisiana French would not naturally sound like anything you'd hear in Paris anyway, and not Quebec City either. The best way to explain it is like mixing a cocktail: start with a base of langue d'oils from the late 17th/mid18th century, namely Normande, Poitevin, and Maine. Add a liberal amount of Spanish and Native American tongues. Now add some German, just a dash. Top it off with 170 years of contact with English and a couple of drops of Creole (this would be a mix of French and West African tongues.) That is what you get when you get the dialect. It is not a broken or dying French but different.
If Torche thinks the conversation is hard to understand she should listen to the trash they are singing in the songs today. Most make no sense if you can understand them. Or they just piece together lines from other songs. I'm not sure about your formula of Cajun dialect.
I feel like an idiot now but this completely blew my mind. Never once have I heard of this let alone considered a Google search. My world is upside down now. Amazing.
I really hope this tradition remains. It would be shame if it died out. I lived in Louisiana for 4 years and they are southerners, but a little different than the boys in Alabama or South Carolina per se.
is anyone here after channing tatum as the gambit lol
😭😭😭
🖐😂
YES LOOL
Honestly, after 5 videos of Cajun and 2 Gambit voice actors. I think he's doing great
guilty as charged 👀
Mr. Thibodeux about to make a name for himself up in here!
I got shot out of my daddy’s dick
I don't think he's walking away from this one...
@@MorphingGrid101just make sure people know what happened here today
I am happy that French is still spoken in Louisiana. It should be preserved.
Take a visit south and come pass a good time in Lafayette and all the towns in the Acadiana heartland. The people, music and especially the food are wonderful.
Connifiture comme ca buddy eh
It's not spoken much anymore..
Why should it be preserved exactly? It's like Latin. It's a dying language. Preserving just to preserve it seems pointless, especially in areas where no one speaks French or it's dying out in favor of dominant languages.
The French colonies were mostly wiped out in the US. Save for a select few. The only reason Canada has a large french population is because the British couldn't afford another war.
CircumcisionIsChildAbuse glad someone had the balls to say it.
However, french a dying language? We need to tell france!
As a French guy I understand everything and it's even more understandable than Quebec accent ...
Sound like old French people in countryside
G Larila Bizarre tu dois pas venir d’ici parce que je comprends fuck all
@@Zack2T viens faire un tour en Picardie tu va comprendre
Giraffes are humans 😂😂
@Fernando Cunha It pretty much was. Parisian French had some pronunciation changes during the 18th and 19th centuries (some of which also happened in Danish around the same time, interestingly), while Cajun French diverged during the 1600s. Some rural dialects are still similar to Cajun
@@BroadwayRonMexico Yes the gutteral r for an example is a recent innovation that spread rapidly in the French speaking world, in Quebec it spread later with French-speaking media, though a few dialects still preserve the front rolling r. In Cajun French the front trill is the still the norm.
I am French and it's interesting how the Louisiane accent is perfectly understandable for my ears while the Quebec one is harsh (but i understand them also)
skiteufr True. It sound like a countryside accent from France.
@@kinou_clem__6366 Yeah it sounds like an older in the South East of France with a slight speech impediment got very drunk. It's absolutely charming !
Hey genuine question, what makes his accent more understandable than ours (Quebec)? I feel like his dialect is closer to ours than to yours, no? Also older generations roll their r's here too :)
@@Kulara il parle moins vite que les québécois, et l'accent est doux, léger, pas "brutal". Quand un québécois fait une phrase ça peut etre les montagnes russes dans la prononciation des mots. Ici on le retrouve moinq
Quebec uses too much slang and abbrevation in their dialect
Wooomabouttolearnfranchais
This is so underrated 😂
i love that movie
Take my Like and GET. OUT. 😆
It's so good to know he and his family are keeping their language alive. I love listening to their French.
Unfortunately for my Cajun family, this dialect is dead. It really dwindled down starting with a great great grandmother. To put it in perspective, her granddaughter is my maternal grandmother who was born in 1921.
@@shieldfaith1 My grandmother who was born in 1922 spoke it, but only one of her children speaks French fluently (and then again, he speaks more France French than Cajun French). None of the grandkids speak French. I took it in high school (once again, France French), and I learned a decent amount, but I would really like to get back to it. It's sad how much it's dying out.
@@madelynmelancon I am self employed providing taxi service for horse buggy Mennonites and currently staying at a Mennonite house due to doing an out of state drive (reside in Missouri, drive was to Wisconsin). I played the video of Amazing Grace sung in Cajun French to my host, she was really wowed by it.
It’s so sad too! my grandparents had to translate what my great - grandmother said to me and when I asked my grandparents why they didn’t teach my dad cajun French they said because they were taught it was wrong and also because they didn’t want their kids to know what they were saying so now none of us do
Being from quebec I find this accent/dialect really interesting.
If you visit New Brunswick(acadian villages down there like saint-louis de kent, Bouctouche etc Our french is very very similar :).
Our Homestead Dream That's probably cause that's were the cajuns came from; their descendants of acadians who came down to Louisiana.
Jocelyne Jourdan sorry my mistake. And I did do some research, guess it just wasn't reliable... again sorry.
Jocelyne Jourdan
Désolé, mais non. Le Cadien est 100% d'origine Acadien, qui vient des dialectes du nord et nord-ouest de la France. Les dialectes créoles, par contre, sont certainement d'origine afro-caribienne.
g aznar Yup Acadiens were deported by the english were sent back to france and the US colonies. Some hid with the natives, some that were deported came back, others settled in some states, others travelled to the french colonies of Louisianna and became what we know as Cajuns. Creoles are the ones with haitian, descent.
Gambit's voice coach seems like a very nice person, I hope you and your family are doing well, Mr. Thibodeaux.
Please never let this tradition and culture die.
Now I know why Gambit talks like this.
"Les petits itou"
Now that's a word we don't really use anymore in France. Sadly.
Dans le patois normand, le mot "Itou" est encore bien présent 😉
@@Locked_Racoon Ca signifie quoi?
@@manon562 en français moderne "aussi", "pareillement". Ça vient du latin. En cajun ou patois je ne sais pas.
@@Songbirdstress tout à fait et ça a donné le "too" en anglais qui veut dire aussi et qui a été importé dans l'anglais à l'époque de Guillaume Le Conquérant.
@@Locked_Racoon je m'en sers aussi régulièrement, pour le plaisir des mots !
Im an acadian living in nb, the history of acadian people in canada and french people in Louisiana is very close! He seems like a happy fella.
Your profile picture is more interesting
Can you give us strangers of the internet a quick recap of Arcadian history?
Jackie Who? Biggest thing regarding Acadiens and Cajuns would be the Great Expulsion in the mid 1700s of Acadian settlers by the English, deported to many places including Louisiana. Cajuns are an offshoot of Acadians, makes sense with the name as well as it's a sort of shortening/slang form of the word 'Acadien'
@Joshua Lebrun Pretty sure they left willingly
This makes me sad. I sure wish I had learned when I was a child, but my dad didn’t push it on us because he didn’t want us to struggle with English. When my grandfather was dying from cancer in the hospital I was staying with him for comfort. He was on morphine and was dreaming about his youth. He began talking to his brothers in French and was so happy. I wish I could have understood his conversation better.
❤️❤️❤️I am sorry for your loss, but glad to hear that your family has such an interesting heritage and he seemed so happy. I think it is never too late to honor the legacy by learning some family language. My family is Russian and I am not the best Russian speaker but I do hope to preserve the language so I will try to strengthen it before I raise kids hopefully :)
I'm a little surprised and saddened by some of the comments. My family has roots in south Louisiana's cajun and redbone history. My great grandparents on both sides spoke Louisiana French. I do not because there is no one left in my family to teach it, and I now live in San Antonio. The language here is heavily Spanish so there is no need for French. But that doesn't mean we should let it die! To many of us it isn't just a language but part of our cultural heritage. The older generations hold onto it because it is one of the parts of their culture that sets them apart. It is a different way of life in many aspects. Anyone who passes it on should encourage that to continue. I feel the same about other languages like gaelic dialects. It is part of where we came from
Hey, fellow Texan here, I'm learning French instead of Spanish, bevause I want to! There's a rich history behind French, and it flows like the softest silk. You should do what you want, if it interests you. Almost three months in and I'm loving it, even if I currently have nobody to talk to. But I'll talk, live, dream, and explore in French, can't wait for my next language! Adieu
@@jsil_ you know, I've thought about it? Lol. Just because. I love French! Even if I don't learn Louisiana French, it'd still be cool.
It’s the same story in the Midwest as well.
My great grandparents spoke low German primarily, but their children and my grandparents were discouraged from their language and culture by government programs in the First World War.
Graves where I live are written in German until about 1917
Spanish is ugly
It's only ugly when it is spoken in a crude manner.
I love seeing the Cajun culture alive & well. My grandmother teaches me a new French phrase or two whenever I visit. I love hearing her stories of my relatives talking mess about people in French. Keep it going y’all! Be proud of our heritage!
Best damn chefs in the world.
Crawfish boil. I miss it
@@thequal1 Po boys are good too :-(
I've lived in Asia 4 years. I'll return to U.S, this month! Guess what's the first thing I'm going to do? Eat Cajun and Mexican food! I don't like Philippines food, where I live, haha
My grandparents spoke Cajun French. So did my Father and Uncle spoke it. My cousins and I never learned to speak it. 1:03
C'est un grand plaisir d'écouter le français cajun.
onn on!!!!???
You don't even have to be French to work this sentence out that it's so close to English.
"It is a grand pleasure to hear the French Cajun".
L’anglais est influencé par le français. Dites moi ce qui est incorrect ! J'avoue avoir des difficultés à comprendre votre affirmation. Bien à vous
Oui, précisemment. Norman Francias et Anglo-Saxon. Non, je comprend :) bien!
Archie, dites moi ce qui vous a troublez dans ma phrase ?
Salut de France à nos cousins d'Amérique, et merci de garder vivante notre langue outre-Atlantique !
sa vien du nouveaux-brunswick on la fripper un peut mes on l'use encore
The way I knew this existed since I was a kid, was from hearing Gambit speak like this.
c'est un miracle que ces gens parlent encore français !
Plus pour longtemps encore hélas
Sim.
Is it bad if I can understand french text
@@CinEverh Non je ne pense beaucoup de gens apprennent le français surtout la nouvelle génération !
Captain Antilles I think they are saying it’s impressively good. I ain’t got time for translating lol
Man I wonder why this could POSSIBLY be in people’s recommendations.
I’ve been learning French for nearly 2 years, and this sounds so unique! It’s an amazing mixture of France/Southern culture.
that's not french, it's like half french and half something else.
@@drefhill It’s French, just an older French. You’re thinking of Louisiana Creole.
I’m so fascinated by the Cajun culture, accent and food. It’s so wild it’s here in the States. Much love to Louisiana. I love that state.
Merci
I wish My mom would have felt that way about teaching us kids French. She was from Ville Platte La. We spent a lot of our younger years in La. But she didn't see the need to teach us the langue. I think that it's great they are letting their kids learn both.
ikr. I so wish my Pawpaw would have taught his kids and grandkids.
JE SUIS DE VILLE PLATTE! BONJOUR MONSIEUR! Je parle français aussi. J'aimer français Cajun.
@@RyandracusChapman J'aime le français cadien. ;)
What's the point...my family hails from the Netherlands but they never saw the point in teaching us a language we would never have to use...people are oddly sympathetic about dying languages. I've never once thought to myself, wow I wish I could speak Dutch, because I've never needed to. Even in the Netherlands almost everyone speaks English. Same with French. It's a secondary language. There's no point other than sentimental value. Anyone can learn the language. Hell, you could learn Latin if you wanted to, but much good it would do you if you don't live anywhere you can actually use it. Which is why languages die in favor of more commonly spoken.
there's nothing wrong with admitting the language doesn't have a wide use anymore.
@@Chin00k0 clearly not smart enough to realize correlation doesn't equal causation. are trilingual people 3 times as smart? just curious as to the standards we're using and to what degree the fluency with the language has to be to count towrads someones added intelligence. if I can count to 20 in 20 different languages does that make me Stephen Hawking?
Hey!!! Im a Thibodeaux as well!!!
Houston Tx, my dad was from Opelousas!!
Can you speak Cajun French too
@@sisigpapi
My Dad passed in 2018, they didn't teach us here in Houston, but im determined to learn now!!
@@amythibodeauxclemons511 That's really cool! I hope you become fluent and then one day pass it on to your own children. I don't know your dad but I bet that would make him happy
@@amythibodeauxclemons511 I'll give you a bit of advice from my own experience learning English from a purely Quebecian (French Canadian) point of view. Many consonants sound extremely similar or only slightly different between English and French, or even different accents of the same language, but are actually pronounced using a completely different vocal posture.
I didn't know this for the longest time and always wondered why I still had an accent in English despite pronouncing all the vowels correctly. They're the secret of how to acquire the proper sound of the language you're trying to learn. If you want to become fluent in a language, you have to learn these, otherwise you'll always sound off and won't be able to properly carry on the legacy of the language.
As an Acadian from New Brunswick, Canada, it sounds like an English person speaking with our dialect. Preserve it!!! 💙⭐️🤍❤️
It has died a lot because not too long ago we weren't allowed to speak it in school. And some of our parents didn't bother teaching it to us for whatever reason. But some schools in Southwest Louisiana have French immersion even in prek and that's definitely where I'm sending my kid.
@@mangersavoir4213 they did not want to teach it for the same reason our parents in new-brunswick went to school and it was nuns..... to expensive. in New-Brunswick about 40 years ago French schools were handled by the catholic church were kids would get beatings and other stuff until a French school district was enforced because of how bad French people dropped out of school ate the time.
Such a beautiful language from such a beautiful culture and people,I love south Louisiana!!!
Ooh, he gonna make a name for himself...
I remember. I was raised here in Louisiana. Even in the 90s, I would get fussed at in school for speaking french until I hit middle school. Then new languages was a choice in class.
My grandpa spoke nothing but cajun french but grandma spoke both english and french. So we, my sister and I, learned by way of my grandparents.
My other grandparents are Brazilian, so I knew Portuguese as well.
I still speak french here though. If you live in Louisiana, it will come up. It helps practice
Ois sua história e muito muito interessante! Você ainda fala francês muito bem? E o português?
My parents didn’t teach me Cajun French so when family was over they could talk all the shit they wanted and I wouldn’t understand because they were speaking in French 😂 I do know a lot of it mostly because I grew up around it. Something I heard the most was and understood fully is “get your ass of the counter before I throw you in with the ‘gators” (I don’t know how to spell it out in French but you get my point)🤦🏻♀️
omg 😂
You spell it the same way you do in english
You're incredibly beautiful.
@@michaelolin2219 simp alert
Michael Olin S I M P
I'm definitely late to this video, but it's amazing that the Cajun French is still pretty similar to French in France. It's great that there are still those who speak it on a daily basis! I hope they keep it going!!!
C est pareil que le quebecois, ils prennent pour base le français avec un gros accent et en changeant quelques mots
@@orangecobraEU Well it's Just like how English in the U.S is not the same as it is in England. Or Spanish in Mexico is not the same as Spain. Pretty much the same thing.
You can hear that Louisiana accent inside of the French!! Like I can hear it when he speaks English (people from that area). Very interesting!
Everything about this dude is so fuckin Cajun it's unreal
The sunburn, the name, the accent...
I'm from Louisiana, I speak French and some of my family does, too. I took a trip to a small town in Nova Scotia and it felt so much like home for me. Their accents, their French, their culture and behavior were so much like Louisiana. And nowhere else in N. America is really like that.
not true the province connected to it same thing except a larger French population also the only bilingual province in Canada,
New-Brunswick. there are Acadian flags every were also the lobster capital of the world and also the fundy bay between New-Brunswick and Nova scotia are the highest tides in the world. another thing a lot of people in the USA don't realize there are other Acadians in the USA in the state bordering New-Brunswick, Main a lot of the population have duel citizenship over here and married with people from the USA many of the French populace that arrived here during the start of colonization mixed with the Mi'kMaq first nation that saved early Acadians from the first Canadian winter.
Je reviens à cette vidéo de temps en temps, c'est assez intéressant d'entendre le français de Louisiane. Honnêtement, je souhaite que mon pays préserverait ces langues, d'une façon ou d'une autre.
Awwww This warms my heart. Monsieur Thibodeaux Garder la belle langue Francaise! :). We are losing a lot of our french over in the maritimes I find. So many of my friends kids dont speak french and it breaks my heart. I married an anglophone newfoundlander but if I have kids he will have to learn to speak french because my children will be raised in french
Our Homestead Dream I’m a Newfie
I’m felt the same way too, Not just French but other languages as well
I'm an anglophone Newfoundlander myself, and my only French is the small amount of Parisian French I was taught in High School (this was before the NL gov was forced to adopt Quebecois French as the educational standard). I don't know enough to speak French, but I was able to understand about 90% of what Mr. Thibodeaux was saying. He had good separation between his words, which was a huge help. I often can't understand Quebec or New Brunswick French as well because in comparison to Parisian French, the words sound slurred to my ears.
Or, you know, you could just raise them in both languages. Considering the US is primarily an English speaking country it doesn't seem like a great idea not to teach them proper English even if you are in Louisiana.
@@someoneuppingdudetechnical6320 ....... You do realise that Newfoundland and the Maritimes are in Canada, not the US. The overall point stands, but it's not the US
Mr Thibodeaux Pere , Merci beaucoup
Never let our Louisiana culture die!!
You know if louisiana rejoins its true country its culture would be conserved by state organisation.
So aren t you for some territorial change in the us ?
@@janflantier7969 and why anglophonic American is more legitimate?
@@janflantier7969 The only territorial change we are for are more states. Louisiana is rightfully and proudly American.
As a French Albertan this is quite interesting to hear this specific dialect of french. It's almost like Albertan french but without all the heavy slang and world slurring, far easier to understand than ones in Quebec and France.
Bruh it's like an old gambit ♠️♦️
It is soooo beautiful that the language and culture is this well preserved. is This is more than what I expected from my country
La joie de vivre perce dans le regard ! Salutations du vieux monde ...
i hope this doesnt die out. this was so interesting to hear. he definitely has a completely different french accent. he pronounces things in french so differently.
@Jamon’e M Finally, someone says it. It's the same for the Quebecian language, people call it French, but it really isn't anymore. If the language spoken in France today is French, the dialects in North America sure as fuck can't be called French. We should embrace our culture and define our dialects as their own languages. When the people who speak French from France can't even fucking understand what you're saying, I think that's enough justification to separate the two.
Because of this bullshit, European immigrants are slowly watering down Quebec with their accents, it is now extremely rare for you to hear a person speak Quebecian in big cities like Montreal and Quebec, and those who do speak it, all over the Province, usually speak a watered down version which is almost unrecognizable. Schools are even teaching French in QUEBECIAN SCHOOLS, we don't even fucking learn our own language, they're actively trying to render our language extinct by brainwashing the new generations to use French instead.
@@EnigmaGameMaster Linguistically speaking Cajun French is not linguistically different enough from other French dialects to be considered another language. Although they are pretty damn different. Creole French on the other hand is different enough to be considered a patois.
@@arvyknowsbest See, the problem is, who exactly defines how different languages have to be before they're considered different languages? Like, when 90% of two dialects are different in some way, yet not entirely alien from each other, is that not enough to classify them as separate?
Really think about it, in the case of the Quebecian dialect, almost every single pronunciation of every single vowel, consonant, word and the vocabulary, etc. is different from European French. We have vowel sounds which are literally missing from French, and those who speak French usually can't even understand us.
@@EnigmaGameMaster it's usually once the two languages are so far apart that they are no longer mutually intelligible unless both speakers slow down and greatly simplify their word choice. When that happens. Even Spanish and Portuguese speakers can sometimes understand one another, but at full speed and using complex word structure and vocabulary this cannot be the case.
@Mani M the Louisiana Creoles are Acadians too and they come in all colors. He’s speaking Louisiana Creole and also called Louisiana French and also called Cajun French
The Acadians are the original Louisiana Creoles
il est bon a voir plus de personne parler français aujourd'hui, notamment dans le région de Bayou. Je voudrais voyager aux le région quelque jour a bientôt.
I'm Vietnamese but I'm glad that French is still spoken in Louisiana not Spanish.
I like Spanish better personally.
c'est impressionnant. ça fait plaisir à entendre de la France.... Merci cher cousin de la Louisiane. Prends bien soin de toi ;-)
it’s impressive. it’s nice to hear from France.... Thank you dear cousin from Louisiana. Take good care of yourself ;-)
I honestly wish I was able to hear Cajun when I went to Louisiana and Mississippi almost a year ago now
A lot of people speak it in a city called Breaux Bridge in Saint Martin Parish
J'adore écouter les Cajuns de la Louisiane. J'enseigne le français et l'anglais. Ce monsieur a l'air génial.
I certainly am no expert in the French language but, to me, Acadian has a more poetic/musical sound than does Euro French. Hopefully, folks there in Cajun country will be inspired to preserve and promote this beautiful language.
I think it flows a lot better, mostly due to the forced standards in France it sounds a bit too formal to me. Think pomme de terre as opposed to patate, if that makes sense, it seems more natural to me but maybe it's the lack of exposure to mainland french
@@JM-nt5ex it's because you re imagine that European French is the same everywhere, but listen to an old angevin speaking French, or even a young occitan, it's just wonderful
@@elbarone9749 I am aware of the differences, I am just not well versed on them. My family immigrated from Southern France but only ever spoke standard french because I'm pretty sure my family was rich in France, funny because in America we became poor as fuck, immigration is confusing
@@JM-nt5ex lol, and I was I informed that if I spoke French the way I learned, it would sound like a dictionary or I would sound like the gentry instead of an every day person! Too funny!! I'm working on French again after 24 years and it's so fun, but I'm learning everyday French as well.
I'm cajun and sadly the only people who knew how to speak cajun french in my family have already passed on. I've heard stories of my great pawpaw getting slapped on the hands with rulers if he spoke french in school, he would get made fun of for being cajun as well. Our family still uses some cajun french words such as "couillon" and "frissons", but other than that no one speaks it fluently anymore. It's sad because cajun french is a dying language and I wish I could learn the language of my culture, but it's too late. I love m y culture and my people and I'm proud to be a full blooded Cajun.
J'espère que le français sera encore parlé longtemps en Louisiane ❤
Il a de beau jours devant lui ! La nouvelle génération est la clé !
On essaie tous les jours a faire de ça une realité!
This is a wonderful interview and an important testimony. I have very fond memories of Louisiana and the French culture over there.
Wooimmabouttomakeanamefomyselfhere
My granddaddy told me the same thing; that they were discouraged from speaking French when he was in elementary school etc. Che.
My grandfather as well, he was spanked or his hands were hit with a small cane.
It is just so fascinating to learn someone's language and culture isn't it?
No
Suddenly the algorithm is giving them spotlight after deadpool 3
Je suis de california (lieu de naissance est connecticut) et j'aime la langue français et un jour, je voudrais visiter a louisiane....Salut monsieur =)
C'est très bien! Je te souhaite un jour de pouvoir y aller ;)
Wow. I once played a gig in Sudbury, Canada and Waylon Thibodeaux was on stage just before us. Great band. Allo à tous les Thibodeaux.
Gambit brought me here.
I am Cajun,but have been away for 60 years,no longer do I speak are have the accent,however,I remember not being allowed to speak French on school grounds,how sad,what an injustice they did to us.The people of Louisiana are special in every way.
Cajun Creole sounds almost Mauritian Creole, I love it! I was first generation born in the U.K. from Mauritian parents, my mother was Mauritian-Creole and my father was Asian-Mauritian. So Mauritian-Creole was my first natal language, heavily laden with English, and I loved that mixture. Unfortunately, since my parents passed away, I’ve not had that constant occasion to speak Mauritian Creole, however, with my siblings and myself, strangely we can subconsciously think in both Mauritian and English. My Mauritian Creole can orally be a little rusty at first but within a short period I’m fluent with my British cockney accent, it’s like riding a bike, you’ll never forget, but I am very british, very proud to be a british-Mauritian. Listening to the old guy speaking his native Cajun Creole is like listening to my favourite song, and I find it easy to understand everything he is saying. Just like Mauritian Creole, Cajun Creole isn’t so strict with the French continuous need to arrange each spoken words into either feminine or masculine set sentences, depending on the sex you are speaking to and/or about the gender you’re referring to. Admittedly, I’m not a major fan of the Americans but, just like I fancy going to experience the life in New Orleans and their old, romantic and majestically old French quarters, after listening to the old guy in this video, I’m fancying visiting y’all in Louisiana, the place sounds very homely and fascinating, very different and a lot more friendlier then the usual images you usually get of Americans being so brash and loud, almost suffocatingly overbearing. Louisiana folks come across as very friendly and have that warm creole-ness about them, which I guess only other Creole would get, we love family and togetherness
There is no Cajun creole,there’s simply Louisiana Creole and Cajun French
This is soo true. My grandmother rip told a story of two friends, boy and girl, who were overheard speaking cajun walking home from school. They were disciplined by the principle the next day.
i mean. they do have the french quarters in Louisiana. so french should be a native language spoken in Louisiana
Most of the native speakers of French and Louisiana creoles are 40+ these days
When speaking with people around , it is always a good surprise to hear people giving a try in french... and i love accents ! Differents expressions , differents ways - See the smile on his face , he is happy :) Mes meilleures salutations a tous !
My parents didn’t teach us French in south Louisiana because they wanted to keep secrets, and talk about things around us without us knowing, or they were just to lazy about it.
I can still hear that thick southern accent while he speaking french and i love it ❗️
Please preserve the language! Teach it to the younger generation!
Andrew Hartford they beat the French out of our grand parents to make them "American" . My grandfather told me that if the nuns from school caught them out of school speaking French, they'd get paddled when they showed up to school. I know a little bit of cajun French. But if you want to really hear it still being spoken among the locals, you'd have to travel to a small town called Dulac. If you don't know French, you're gonna have a tough time as a fisherman out there.
Jason deLaloire
Take French classes online or in public school, they surely cannot punish you anymore. That would go against modern anti discrimination laws.
Un bonjour de France. Merci pour cette vidéo qui montre une autre variété de français que l’on connaît mal. J’aime beaucoup explorer différents langages du monde francophone. Quoi que l’on dise, ça reste large ! Vive la Louisiane et les cajuns !
Hearing foreign French with English subtitles is one of the weirdest experience I've had so far
Aw! I saw the interview with his son and I thought this might be a relative! They look so much alike. Such lovable people! I don’t speak much French, but I know enough to spot the accent... It really is a friendly and more “down home” accent. I would give anything to be able to hang out with these folks and learn their dialect. I’m up for adoption! 😂
he should play gambit
His son Waylon has a lot of good songs and I bought his CD back in the 90s when I lived in Biloxi, Mississippi. I liked a song about Matilda..
Il s'est passé la même chose avec l'Occitan en France, mes grands parents ont été battus par leur professeurs pour avoir parlé Occitan dans l'école, on leur a apprit que leur langue n'était pas une langue mais un patois et qu'il ne devait pas le parler. Aujourd'hui mes grands parents ne considerent pas leur langue maternelle comme une langue mais un patois qui ne doit pas etre parlé. On parle souvent de l'independance linguistique de régions de notre pays mais l'occitan a été tué à la racine par le gouvernement français et aujourd'hui la langue Occitane est en train de périr. Alors je comprends parfaitement le combat des Cajuns, je le salue aussi.
foutu république, à vouloir mentir sur l'énorme diversité de peuple qu'il y avait en France avant de tout mélanger pour au final ne mené à rien d'autre qu'un anéantissement des cultures françaises, tout ça pour une élite bourgeoise déraciné
This warms my heart even though I'm the furthest thing from a Frenchman. Just something about the preservation and survival of small cultures in the vast ocean that is America. Feels like rooting for the underdog.
Une merveille cette préservation de notre langue en dehors de l'Europe...
Sadly it's a dying language because our grandparents got beat by the teachers in school when they spoke it.
So to save their kids and grandchildren from the beatings.... they decided to not teach them. (At least that was my grandparents reasons.)
I can only understand some words and phrases but not all.
It was natural to hear my grandparents speaking our native language to each other and their friends growing up... but we never understood.
It truly breaks my heart that we weren't taught to be fluent in it.
Merci Monsieur…I didn‘t know how much citizens of the US feel themselves as French speaking people. Mais j‘ai tout compris…formidable Monsieur…incroyable/ incredible
TH-cam Algorithm: why is this video in my recommendations?😂
The Thibodeaux family is prolific in the south. I have met white, black, Latino and Asian Members of that family.
They’re even different dialects of Louisiana French here. :)
What a happy man :) merci d'avoir partager ce vidéo
Just now realizing the dude in overalls’ accent in Waterboy was kind of a real thing
I wish they would bring this piece of our culture back into our schools. I’ve lived in New Orleans my entire life and did know this.
I find it very fascinating that this dialect is still alive... the people in Louisiana seem really nice... (french is my first language).... I don't want to be a hater but to my ears, Cajun French is like a dying french. They skip SO many words and they use a lot of English ones. You could almost never write down a Cajun speaker's sentence and have it make grammatical sense... this really makes me wonder... Do the kids go to school in french? and can Cajuns *write* french properly? does the governement do anything to help preserve French in Louisiana?..... but hey, they look really happy speaking their dialect so props to them!!
Unfortunately the schools/government are shoving spanish down our throats like most other places. The little cajun-french we (the younger generation) know is from hearing our grandparents and very little from our parents. However, we ALL have the accent. 20 years from now, my culture will die.
xHylianLegendx I don't think it will "die" I believe it will continue to suffer the Americanization of our language and culture. The music, as long as it is sung as it was recorded years ago will be one of the key components of keeping the language on life support.
T0rche, moi je parle francais aussi. My mom is from South Louisiana and is about the same age as M. Thibodeaux. They belong to the last generation to speak French in the home; as he says in the video, when they went to school they were forced to speak English. When she speaks French she sounds a lot like M. Thibodeaux. There are a lot of people (admittedly must of them are older than M. Thib) who speak Cajun French in Louisiana who sound more fluent than he does. I suspect he is more fluent at times than he is here; sometimes my mom sounds really fluent and other times not so much. They don't get many opportunities to speak it so they rely a lot on childhood memories that surface as they speak, and I suspect he felt a little self-conscious with a camera in his face. My grandma and her siblings (now all passed; they would be in their 80s and 90s) could speak it very fluently. Each generation has lost a little bit, sadly.
To answer your question - no, most Cajun French-speaking people don't know how to read or write French, unless they've learned in school. It's almost exclusively an oral language, and its grammar is much looser than that of standard French, but they have no trouble communicating with each other. They are the warmest and friendliest people I know, and their language is legitimate, even if it sounds strange to a French or French-Canadian person.
It's not as simple as that, torche. Louisiana French would not naturally sound like anything you'd hear in Paris anyway, and not Quebec City either. The best way to explain it is like mixing a cocktail: start with a base of langue d'oils from the late 17th/mid18th century, namely Normande, Poitevin, and Maine. Add a liberal amount of Spanish and Native American tongues. Now add some German, just a dash. Top it off with 170 years of contact with English and a couple of drops of Creole (this would be a mix of French and West African tongues.) That is what you get when you get the dialect. It is not a broken or dying French but different.
If Torche thinks the conversation is hard to understand she should listen to the trash they are singing in the songs today. Most make no sense if you can understand them. Or they just piece together lines from other songs. I'm not sure about your formula of Cajun dialect.
Bien le bonjour M.Thibodeau!
wooimboutamakeanameformyselfhere
I feel like an idiot now but this completely blew my mind. Never once have I heard of this let alone considered a Google search. My world is upside down now. Amazing.
Why have i been getting a bunch of cajun french vids in my recommendations
Holy shit I thought it was just me! The youtube algorithm has been very strange lately.
His french is so funny 😂😂😂. It looks like french spoken in the France's countrysides.
Merci bien pour cette vidéo.
I learned french in high school and I don’t understand regular french spoken but this is strangely comprehensible.
I really hope this tradition remains. It would be shame if it died out. I lived in Louisiana for 4 years and they are southerners, but a little different than the boys in Alabama or South Carolina per se.
Not a little,Much much different in the southern part of the state😂
Wow bonjour du Québec je me reconnais avec ce monsieur c'est comme si il serait de ma famille et je ne l'ai jamais connu. .
Bro I literally soeak this 🤣🤣🤣
WHOA!!! This guy sounds like Gambit!!
He made a name for himself
Bonjour à vous cher Monsieur. Vivement que je puisse visiter votre région. Vive la langue Française!
He sounds like the guy off water boy
Billy ! Literally watching the movie right now 😂😂😂
There supposed to be Cajuns living in Louisiana so spot on
Farmer Fran!
Merci... Bonjour de la Provence...