CajunJosh

• 英語 (美國) 母語者

• 法語 (法國)

美國

• 法國

My name is Josh. I live in the US and I am here for my family. I am trying to restore our family’s lost French heritage. We descended from Acadian immigrants (French colonists driven from Nova Scotia by the british) who settled in the southern US in the area that later became known as Louisiana.

Our own dialect “Cajun-French” was spoken by millions of us “Cajuns” until the 1920s when the government decided only English would be spoken at school.

My grandfather and grandmother were beaten for speaking French in school and so all that was ever passed down to us was broken phrases.

Now only a small portion of us, from rural areas of the state speak the patois at home. We are trying to rebuild our culture for our children by reintegrating with the official French (France) language and then eventually learning the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary from some people we know in the more rural parts of the state who grew up speaking Cajun French.

They don’t know enough to fully teach us. So we are paying for French programs and I am posting questions here.

We are making French the primary language of our home again but it is a long journey full of bad grammar. Please bear with me.