Black People Speak French

Growing up in the South, or really just by turning on the television, it's easy to hear the differences between African American English (AAVE) and Standard American English (SAE). Even more, with my family being from South Louisiana, I've found Louisiana English (LAE, by this I mean what's typically called Cajun English) has the same differences with SAE as AAVE. Why?

They both have the same origin and that origin is Louisiana French.

What I'm going to do is show the commonalities AAVE has with French grammar and semantics and present an historical explanation of why this is.

I always thought of Lafayette as being purple.

Let's talk about grammar.


*Note, I had to edit this article to make the French a little more clear, thanks to my friend Ibrehemia for protecting me from myself*

In French, and in all Romance Languages (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc...), negating a sentence works a little differently. So when you hear someone say in AAVE say

                I ain't done yet

Know that in French there are two place markers for negation (even if informally it doesn't always work that way).

              Je n'ai pas encore fini.

Also, in French, the double negative is okay.

             Je n'ai pas rien

Or in English:

            I don't have nothin'

Recognize the meanings are different between the French and English sentences. In French you're saying you have something, in English you are emphasizing that you have nothing. However, in both ways of speaking, the double negative is acceptable.

Now, in Louisiana French it's okay to go with either 'ai' or 'suis' but why strain gnats?

When you can pinch a crawfish tail?

Have you ever wanted to express something you did frequently in the past, but explain it as something you don't do anymore? Or talk about something you did once or twice, but it isn't something you do all the time? You're thinking about the Imperfect Tense. That is, things that happened in the past but have a definite stopping point. It's how we talk about old habits.

For example:

           No, your Honor, I used to dress up like an Onion and break dance in public libraries, but I                 don't anymore.

We've all been there, right? But I bet having to say 'used to' bunched your cassons -not just because you miss those days of onion induced madness- but because of how clunked 'used to' is in that sentence.

Don't worry, mon ami, we've got you covered, and I don't mean your ragged underwear:

                    Non votre Honneur, j'avais l'habitude de m'habiller 
                   comme un oignon et danser dans les                    
                  bibliotecheques mais je ne le fais plus

In French, you can just change a verb tense!

He is in the process of dressing like an onion. The present continuous tense

And the imperfect tense in AAVE? Just be yourself!

            He be walkin' everyday.
            It's hot, but it don't be hot.

Bad habits can be hard things to break, but in French and AAVE at least it's easier to talk about them.


Then we have lexicon, or the words and phrases used in a language. We find crossover there as well:


                  AAVE/LAE           French               American Standard English
          Bougie                       bourgeoise                   Kardashian
    Makin' groceries          Faire les courses           Costco Membership
    I stay in Mansura        Je reste au Mansura       I live in a gated community.

The list goes on and on and on and on. I be believin'.

Is there a Zydeco cover band? Get Wayne Toups on the phone.

Then there's pronunciation. The 'th' sound as in father, the voiced dental fricative, becomes a 'd' sound in AAVE and LAE

Who Dat Say Dey Need Da Voiced Dental Fricative?

Which makes sense because French doesn't have it either.

He's just as surprised as you.

There are some cultural-linguistic crossovers as well, one in particular I am thinking of, but I can't tell you yet for fear I'll upset you. Save the controversy for the end.

So, what historical events would make it so that African Americans share these linguistic traits with Louisiana English?

To answer that question, we need to look at Census data.

But we can't, because they didn't record that.

However, churches did. If we look at the registrars of Catholic Churches -because Louisiana French people tend to be Catholic- we can see when the church registrars switch from French to English:

                                  Archdiocese New Orleans 1891
                                  Diocese Baton Rouge 1906
                                  Diocese Lafayette 1917
                                  Diocese Houma/Thibodeaux 1916


Of course this doesn't tell us when people stopped talking French  per se. If you've ever been to Hessmer or Rayne you know good and well people are still speaking French. What it tells us is when people in Louisiana became semi-speakers.

A semi-speaker is someone with only partial competence in a certain language. By the 1920s in Louisiana, many of our ancestors became semi-speakers in both French and English -with a dialect in English that borrows heavily from French and a patois in French that borrows heavily from English.

So, we know right around the 1920s Louisiana French people were speaking a quasi-French, quasi-English, as many still are today. What else happened around that time?


The Great Migration.

Driven in part by The 1927 Flood, African Americans left the South, in particular the Mississippi Delta Region, in droves. This was a time, as well, where French still be spoken in southern Missouri and Arkansas as well the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast. This was a trend that would persist well into the 1950s, which is why LA has an L.A. colony.

These African American laborers, standing up to the insanity of the Jim Crow South, crossing boundaries to claim their own autonomy, were the first ambassador's of Louisiana's culture and dialect, long before Justin Wilson did whatever-the-hell-it-is-he-did and Paul Prudhomme overcooked Redfish on a skillet.

Like any good theory, my theory is wrong. What I mean is, AAVE is more than just Louisiana French. It's also Southern English (for example the use of 'gotten' that we find in Southern U.S. English but nowhere else) and it's own developments and idiosyncrasies that I'll let smarter people research.

Point is, though, except maybe for that Formation video, the amount of crossover between Louisiana French culture/dialect and African American culture/dialect isn't a connection I've seen people make and I'd love to see more research on it.

Can I intern?

Now, the controversy.

So, in Louisiana French we call each other 'nigga.' We say 'neg', but yeah, we're terrible and that's what we're saying. I'm sorry and I'll turn in my Cajun card (if I ever really had one) if I've offended whatever Brouillette or Doucet who's reading this.

And I'm not saying we starting doing this after watching Richard Pryor stand-up, either. I mean we've been doing it for a long time.

It's called covert prestige. It's taking a term people call you to put you down, flipping it, and using it solidarity with other people also called that name. This isn't to say white French-speakers and black French-speakers got along -on the contrary Lafourche Parish had one of the highest ratios of lynchings in the United States- but it is to say when people are getting shitted on they at least find a way to make fertilizer.

And what a bizarre, intricate culture we've grown at out this muck of racial caste struggle. A cacophony of color painted by the songs of Africa.

What makes Louisiana unique isn't the French, if you think about it. Maine has a large French-speaking population and I have yet to be invited to a clam bake down here. No, it's our Afro-Caribbean heritage. Without Africa, Louisiana wouldn't have okra, spicy food, or music worth listening to.

We'd just be a tropical New Brunswick without the good healthcare or education.

So, in that respect, in can be hard to define when one culture ends and the other begins, mon neg.