Author: jbenton

The MLA Language Map tracks the linguistic makeup of American places. In other words, it is a database, derived from census data, of who speaks what languages where.
Regular readers of this site know I’m a proud Cajun and very interested in all things related to language persistence. Just a few decades ago — until World War II — Cajuns were almost entirely Francophone. (Some spoke English, too, but only to talk to those damned Anglos.) The rise of a national popular culture and a host of economic factors have since pushed French to the sidelines.
(To put this in my family’s context, my great-grandmother, Oureline Dugas Mouton, died in 1988 without knowing a word of English. My grandmother Mazie grew up speaking only French and didn’t learn English until grade school — but she barely spoke any French in her last few years. My mother knows enough French to get by, but hasn’t used it in conversation for years. And by the time I was a kid, French was the language the old people spoke when they didn’t want you to understand what they were saying. So while I took French class in school, my language skills are mediocre.)
Anyway, I used the MLA site to run a few numbers for Louisiana. This is the sad result.
You’ll notice that there are still 194,314 French speakers in Louisiana — the largest total of any state and more than one-tenth of all French speakers nationally. That’s still a lot more than the second-largest minority language in Louisiana — Spanish, which has 105,189 speakers.
But look at the age breakdown on that chart. Among children aged 5 to 17, there are 16,395 who speak French at home. But there are 20,689 who speak Spanish at home.
In other words, among today’s children, French isn’t even Louisiana’s secondmost popular language. And this is in a state with a relatively tiny Hispanic population.
Depressing — particularly with all the evidence out there about the benefits of being bilingual. At some point, folks Zachary Richard — who tie concepts of Cajun identity with the persistence of the language — are going to have to realize that battle is already lost. If a Cajun identity is going to persist, it’ll have to do so separate from the language.

Just because I have to get back to regular posting someday:
– Announcing Mumkin, the newest addition to the clipfile.org family of weblogs. It’s run by the lovely and talented Abby Wood — Harvard Law student, crabwalk.com reader, ex-Dallasite, and one-time-long-ago blind date of mine. Abby is working at USAID in Egypt this summer. Remember that sunscreen, Ab!
– JustConcerts.com, the CBC‘s online catalog of recent Canadian concerts. Mostly indie rock, including crabwalk.com faves like Calexico, the Decemberists, and the Weakerthans. (By the way, the Weakerthans‘ Left and Leaving is absolutely wonderful. Couldn’t stop listening to it last week. Track 11, in particular.)
Anyway, combine the RealAudio streams from JustConcerts.com and something like Audio Hijack and you’ve got lots of new good material for your iPod. (Audio Hijack rocks. Great for recording This American Life or other NPR shows for a long drive, too.)
– Sorority Girls From Hell, a fast-talking blast from the 1980s and the 1950s — at the same time!
– Pitchformula.com, in which a data network engineer tries to algorithmically determine what Pitchforkmedia.com wants in an album.
– My column from last Monday, since I didn’t get a chance to link to it then.
– Beulah is breaking up. Glad I caught them a couple weeks ago.

I’m back in Dallas. Thanks again to all of you who have called or emailed. I really appreciate it. Something approaching regular crabwalk.com life will return soon.

A thousand thank yous to those of you who’ve called, emailed, sent flowers, or in some way let me know you were thinking of Mazie and me. I’m doing about as well as I could be, I imagine. Funeral’s tomorrow. Tomorrow night will hopefully bring a long night’s sleep.
Hopefully I’ll be up to writing more about Mazie sometime soon. But in the meantime, I want to point out that Howard Swindle died a few hours after Mazie. From 2000 until he entered hospice care a couple months ago, Howard sat across the aisle from me at the Morning News. Let me tell you, that man was a hell of a journalist. Overhearing his phone calls was a journalistic education — he could get anybody to tell him anything. And he was an honest man with an underdog’s spirit. These three grafs in the DMN obit tell the story:
“One of his secrets to getting information was that he was so likeable,” said Eric Miller, a former colleague. Mr. Miller, now an investigator in Washington, said he learned from Mr. Swindle that the soft-sell works. “He never talked down to people, and treated everyone with respect, whether they lived in trailer parks or mansions. I marveled at how he could get anyone to talk.”
[Managing editor Stu] Wilk said he, too, was struck by Mr. Swindle