Quote:
Originally Posted by eschaton
Looking at Louisiana, it remained officially bilingual until the Civil War, when the Reconstruction-era government began to promote English. It really wasn't until the 1920s that French began being actively suppressed (around the same time language shift started in communities across the U.S.) . There was also the added complication that Cajun French is much more divergent from standard French than Quebecois is - meaning there was little impetus to preserve it.
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That's certainly the case today, but I am not sure if that would have been true 100-200 years ago.
In 2021, Quebec has 100+ more years of the ubiquitous use of French in all aspects of society under its belt: government, education, business, media, etc.
But in the 1800s (even in the latter part of the century), would the departure from standard French in Louisiana have been much greater than in Quebec? I really don't know.
When I was in high school, we read this book below that was written by a woman who was born and raised and AFAIK lived her entire life in Louisiana. It's written in beautiful French, and was published in 1983. The author I believe passed away in the 1990s. Obviously she was an outlier for being that proficient in French but there are others, like singer Zachary Richard.
https://www.amazon.ca/-/fr/JEANNE-CA.../dp/2903157308
It's declined almost to the point of no return today, but if you back a century and half or so, I don't think that in terms of its quality, French in Louisiana started off in that much worse a position than French in Quebec or Maritime Canada did.