Inside a small school up on stilts, two girls sit at a table covered with flash cards.
When asked, the second-graders introduce themselves in French.
“Je m’appelle Juliet,” says the one with baby blond hair.
The other has a tiny smudge of pizza sauce on her face. It’s lunchtime. “Je m’appelle Lana,” she says.
While there’s a growing number of public French immersion schools in Louisiana, this bayou school is one-of-a-kind. That’s because the focus at École Pointe-au-Chien isn’t on teaching standard French but on local dialects.
That’s where the flashcards come in.
They’re for words with multiple French translations in Louisiana, like alligator.
People in France say un alligator. But in Cajun French, it’s un cocodrie. Then there’s a third way people in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes might say alligator — caïman. It’s a native word.
The girls say they like un cocodrie more because it’s fun to say: a short co-co sound and a long dree.
There are other words, too, like shrimp. Crevette is the standard word, while chevrette is Cajun.
Lana and Juliet’s parents don’t speak French, but like many of their nearly 30 classmates, they have an older family member who does.
Most people used to speak French in Pointe-au-Chien and Louisiana, dating back to when it was a French colony.
“The way you speak tells people about who you are,” says Nathalie Dajko, who teaches linguistics and anthropology at Tulane University.
About 15 years ago, Dajko interviewed French speakers down the bayou and analyzed the similarities and differences between local dialects and how they vary from standard French.
“I would often ask people, ‘Do you think the kids should learn French?’ Basically, uniformly, the answer was yes,” she remembers.
And when it came to what kind, “There was kind of a split between, ‘I don’t care which French they teach them and people who said, ‘They should learn our French,” Dajko said.
Before the Civil War, Dajko says there were at least four kinds of French in the state: There was the French spoken by people who had come directly from France, both standard and non-standard French.
The Acadians, descendants of French settlers who were kicked out of what is today Canada, spoke something very similar, “but nonetheless distinct,” Dajko says.
Some ended up in Louisiana and ended up speaking what's known today as Cajun French.
Add to that Creole, a variety of restructured French created by enslaved Africans. Native people also started speaking French, and those dialects all mixed after the war.
When lawmakers tried to Americanize the South in the 1920s, they made English the state’s official language and prohibited French in schools. The ban was in place until the 1970s. By then, English was here to stay.
“You don’t have to punish somebody to tell them that their language is not valuable. You just have to not use it,” Dajko says.
Because Native communities were initially kept out of public schools, she says they held onto their French for longer.
Some of the youngest French speakers in the state are part of the Native community, Dajko says. Their French is very close to Cajun, but with some small differences, like the word alligator.
She says the variations by dialect, including pronunciation and some grammar, are mostly subtle and largely regional.
For example, in standard French, “what” is “quoi” and “who” is “qui.” But in Terrebonne and Lafourche, “qui,” which would otherwise just be “who,” is used for both.
Dajko says she made the mistake on a visit to Lafayette.
“Somebody misunderstood me when I said “Qui c’est ça?” They were like, “Who is it?” And I was like, “No, no, no, but OK.”
The mistake didn’t mean they couldn’t communicate; they just had to listen to one another and problem-solve.
‘Part of our culture’
Christine Verdin is the director of École Pointe-au-Chien. (École means school in French.) She’s in her 60s and grew up speaking what she calls “Indian French” as a member of the Pointe-au-Chien Tribe.
“We all spoke French,” she says. “That’s the only way not to lose it.”
Speaking French has taken Verdin all over the country and the world. There used to be more gatekeeping of the language, she says.
“People would tell me, ‘You don’t speak the real French,’” Verdin says. “And it was someone from France who finally told me, ‘Christine, you do speak the real French.’”
École Pointe-au-Chien, the first French immersion program in the bayou parishes, opened last year with just nine kids. The tribe and other residents started the program after the local school board closed the town’s elementary school — that Verdin attended and taught at for a decade — due to low enrollment.
Verdin says it’s becoming more difficult for people to stay in coastal communities like theirs as waters rise and land slips away. Storms are more frequent and intense. Costs, especially for insurance, have increased dramatically, straining families’ already tight budgets.
Verdin says for those who have stayed, French is still a big part of the culture. She says at first, some tribe members wanted the kids only to learn native words.
“And I had to say, ‘We can’t do that,’” Verdin recalls.
Yes, the school is about preserving Indian and Cajun culture, she says, but French is also a tool that can take kids places. If you don’t learn standard French, you miss part of the benefit.
“But you bring in our French, too,” she says. “Because when they go home and speak to their grandparents, their grandparents are not going to know that a citrouille is a giraumon, which is a pumpkin.”
Acknowledging these small differences and letting students know both words are right makes the school unique. It’s the first school like it in the state and possibly the first to teach native French in the country.
Sharon Picou also grew up down the bayou and oversees the school’s English curriculum.
Her dad was one of the Cajuns who was punished at school for speaking French, and her parents spoke the language at home. “But they didn’t teach us,” she says.
Picou understands some spoken French and says she wants to speak the language, but it’s intimidating.
“It’s a confidence issue,” she says. “I hope the French teachers don’t critique my French because I’m learning.”
‘This is deux’
The French teachers at the school are from France, part of a decades-old agreement with the country to help preserve the language in the state.
Verdin says she had to get the French teachers up to speed on Cajun and Indian French, and they've embraced teaching the language in its many varieties.
École Pointe-au-Chien is open to any child who lives in Terrebonne or Lafourche parishes. This year, the school offers Pre-K through second grade, with plans to add one grade a year until it reaches fifth or sixth grade.
The school's older kids spend more than half of the day learning in French, while Pre-K students are taught entirely in French.
In Camille Revillet's class, her four-year-olds are working on a math worksheet, counting boxes and drawing a line to the correct number.
Revillet asks a little girl, “C’est où les deux?”
"This is deux," she replies, pointing to the correct number.
Dajko says people have long predicted the demise of Louisiana French — but it keeps surviving. She's not predicting anything, "but I think there's a lot of hope these days in younger generations," she says.
French speakers are teaching their children and grandchildren the language at home. More people, many of whom don't speak French, are sending their kids to immersion schools.
They're all excited about speaking French, Dajko says, and that's what keeps a language alive.
