Cajun French, Sociolinguistic Knowledge, and Language Loss in Louisiana

This study uses Foucault's work on knowledge and power to show that the politics of language and the politics of researching it are closely related. As a discipline, sociolinguistics has barely begun to investigate the relationship between academia and issues of power and the different ways it ultimately may reinforce the interests of a dominant linguistic group. Language loss studies tend to emphasize demographic and economic factors over other social issues. This study about Cajun French, a fast-eroding French dialect still spoken by around 250,000 people in Louisiana, argues that language loss is a social as well as a discursive process and that academic knowledge and discourse both play a significant role in language politics. The study advocates the use of local knowledge to enhance our understanding of sociolinguistic issues involving unequal power relationships.