A sign of Cajunness

Language change can be systematically studied by comparing contemporary speech with historical records but also by comparing the speech of different age groups, as in this study (carried out by Dubois and Horvarth) of the Cajun dialect spoken in Louisiana. One of the features of this dialect is the nasalised pronunciation of vowels. This feature is associated with the traditional community and is gradually disappearing. As might be expected, middle-aged speakers use it less than older speakers. There is no gender difference in these groups. There is a gender difference, however, in the group of younger speakers. Younger women use nasalised vowels even less than middle-aged people, i.e they continue the trend. But younger men reverse the trend. They nasalise almost all their vowels. This may be due to the fact that young men are often involved in the tourist industry and have re-adopted the feature as a sign of their “Cajunness”. A similar trend can be observed with regards to another feature of the Cajun dialect, the absence of aspiration in voiceless plosives. Older and middle-aged men and women use this variant more often than not, with no significant difference between men and women. This is different in the younger group, where women have almost entirely given up the old feature but men have not. In both cases, gender and age seem to related, and in both cases, women lead the change towards Standard English. Not all young women, however, behaved in the same way. Those who have closed networks, i.e. those who have more ties with their local community and spend most of their time with other members of their community behave differently from those who have open networks. This was reflected in the results for another feature of the Cajun dialect, the replacement of the dental fricative in think or this by plosives, /t/ and /d/. Women with closed networks use the traditional Cajun forms more often than those with open networks. (Meyerhoff, Miriam, Strycharz, Anna: “Variation and change in English”, in: Seargeant, Philip & Swann, Joan (ed.): English in the World. History, Diversity, Change. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012: 302-10)