How Our French Has Built a Modern Lexicon
Langage (“language”) — whether spoken, written, signed, or merely thought — permeates every aspect of our daily lives. But while the course of an ordinary day brings us into contact with many hundreds of unique words, it is only very rarely that we spend any time at all contemplating the actual origins of each of these mots (“words”). For those of us that speak French in Louisiana, however, and are lucky enough to be able to spend any portion of our days in our native French and Creole, this may not ring true at all; here in the twenty-first century, our professional and personal lives are positively overflowing with words — words such as truck, tarpoline, coal-oil, and mop, to name but a few — whose origins might jump immediately out to us, standing starkly out in each sentence from their French neighbors — they are, obviously and originally, English words. Langues d’héritage (“heritage languages”) the world over are replete with borrowings from more dominant languages, and in Louisiana these loans from, in our case, English have served mostly to fill in lexical gaps opened up by the rapid advances in technology that have been seen over the past century, which have continued to introduce novel activities and new things at first unpossessed, but desperately in need, of words to refer to them.
In most cases, by the time of their typically tardive arrival to the Louisiana countryside, the artifacts of these social and technological changes generally come with English labels already well-attached to them, making a simple adoption of these English words, rather than the invention of new ones, the readiest and simplest course of action, one that, as an aside, French is pas proche (“far from, not at all”) alone in taking: it must be remembered that English itself is full of very recent borrowings from French, such as turbine, pulley, garage, fuselage, ambulance, résumé, mayday (from the French phrase [Venez] m’aider, “[Come] help me”), and liaison, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of words taken from French in centuries past.
It is important to note, though, that the emprêtage (“borrowing”) of words from English is far from the only way that our French has kept lexical pace with modernity. Another common method relies on the reäpplication of preëxisting words to the new referents in question. In the domain of embarcation (“transportation”), for example, contemporary words such as char (“car”), voiture (“vehicle”), transfert (“bus”), and charrette (“cart, buggy, ATV, side-by-side, trailer”) all originally referred to specific kinds of wheeled, horse-drawn vehicles before they were eventually applied to new, motorized instruments of transportation.
Another common strategy for the development of new words draws on well-established internal methods of derivation to create novel terms. For instance, many tools and items of machinery in Louisiana carry names based on their function, composed of the appropriate verb plus our feminine agentive suffix -euse, the equivalent to English -er. The modern, mechanized habitation (“farm”), for example, is particularly well-stocked with native French words created in this fashion, such as éridisseuse (“wire-stretcher”), raseuse (“sickle-bar mower”), laboureuse (“disk plow”), trancheuse (“disk harrow”), coupeuse (“combine harvester, cutter, mower”), ramasseuse (“reaper, harvester”), amarreuse (“binder”), emballeuse (“baler”), fouleuse (“compacter, packer”), porteuse (“bundle carriage”), and batteuse (“thresher”), but so too is the domestic sphere: chesseuse (“dryer, clothes dryer”) and laveuse (“washer, clothes washing machine”) are familiar words in most households, as are other terms created this way, such as encaineuse (“canning sterilizer”), plucheuse (“peeler”), and affileuse (“sharpener”), among many, many others.
Finally, French in Louisiana has of course in many cases simply adopted international French terms. After all, Louisiana has always been part of the broader French-speaking world, and it was only a few generations ago that English installed itself as the preferred source for new borrowings. Words such as électricité (“electricity”), disque (“album, record”), téléphone, radio, éventail (“fan”) and machine (“motor”) are just as familiar in Lafayette as they are in Paris or Québec, which, together with the long list of previous examples, reminds us that, upon encountering a gap in our French or Creole vocabulary, recourse to English is, while possibly expedient to us as English speakers, ultimately rarely necessary.
