Then, of course, there are the mixture languages. In the early 1700s, French settlers lived in what is now Canada, in the Nova Scotia (New Scotland) region, in a place called Arcadia. However, due to expenses incurred in the almost-never-ending French wars of that period, France sold Canada to England, which promptly required all Canadians to swear allegiance to the King of England. As our late humorist/historian Justin Wilson tells the story, they would swear TO the king, they would only swear AT him. In the mid-1700s, the "Acadian Diaspora" began, with people sailing south to find the other major French settlement near New Orleans. However, we had other incursions. At different times, many different flags have flown over the city of New Orleans. That would be the French (royal, or "Bourbon") flag, the Spanish flag, the French tricolor (republic) flag, the English flag, the USA flag (we bought Louisiana from the French republic. Paid cash, too! We were under the flag of the Confederate states for a couple of years. That's six flags. The other two flags are the city's own flag and the State of Louisiana - a total of eight flags. But we also had immigrants from Germany, Ireland (during the early 1800s potato famine), and many people from the Caribbean and Africa, some related to slave trade but others not at all involving slavery. So we have some central African words as well.
So is it any surprise that anyone who speaks Cajun French absolutely cannot understand or be understood by a speaker of Parisian French?
Simple examples: In "Paree" French, "I don't know" is "je ne sais pas" but in Cajun French it is "pas ca ne." In "Paree" French, a potato is "pomme de terre" (apple of the earth) but in Cajun it is "potat." And the ethnicity "Cajun" is actually linguistic drift from "Acadian". My mother-in-law spoke accented English but also spoke Cajun fluently. When I told her my ancestry research could prove that her family had, in fact, come from Acadia, Nova Scotia when the Cajuns arrived, she lit up like a Christmas tree to learn that she had a provable human "pedigree." It was as good, to her, as it is for some folks to say their ancestors came over on the Mayflower from England.
