The Story of French (14 page)

All French-based Creoles were created during the slave trade, when African slaves communicated among themselves by using colonial French terms with a simplified grammar. Most Creoles were strictly oral languages until recently and evolved without a fixed grammar system for two or three centuries. Words are very often similar to the French spoken in France at the end of the seventeenth century, but spelled phonetically, which blurs the resemblance. The Creole word for
étudiant
(student), for instance, is
étidyan.
Many terms can be understood if they are sounded out, but it sometimes takes a bit of imagination—
comprendre
(to understand), for example, is
konprann.

No one knows exactly how French-based Creoles developed, partly because slaves couldn’t write and because slave masters didn’t care much about what their slaves were saying. Today, speakers of these different French-based Creoles can generally understand one another, which shows how strongly Creoles are related to French. Most francophones would be able to understand a phrase like “
Mwen palé on ti kal Kreyol
” (“I speak a bit of Creole”) if it was clearly enunciated, but probably not “
Ki sa wap etidye?
” (“What are you studying?”).

While French-based Creoles have features remarkably similar to the French spoken in the colonial period, the grammar and phonetics are often typically African. Verbs like
voir
(to see) and
boire
(to drink) are pronounced
vwè
and
bwè,
while
ici
(here) is pronounced
isit,
as it was in the seventeenth century. Colloquial French in North America has also retained these features. But whereas the French of the time rolled the R, Creole speakers often drop the R, which is why they say
vwé
and
bwé.
Nasalization is typically African—
aimer
(to love) is pronounced
enmé
in Guadeloupe and
renmen
in Haiti. Grammatically, gender disappeared and all words became neutral. The five articles usually follow the noun;
la pomme
(the apple) is
pom-la.
Verbs are not conjugated (with endings, as in French), but constructed, like most English tenses, with a pre-verb marker to indicate the tense. In Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana, for instance, they use
ka
for the present,
té
for the past,
ké
for the future and
téké
for the conditional. There are a number of Africanisms in the vocabulary, and not just for voodoo-related terms. In Martinique and Guadeloupe the native whites are called
békés,
but in Haiti they are called
blan,
from the French
blanc.
The present meaning of Africanisms is often far removed from the original meanings in African languages—
zombi
originally meant
god
in Bantu (spoken in the Congo area).

French Creoles are actually separate languages, not dialects of French. But despite the high numbers of speakers, they never had much impact on French during the colonial period, not even on the French of Haiti, despite the fact that half a million people spoke Creole. The impact of Creoles may become greater with the rise of francophone literature today (which we discuss in chapter 19). The strong normative attitude of francophones has always been an obstacle to contributions from Creole, aside from a few terms such as
vaudou
and
zombi.
The same attitude would also shut Canadianisms out of mainstream French for two centuries.

In North America, French exploration and settlement were all about fur. When beaver hats became fashionable in the sixteenth century, the craze for fur encouraged François I and, later, Henri IV to send explorers to Canada. French explorer Jacques Cartier visited Canada twice, in 1534 and 1535 (with mixed motives—still in the gold bullion era, he was seeking a northwest passage to the Pacific). But Cartier’s forays into the North American continent didn’t amount to much. The winters were harsh, there was no gold, scurvy decimated his men and he had trouble seeing how he could make a profit out of the whole business.

It was Samuel de Champlain who ushered in France’s first colonial push into the New World. He established the longest-lasting French settlement in North America in 1608, at a time when he had more than a few grey hairs under his wig. He called the settlement
l’abitation
(the habitation). He was tireless, crossing the Atlantic no fewer than twelve times and running the colony until his death in 1632. In the explorer’s first winter in Canada, scurvy killed two-thirds of his men, yet Champlain survived. He went on to gain control of the continent’s main waterway, the St. Lawrence River. To solidify France’s presence in America, he set out to create alliances with the Natives; his favourites were the Hurons, so called by the French because the men’s hair resembled a
hure
(a wild boar’s mane). To bolster his alliance with the Hurons, Champlain joined a campaign against their enemies, the Iroquois, in 1609. The Natives’ help would make it possible for the French to explore a huge swath of land that spanned the American Midwest and the Mississippi River basin.

Champlain understood that language was a key to building alliances with the Natives, and he established a tradition of learning Native languages that became the trademark of French expansion in North America. In 1610 he sent an eighteen-year-old colonist, Étienne Brûlé, to spend the winter among the Algonquin (allies of the Hurons), with instructions to learn their customs and master their language; he also brought a young Algonquin to live among the French. Champlain’s plan was to turn Brûlé into a
truchement
(interpreter). The word was a corruption of the Turkish word
tergiman
(interpreter), which the French had picked up when François I struck up an alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1520s. The next summer, Brûlé returned to Quebec “dressed as a savage” and speaking fluent Algonquian.

After the success of this early experiment, the French began sending children as young as nine or ten to learn Native languages from tribes as far away as the Illinois (in the American Midwest) or the Natchez (in present-day Alabama). French missionaries all learned at least one aboriginal tongue; it was considered the most efficient road to converting the Natives. Father Jacques Marquette, a missionary who accompanied explorer Louis Jolliet down the Mississippi River, spoke six Native languages. In contrast, early English explorers and colonists did not make a habit of learning Native languages.

Brûlé turned out to be a brilliant scout. He was the first in a long line of bold, larger-than-life French characters known as
coureurs des bois
(bush rangers). During the five years he lived among the Hurons, on present-day Lake Huron, he canoed south to Lake Ontario and the present site of Buffalo, New York. He was the first European to see Niagara Falls. He roamed the inland territory of Pennsylvania and had explored Lake Superior by 1622. Brûlé recorded none of his observations, but spoke widely of them to other colonists. He was a controversial character; one early missionary criticized him for adopting the “licentious” way of life of the Natives, and he later sided with the English against Champlain. His life ended tragically when he was murdered and eaten by his adoptive tribe for reasons that no one has established.

At the end of the seventeenth century more than eight hundred
coureurs des bois
were spread over the continent, an impressive number considering that there were only ten thousand French settlers in North America at the time. The French missionaries were their harshest critics; they particularly disapproved of the custom of paying for furs with alcohol. And the French authorities didn’t think much of this group of free spirits because they were loose cannons. As an example, two famous
coureurs des bois,
Médard Chouart des Groseilliers and Pierre-Esprit Radisson, were instrumental in the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, after they switched allegiance and sided with the English.

French explorers have become a mere footnote in American history. Yet they were the ones who really opened the path for British and American settlers, founding cities such as Minneapolis, Detroit and St. Louis. The European dream of finding a continental route to China died a slow death. One French explorer, René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, who came to New France in 1667, was so obsessed with finding the passage to China that his seigneurial estate west of Montreal was dubbed
La Chine
(now called Lachine). On his way down the Mississippi Lasalle realized that he was actually headed for the Gulf of Mexico. He was the first to link the territory at the lower end of the Mississippi, first explored by Hernando de Soto, to the upper Mississippi, which had been explored by Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet. By 1743 the La Vérendrye brothers were walking the Black Hills and they allegedly saw the Rockies.

The impact of this expansion on the French spoken in the New World was immediate. The French named most of the continent and the natural phenomena they observed there. Many French terms were picked up later by English colonists and slipped straight into English, for example,
butte, levée, depot, bison
and
Sioux. Gofer
(gopher) is a deformation of
gauffre
(waffle), which described the waffle-like holes that prairie dogs dug.
Mush,
a familiar command of dogsled drivers, comes from the French
marchez
(walk). Many names of Indian tribes in English are deformations or translations of French names, including Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Fox, Creek and Iowa, which were formerly Chiens, Pieds-noirs, Renards, Crics and Ayouhais. More than five thousand places were named by the French; most of the names were translated, like the Ozark Mountains
,
formerly Aux Arcs (itself short for Arkansas).

Settlers in New France borrowed from the tribes they were friendly with—Algonquin, Hurons and Montagnais—picking up words such as
caribou, carcajou
(wolverine),
mocassins
(moccasins),
achigan
(bass) and
sagamité
(a type of corn soup). The Iroquois contributed the name for a new sport,
lacrosse. Tabagie,
now the word for a smoke shop, came from the word for an Algonquin feast. Many of the terms the settlers picked up are still used in French Canada today, although
mocassin
became a common term in French only in the nineteenth century, under the influence of English literature.

The New World experience also led to new variations of old words. The term
sauvage
(savage) existed, but colonists and explorers soon started using terms like
sauvagesse
(a female savage) and
ensauvagement
(returning to the wild). The French names for animals such as the
chat sauvage
(wildcat) and
bête puante
(stinking beast, or skunk) have remained in use in Canada, although Canadiens also developed their own terms, such as
raton laveur
(washing rat, or raccoon) and
mouffette
(skunk). Settlers called snowshoes
raquettes
because they looked rather like the rackets of a new sport,
le jeu de paume,
French for “tennis”—a game borrowed from the French and named after the server’s call, “
Tenetz!
(Take this!)” However, while exploration brought new words, it had very little impact on the structure of the French spoken in France, which was settling down during this period, though not quite set in stone.

In New France a linguistic phenomenon was taking shape that was almost the opposite of Creole. In its early days the colonists were reputed to speak French as well as or better than it was spoken in France—this comment is almost universal in accounts of early French colonialism. Ninety percent of French people at the time lived in the countryside and spoke only a local dialect. However, unlike the slaves who were shipped to French colonies, the majority of colonists in New France came from roughly the same places—either around Paris or the major Atlantic ports of La Rochelle, Nantes and Bordeaux. The French kept thorough records of who was sent to the New World, so historians know that ninety-two percent of the colonists came from
langue d’oïl
regions. Most of them spoke Picard, Norman or Orléanais as well as French. Half the new settlers had also been city dwellers, making them a more literate and cultivated group than most French people at the time (meaning that they spoke at least some French in addition to their regional dialect). Illiteracy was still the norm in France, but most of the colonists could at least sign their names.

Today the descendants of original French settlers in North America are reputed to speak not a “pure” French but, quite the contrary, an old if not archaic French. Although this view is now greatly exaggerated, Canadian French has retained some expressions and pronunciations that in purist circles are regarded as archaisms. Quebec French would even come to be called (falsely) a patois (discussed in chapter 10). That’s not surprising, given that French speakers in North America were almost completely cut off from France near the end of the eighteenth century, and would remain that way until the middle of the twentieth century.

In a way it’s surprising that French even survived in New France. The French never did send enough colonists to the New World. In 1600 France’s population was four times larger than Britain’s. But in the New World, British settlers far outnumbered the French, right from the start. In 1620 there were already a thousand Virginians while French settlers numbered no more than a hundred in Quebec and Acadia combined. By 1700 New France had attracted only ten thousand colonists, compared to some 150,000 settlers spread out among the thirteen British colonies. In 1750 France still had more than twice Britain’s population, but New France, Acadia and Greater Louisiana had only seventy-five thousand French inhabitants, while the thirteen colonies had 1.5 million (including three hundred thousand slaves). In short, one British subject in six lived in the colonies, compared to one Frenchman in three hundred.