The older generation

For hundreds of years, Cajuns were monolingual French speakers who lived in rural settlements where they were either the dominant group or the only group. It was some of our oldest speakers (the majority born before 1930) who first experienced the pressure to change their language at least to the extent of learning English. These first users of English were judged most harshly on their French and their English abilities. Men and women alike learned English as a second language but most would have had little use for it. All of them use a high rate of all of the CajVE features and there is no gender differentiation. The way they spoke English was unremarkable until the outside world began to impinge on the consciousness of the close-knit communities of southern Louisiana. Their variety of CajVE has little directly to do with the usual understanding of language change in progress except for two crucial facts: they, along with the generation earlier than theirs, begin the process of the creation of CajVE, and their ways of speaking provide the source for future change. The actual linguistic forms they use are relevant to what happens in the succeeding generations.