New England French () is a variety of French spoken in the New England region of the United States. It descends from Canadian French because it originally came from French Canadians who immigrated to New England during the Grande Hémorragie.
New England French is one of the major forms of the French language that developed in what is now the United States, the others being Louisiana French and the nearly extinct Missouri French, Muskrat French and Métis French. The dialect is the predominant form of French spoken in New England (apart from standard French), except in the Saint John Valley of northern Aroostook County, Maine, where Brayon French predominates.
The dialect is endangered. After the First World War, laws were instituted banning immersive bilingual teaching outside of dedicated foreign-language classes, and during the 1960s and 1970s some public schools disciplined students for speaking French in school; however, in recent years it has seen renewed interest and is supported by bilingual education programs in place since 1987. A continuing trend of reduced bilingual and foreign-language education has affected the language's prevalence in younger generations. However, cultural programs in recent years have led to renewed interest between older generations speaking the dialect, and the language has also been bolstered by newly arrived refugee populations from Francophone Africa in cities such as Lewiston.
History Early history
Dating back to the earliest colonial period, a French presence remained in New England with its proximity to Quebec, even after many Acadians were exiled in Le Grand Dérangement and later settled in Spanish Louisiana. Although the French and Indian War would leave distance between the Yankee and Franco settlers, the role of France in the American Revolution as well as the contributions of French military figures like Rochambeau in the Siege of Yorktown, engendered an alliance against Loyalists at that time.
Early figures from French stock who would become a part of the American narrative included Peter Faneuil, Gov. James Bowdoin, and Paul Revere, all descendants of Huguenots who fled persecution to the New World. However, while Faneuil and Bowdoin both spoke fluently, the latter encouraged his son James Bowdoin III to learn the language, but was described as decidedly pro-British after the Revolution, for his disdain at France's reversion of the Edict of Nantes. In contrast, born to a French household, Revere (anglicized from Rivoire) only spoke the English of the Bay Province, though he had family who spoke the French language in Boston and overseas, and would correspond with them, having replies translated for him.
The French language remained extant in Boston during its time as a British colony, though not abundant, one reason being a fear of the influence of Catholicism; academically this prevented the language from gaining early acceptance at Harvard, when its first instructor was dismissed in 1735, after two years of teaching, due to rumors of converting students from Protestantism. Six decades later, one of the first publishers of a French textbook in the Americas was Harvard's first salaried French instructor, Joseph Nancrède, who compiled then-contemporary French texts and published them alongside limited English translations in his L'Abeille Françoise in 1792. Years before, in 1789, Nancrède established the first French newspaper of Boston, a short-lived weekly published for six months that year which he described in its prospectus as a means to foster commerce between the Americans and French-speaking world, and "to convey adequate ideas of the Majesty of Congress to nations who scarcely know that there is one existing."
Outside of Boston, prior to the Industrial Revolution and the Second Industrial Revolution, the influence of French settlers in New England was diminished almost entirely following the end of the French and Indian War and the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which gave control of the region to the British. During this time many of Vermont's earliest settlers returned to Quebec; however, the Vermont Archaeological Society has noted in the past that a small number of French remained settled, at farms too remote to meet the notice of the fledgling colonial government. Similarly, Maine was claimed by the French to the east of the Kennebec River, and during the expulsion of the Acadians, French culture largely left that landscape as well.
Prior to the Great Migration of the Québécois during the Second Industrial Revolution, one of the earliest examples of New England French arose from the Papineau Rebellion in Lower Canada. Following the rebellion, Ludger Duvernay, one of the 26 patriot leaders arrested by Canadian authorities for printing articles critical of the British colonial government, went into exile in the States. Formerly publishing La Minerve in Montreal, he issued a prospectus for a French-language paper in 1838, hoping Americans would support a journal that promoted civil rights and independence in Lower Canada. He set up in Burlington, Vermont, what was described as the first French-Canadian American newspaper, publishing the first issue of Le Patriote Canadien on August 7, 1839, for both Canadians across the border and a patriot community in the United States.
The Great Migration
Beginning in the late 1840s, greater numbers of French Canadians began to settle in the States, at first for seasonal agricultural jobs, and then eventually brought in by horse and later train, to serve as factory workers for the large mill towns being built by the Boston Associates and others all across the six New England states. By 1899 there were reportedly 120 French-language parishes in New England, and by that time of the 1.5 million people of French-speaking Canada, about 600,000 had migrated to the U.S., primarily to New England.Sacha Richard, "American Perspectives on La fièvre aux États-Unis, 1860–1930: A Historiographical Analysis of Recent Writings on the Franco-Americans in New England." Canadian Review of American Studies (2002) 32#1 pp: 105-132. To a degree these newcomers integrated and learned the English language; however, La Survivance also endured. On the eve of the Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1881 Carroll D. Wright described the newly-arrived French as the "Chinese of the Eastern States" for their refusal to entirely integrate, the use of their labor by mill owners to subvert union wages, and the creation of separate French-language institutions. This statement would serve as a flashpoint of controversy for decades, but others in the Yankee political class would welcome the newcomers, with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge remarking in a 1908 immigration speech to the Boston City Club that they "represent one of the oldest settlements on this continent. They have been, in the broad sense, Americans for generations, and their coming to the United States is merely a movement of Americans across an imaginary line." Industrial cities as large as Fall River, Massachusetts, and as small as Somersworth, New Hampshire, would often have bilingual signs, and American customs such as baseball gradually adopted by younger generations had their own francized jargon, with it being as common for a muff to be met with an outcry of "sacré nom" by spectators.
One of the earliest examples of New England French being differentiated from Canadian French and Acadian French came in an 1898 study in Johns Hopkins University's Modern Language Notes, noting variants of phonology, and studies would continue sporadically covering vocabulary into the late 20th century. By 1924, approximately 1.5 million people, regardless of origin, spoke French in New England, which at the 1920 US Census was recorded at 7.4 million residents, placing the proportion of French speakers at about one-fifth of the population, or nearly the same proportion as that of French speakers in Canada in 2016.
Historical newspapers
During the late 19th through mid-20th centuries, the dialect was supported with more than 250 French newspapers extant in New England, many being published weekly and only seeing publication for a few years, while some would endure from the late 1800s and early 1900s into the interwar period, with 21 newspapers and four monthlies in existence in 1937, and a handful publishing through the 1960s, such as Le Messager in Lewiston, Maine, L'Indépendant in Fall River, Massachusetts, and La Justice in Holyoke, Massachusetts. However, competition with the daily English press, a lack of public support from non-speakers, and the availability of larger Quebec publications like La Presse in Montreal led to a gradual decline of the New England French newspaper trade. In one 1936 editorial in the Woonsocket L'Union, the editorship described an apathy that had set in with the French community in response to an increase in advertising for financial support-
"Our press is barely able to maintain itself ... One of our weeklies has just expired; others live almost exclusively on ads; many get only blame and denigration in return for the free publicity they give to Franco-American works ... It's all the hostility, the apathy, the indifference of Franco-Americans that prevent our newspapers from achieving perfection ... Their defects come from their relative helplessness rather than from their incompetence."
Many of these ads would increasingly appear in English, and changing mediums like radio, as well as a frustration with the helpless financial situation leading to more ads only aggravated the decline. One exception to this was Lewiston's Le Messager, whose publisher-owner, Jean-Baptiste Couture, founded central Maine's first, and New England's only radio station owned by a Franco-American weekly, WCOU, in 1938. The bilingual WCOU would outlive the paper, broadcasting regular French programming through at least 1972. A few newspapers were able to retain a readership beyond the 1960s independently. This included Le Travailleur, a Worcester French-language weekly that folded in 1978 which, in its final years, could hardly be described as in the tradition of its predecessors, as it was mainly syndicated news from France. During a period of revival in preserving New England French in academia and civics, the Ligue des Sociétés de Langue Française ("League of French Language Societies") in Lewiston launched its monthly L'Unité, which published from 1976 through 1984. The only New England French news outlet to endure into the emergence of the internet was Le Journal de Lowell; founded in 1975, the monthly paper would continue to produce French-language content, including the translation of English ads, until December 1995, when it abruptly ceased publication.
Decline A combination of cultural and economic forces would drive a decline in the use of the French language in New England through the end of the 20th century. Attitudes varied among Anglophone Yankees. During a speech in 1891 in Boston, Canadian Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier urged a French-Canadian audience, "One of the things that is absolutely essential is to study the English language, the language of [this] country...most of you, if you are now over a million on this side of the 45th line, you have not come for any other object than that of earning your daily bread. So, while not losing the memory of your origin, remember that you have duties to fulfill as citizens of the Republic and that you must love your adopted homeland."