In northern Maine's St. John River Valley, many families trace their lineage back to the Acadians, members of a French ethnic group who arrived in the late 1700s after the British banished them from what are now the eastern Canadian provinces.
But a living piece of that lineage — Acadian French — is fading as many fluent speakers grow older. One high school French teacher from Fort Fairfield, however, is racing to preserve the language for future generations.
Earlier this summer, about a dozen French teachers from Maine, Florida, and Washington State donned period costumes for a living history reenactment at the Acadian Village in Van Buren.
It's the culmination of a weeklong immersion in Acadian culture, language and history organized by Fort Fairfield French teacher Jonna Boure, with help from the American Association of Teachers of French.
Seated at a table inside a dirt floor log cabin from the 1700s, Boure, who is also a tour guide at the village, said she's on a mission to raise the profile of an often overlooked variant of French.
"I never knew anything about Acadians," she said. "I was a French literature major. And I think that we need to expand what we know about the Francophone world."
Boure said Acadian French is mostly an oral, as opposed to written, language, and that centuries of cultural isolation and displacement led to distinct vocabulary and phrasing.
"Sometimes they've really smushed together some of the words," she said. "It's unrecognizable to someone who speaks standard French only because their ear isn't attuned to it."
She said it's also peppered with nautical terms, reflecting the Acadians' history as a seafaring people.
"For instance, the word for window in standard French is 'fenêtre.' They would have used 'chassis', and a chassis is more like a window that you have on a ship or porthole," Boure said.
But she said these particularities have worked against the language. Many speakers, Boure said, have been told that Acadian French, known locally as Valley French, is an incorrect version of French.
And in 1919, the state imposed a ban on speaking French in school, which remained in effect until 1969.
"I remember this," André Morrow, who grew up in Grand Isle. "I was probably in first grade, coming home crying. 'They won't let me speak French.'"
Morrow said his first exposure to English came through TV shows like Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street.
"At home it was always French, or even in the town it was always French, because most of the older folks was all French. A lot of them didn't know English," he said.
Morrow said for his generation, French and English would often mix, into what some call "Franglish." He cited one example, from his childhood.
"I'll say it in English first. Our parents would say sometimes, 'Go ride bike on the sidewalk and be back to the house when the street lights come on,'" Morrow said. "Translated in our well, in my language, would have been 'Va rider a bicycle sur sidewalk puis viens back a maison quand les street lights viennent on.' So it's both. And we still talk like that today."
And Morrow said he's come to feel pride in Valley French, relishing the idioms that give it its unique character.
"Let's say somebody is very energetic," he said. "We'll say 'Lui il en a dans canis.' So that means, 'his gas can is full.'"
But Morrow said he has fewer and fewer people with whom to share those idioms, as the younger generations, including his own grandchildren, lose touch with their ancestral language.
He said that makes preservation efforts all the more important. But it also raises a question.
"Are we going to teach them the Acadian French of their parents and grandparents, or are we going to introduce them to a — I hate the word — a more 'standard' French or something that might seem like international French, Parisian French or Quebec French?" said Patrick Lacroix, director of the Acadian Archives at the University of Maine at Fort Kent.
Lacroix said he doesn't expect everyone to start speaking Valley French again. But he says the language can, and should be preserved for those interested in learning it.
"I think it's provoked a lot of really beneficial thinking about what we can do and be more intentional about what we do to pass on the culture," he said.
That's where the Acadian immersion tour for French teachers comes in.
Ed Michaud, a teacher from Southwest Harbor, said visiting the Valley for the first time, and staying with a local Acadian French-speaking family, has given him a new appreciation for this unique corner of the Francophone world.
"It's a living cultural entity that's happening right in front of us," Michaud said. "And I think it's something to be respected and treasured."
It's a lesson he plans to bring back to the classroom this fall.
