Introduction

French is the fourth most common non-English language spoken in the US (Table 1.1). However, it is also one of the four languages among the top twelve that experienced a decline in the number of speakers between 1990 and 2000, and again between 2000 and 2007. This is due to both low levels of immigration of French speakers to the USA and also low rates of intergenerational transmission of the language. This chapter provides a general presentation of French in the USA with a focus on two communities established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have endured to the present: the New England and Louisianan Franco-American communities, where there still exists some severely limited intergenerational transmission of the local vernacular bolstered by grassroots efforts to maintain and revitalize these varieties. Brief mention will be made of small geographically isolated communities where the local vernacular is moribund. After exploring the history of French in the USA, this chapter provides demographic information about the various communities, the public presence of French, and aspects of language shift and language attrition that affect these various communities.

History

Numerous French place names including Butte, Des Moines, Eau Claire, Terre Haute, and Baton Rouge serve as an eloquent testimony to the former French presence on the territory that forms a large part of the present-day USA. But even though French coureurs des bois, (adventurers, hunters, and fur traders) from present-day Québec province criss-crossed much of the territory during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they have left few linguistic traces except for these toponyms.