If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That: The Creole Language of Pointe Coupee, Louisiana.
By Tom Klingler.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. 627 pages. $75.00.

Tom Klingler’s If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That: The Creole Language of Pointe Coupee, Louisiana is a remarkable scholarly celebration of the language, history, and culture of the Louisiana Creole spoken in rural Pointe Coupee Parish, northwest of present-day Baton Rouge. Klingler, a professor of French at Tulane University, reviews the story of the African slaves who were forcibly transported to the Louisiana colony, then examines the language which they fashioned for themselves in the process of becoming a people.

A creole is a new language that may form when one group of people seeks to learn the spoken language of another group. One well-known set of creoles appeared throughout the Caribbean during the development by various European powers of slave dependent colonial economies. The slaves spoke various African languages, while their masters spoke one or another European language, depending on the colony. As the subordinate group, the Africans were expected to learn the language of their masters, not the other way around. However, when adults attempt to learn to speak a language without specific instruction, the result is predictably imperfect: such learners get the words of the target language, but arrange the words into novel sequences, change the meanings, and fail to reproduce the pronunciation accurately. Thus, a creole based on French words will sound to a French speaker like a “broken” form of French: he can identify many French-sounding words but cannot make sense of the speech.

A creole, however, is not broken; rather, it is a new language, a hybrid, with its own regularities and grammar and it can satisfy all the uses of another human language. A creole may serve its speakers as a central symbol of group identity and of culture. Once formed, a creole changes over time just as other languages do. Likewise, it prospers or declines with the fortunes of the people who speak it, and it dies, should all its speakers shift to the use of another language.

Louisiana Creole arose in the 18th century within the colonial agricultural society of French Louisiana. The language has been spoken for over three hundred years, at first by the slave community that created it, later also by the freed slaves and their descendants, and at least in Pointe Coupee Parish, it has been taken up by whites as well. This persistent language is poised, however, to disappear within another two generations: today, all Louisiana Creole speakers also speak English, and almost no families are passing the creole on to their children. Thus, Klingler’s study captures Pointe Coupe Louisiana Creole at a point where it is still dear in the hearts of its remaining older speakers but has lost its allure and its usefulness for younger generations, whose lives will be lived in English.

The astonishing amount of material Klingler presents is organized in a modular fashion which makes it easily accessible to the specialist and the general reader alike. Separate sections are devoted to the history and sociology of slavery in the New World, competing theories of how creolization happens, the structure of Louisiana Creole, and transcriptions, complete with English translations, of recorded conversations in the language. Each of the sections can be read as a stand-alone treatment of one aspect of the study. For many readers, the late 20th-century Louisiana Creole speakers’ experiences, humor, and philosophy as revealed in the conversations will by themselves be worth the price of the book. Explanatory notes, a glossary of Louisiana Creole words, an extensive historical and linguistic bibliography, and a detailed index round out the volume.

Rebecca Larche Moreton