Cajun French

Cajun French, more formally Louisiana French, is the French once spoken by most of the population of French Louisiana and still heard today mainly in the Acadiana region of southern Louisiana and in adjoining parishes of southeastern Texas. It developed from the speech of Acadian exiles deported from Nova Scotia in the 18th century, blended over time with the French of earlier Louisiana colonists, enslaved and free people of color, and Native American peoples such as the Choctaw and Houma. Marked by an alveolar r rather than the uvular r of Parisian French, by the emphatic pronoun forms vous-autres and eux-autres, and by extensive Choctaw and English borrowing, the variety has declined sharply since the mid-20th century, from roughly a million speakers in the 1960s to well under 150,000 today, and UNESCO now lists it as severely endangered.