Celebrating a remarkable man and his work

The Town of Welsh will mark this week one of the events that many people think was pivotal in the effort to keep Cajun French alive. The Friends of the Welsh Museum are sponsoring a celebration of the town’s designation by the state legislature as the home of the dictionary of the Cajun language.
That dictionary was published in 1984 by Monsignor Jules O. Daigle, affectionately known as Père Daigle, who was pastor of Our Lady of Seven Dolors Church in Welsh for 44 years. The events on Wednesday begin appropriately enough with a 5:30 p.m. Mass to be followed by a reception at the Welsh Museum at 202 E. South St., where an exhibit concerning Daigle’s life and work will be on display.
Beginning in 1974 he spent 10 years of his life and $20,000 of his own money to publish his first Dictionary of the Cajun Language (Edwards Brothers, Ann Arbor, Michigan), a 600-page tome that made his name all but synonymous with the effort to not only keep alive Cajun French but to gain respectability for it.
One of his biggest peeves was over people who claim Cajun French is “bad French.” Saying that, he insisted, is the same as saying Italian is “bad Latin.” His book was the first large-scale attempt to record the language developed over the centuries since the Acadians came to Louisiana.
He said in its introduction that he wrote it “for the purpose of preserving the Cajun language as it was spoken here before it began to deteriorate after World War II.” The language of his dictionary, he said, “is the Cajun that most of my contemporaries and I have spoken for the past 84 years.” (He lived to the ripe old age of 97.)
Not everyone agreed with everything he said. Père Daigle maintained, for example, that “Cajun French is a rich language with many words for one and the same thing.” He disagreed with linguists and others who say geographical isolation and other factors have caused the original French brought here by the Acadians to splinter into at least two dialects, “bayou Cajun” and “prairie Cajun,” and possibly more than that.
When it was first published, Daigle’s dictionary and his reasons for publishing it put him at odds with some of the folks at the Council for Development of French in Louisiana and others, who thought it best to teach our children the French spoken in Paris today rather than the French spoken yesterday by Père Daigle and his contemporaries. The argument over which French to teach still creates sparks in some circles.
But whichever side of that argument you are on, there is no getting around that Father Daigle was Cajun through and through, that he was proud of it, and that he played a large role in the revival of the culture.
It appears now that distinctive parts of that culture have been pulled back from the brink of extinction, especially what’s known as Cajun cooking and Cajun music (though both combine elements from a number of cultures).
It is less certain, in fact, unlikely, that Cajun French will be kept alive in the sense that it will be as commonly heard on the streets as it once was. But, because of the work of Father Daigle and others, neither will it be irretrievably lost. We will always have a record of the language spoken by our grandparents and great-grandparents, and, through it, a reflection of their lives and times.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.