Baie Sainte-Marie

Situated along the shores of St. Mary’s Bay in southwest Nova Scotia, the Municipality of Clare (also called the Baie Sainte-Marie region) is an Acadian community permanently settled from 1768 following Acadians’ return after the Grand dérangement. Some works on the history of the community show that a substantial proportion of the founding population was born in nearby Port-Royal or in exile, mainly in New England. The settlement of Baie Sainte-Marie occurred fairly rapidly, with thirty founding families having been granted lots of land by the mid-1770s. The community was expanded further south in subsequent decades by the second generation who had already settled in the region. Unlike our other research sites, there weren’t multiple waves of migration of francophones (Acadian or otherwise).

The pattern of settlement means that, unlike many other Acadian communities, including the other communities examined in this programme of research, the population of Baie Sainte-Marie did not find themselves in intense contact with other varieties of French. This explains, in part, why the Baie Sainte-Marie variety retains a number of linguistic features which have disappeared from other spoken varieties of French, including other varieties of Acadian French.

Baie Sainte-Marie has maintained a vibrant Acadian culture with many local francophone artists, musicians, filmmakers, and authors. French-language education has also been available to Baie Sainte-Marie residents to varying degrees since the first half of the 19th century. While French is spoken by a minority of the population of Nova Scotia, French remains the majority language in the Baie Sainte-Marie region, according to the 2016 Canada Census. Given the important number of French-language institutions, services and celebrations (e.g., Université Sainte-Anne, community radio station Radio-CIFA, Le Courrier de la Nouvelle-Écosse, the Festival acadien de Clare—the oldest Acadian festival), French is still widely spoken in this particular Acadian community. Indeed, Baie Sainte-Marie is today the Acadian region of Nova Scotia with the largest population of francophones.

Références

Deveau, J. A. (1968). Clare ou la ville française – Tome 1: les premiers cent ans. Québec: Éditions Ferland.

Flikeid, K. (1994). Origines et évolution du français acadien à la lumière de la diversité contemporaine. In R. Mougeon, & B. Édouard (Eds.), Les origines du français québécois (pp. 275–326). Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval.

Ross, S., & Deveau, J. A. (1995). The Acadians of Nova Scotia, Past and Present. Halifax: Nimbus Publishing.