L’Anse-à-Canards

The Newfoundland Acadian French variety is spoken on the Port-au-Port peninsula by descendents of both Acadian settlers from Cape Breton and the Magdalen Islands and European settlers from Lower Normandy and Brittany. This variety is relatively young since Acadian colonization of the region began towards the end of the 18th century while European French settlers arrived a century later. We refer to it as Franco-Acadian since, while clearly an Acadian variety, it also has a number of linguistic features found in northern France at the turn of the 20th century.

This mixed heritage includes traditions and customs related to everyday life (e.g. fishing techniques, calendar customs) which are also found in the other communities which are part of this research program. Also part of this heritage are verbal arts (e.g. traditional folktales and folksongs) which recall the Brittany and Lower Normandy ancestral heritage. Our research has shown that this latter group played an important role in the formation of the L’Anse-à-Canards variety and that of neighbouring communities.

While the French-speaking population of the region was never large, until the mid-20th century it was stable due to geographic isolation. Our own door-to-door surveys in the 1980s for all three peninsular francophone communities (Cap St-Georges, La Grand’Terre and L’Anse-à-Canards along with surrounding areas) found that the number of French speakers was about 600 in total. A generation later, that number had decreased even further due to linguistic assimilation to English on the part of younger community members. Despite these assimilatory forces which threaten the survival of the local language variety, Newfoundland’s Franco-Acadian population, including L’Anse-à-Canards residents, remain strongly attached to their heritage.

Références :

Butler, G. R. (1995). Histoire et traditions orales des Franco-Acadiens de Terre-Neuve. Québec: Septentrion.

King, R. (2013). Acadian French in Time and Space. Durham: Duke University Press.