More years ago than I care to believe I worked for a while as a foreign language assistant in a small place in the Ardèche, Southern France, trying to get recalcitrant French teenagers to speak English. Not too recalcitrant, they actually wanted to communicate out of lessons more than during lessons. Anyway, that’s by the by. I wanted to comment on the fact that I would occasionally hear people calling their dogs in what sounded more like Spanish than French. The local patois had a lot of Spanish in it, like so many regional dialects in Southern Europe a mix of all sorts of romance languages.
This morning I came across this article about a school in Louisiana where they teach Indian French as well as standard French. It’s part of a programme to reinforce the local community. It’s only a small school and most of the students belong to the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe, which for centuries has integrated Indigenous words for the plants and animals, native to the bayous, with French. The tribe itself is small, about 850 members, about half of them speaking Indian French but most of those speakers are over 60. It’s the old story of children going to school and being punished for speaking their local dialect - Melvin Bragg spoke about speaking Cumbrian dialect until he went to school and had to quickly adapt to “proper” English. Now all over the place they are trying to preserve the old languages. The Pointe-au-Chien ancestral village was badly damaged by a hurricane in 2021 and many people moved away. The elders hope that this new initiative will keep their community together.
Now, back to an old moan about weather. Drought or downpour seems to be the only possibility for rainfall. We have an awful lot. Galicia in North West Spain has an awful lot. We complain about it an awful lot. My Spanish sister, resident in Cadiz, South East Spain, round the corner onto the Atlantic, complains that they don’t get enough. Much of Southern Spain suffers in the same way, but not just the South, also Catalonia and the East of the country. Here’s a link to an article about Barcelona, where they have regulations about conserving water and notices reminding people that “l’aigua no cau del cel” - Catalan (another nicely mixed regional language) for “water doesn’t fall from the sky”, as it patently is not doing so at present and is causing all sorts of problems.
Climate change is affecting us all. We can’t ignore it. And it’s one of the driving forces behind the movement of people seeking a better place to live - not the only one by any means but one we must remember when we complain about migrants.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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