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The causes of language death are numerous, though not usually difficult to figure: TV, urbanization, government oppression, stupidity, neglect, illiteracy, upward mobility, and the desire to leave less prestigious languages behind. Conditions unique to the modern world have rapidly accelerated the pace of language extinction.
As for what's to be done to preserve dying tongues, the authors' advice is fairly straightforward in theory if more cumbersome in practice: "identify and stabilize languages under threat so that they can be transmitted to the next generation in as many functions as possible" (Nettle and Romaine); "An endangered language will progress if its speakers increase their prestige within the dominant community" (Crystal); "Minority groups who have retained control over their schooling, such as the Old Order Amish in Pennsylvania, have … shown greater language maintenance than those who have not" (Nettle and Romaine); "An endangered language will progress if its speakers can make use of electronic technology" (Crystal); and so on.
Obviously, linguists themselves can't do much more than document endangered languages before they vanish. Kevin Rottet, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, asserts that "only native speakers can [save their languages], mainly by speaking their language to their small children." Crystal, Nettle, Romaine, and Rottet agree that linguists would do the world a favor if many of them shifted their attention from large, majority languages to the endangered kind. And Rottet is playing his part: a coeditor of the Dictionary of Louisiana Creole, he is now working with other linguists on a dictionary of Cajun, and he aspires to teach Welsh to North Americans with an interest in that ancient, endangered, and famously difficult tongue.
Unlike Welsh—which, almost uniquely among languages that were in sure decline 30 years ago, is making something of a comeback—the future of Cajun French and Creole in Louisiana isn't bright. There are very few speakers of either language under 50 years of age, Rottet told me in an interview, "and not enough concentrated in most areas to form a speech community in any useful sense once the older speakers have passed on."
As is in true in many places where old tongues are languishing, there is a movement afoot (spearheaded by the Council on the Development of French in Louisiana) to preserve French in Louisiana, though it's impossible to predict the long-term effect of this effort. Most Cajuns and Creoles do not read French, so even if the movement to preserve Louisiana's French dialects was successful, it would most likely alter the French currently spoken in Louisiana; many of the teachers who work in Louisiana's several French immersion schools are from France, Belgium, and Quebec, and they teach standard, not Cajun, French.
One thing that makes the future of Creole particularly bleak is that it is the least prestigious of Louisiana's historic languages. Spoken primarily by blacks (though some whites who grew up under the care of black mammies also speak it), Creole is associated with poverty and backwardness whereas in recent years Cajun speakers have enjoyed relatively greater upward mobility. Also, unlike Cajun, which is a true French dialect that can be understood by patient French speakers from Europe and Quebec, Creole is a language unto itself. The bulk of its vocabulary is French, though it has also drawn words from Spanish, various Native American languages, and, of course, English. But Creole's grammar is unlike that of any of these languages.
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