[Acajack]

Second part of the answer on how it is having conversations in French with those Cajuns who still speak the language...

I've had a number of conversations with older Cajuns in French. By and large their French is very antiquated and colloquial. It's how I imagine rural people in Quebec spoke 150 years ago. We can still understand each other but it takes a bit of work.

It's not always easy to find them even in the areas where the stats tell you lots of people speak French. My sense is that there is still a lingering reticence about speaking French out in public. It's happened a few times that I overheard people talking in French and when we approached they switched to English between themselves. (I recall some francophones living outside Quebec used to do this when I was a kid - but this practice has all but disappeared.)

There is also within the Cajun community an activist component who speak French with the Cajun accent but with vocabular and grammar that is closer to the international standard. The most famous Cajun singer Zachary Richard from the Lafayette area is like this. He is totally "plug and play" linguistically for TV interviews in both Montreal and Paris.

One thing is that the kids who've gone through the CODOFIL programs I mentioned above don't usually speak French with much of a Cajun accent. Unless they also speak French at home - which is a rarity down there. So they often sound like anglo French immersion kids in Canada!

What's interesting in Louisiana is how knowledge of French is "bookended" generationally. The French speakers are concentrated at both ends of the age pyramid, and almost no one in the middle (my age and people 15-20 years younger or older than me) speaks French.