GO TO BED! Y’ALL FROM SHREVEPORT?
(am I the only person who just randomly blurts this out?!)
The Princess and The Frog was the second film I’ve watched that has Louisiana Creole/Kouri-Vini on the big screen! (although some of it maybe Louisiana French—I think). Or at least I think the film is showcasing Kouri-Vini. I could be so wrong because my ear could be mixing KV and French.
I hadn’t realized till now that the captions for the Kouri-Vini dialogue isn’t exactly captured. Maybe the tv version of the film does it but the DVD of the film doesn’t. Some parts actually will have (Speaking French) in the captions when either Dr. Facilier or Ray speaks non-English.
Raymond’s Cajun accent is so on point lol! The pronunciation of Ray-Mòn is on point!! That lil firefly is super country! I for real laugh out loud everytime “Go to bed! Y’all from Shreveport” comes up!!! Shreveport is sooo north of the boot that many Louisianians, jokingly, don’t even consider it’s in the state, ha! And Dr. Facilier’s Kouri-Vini is good! He’s definitely the Creole unc! He kinda sounded like my late great-grandmothers and my late mamaw! The Creole inflections are pretty good to say Keith David isn’t from Louisiana! (I’m still trying to figure out if Ray is speaking like a combination of Louisiana French and Kouri-Vini or it’s Cajun itself —maybe an expert can educate me on that; I’m unlearned on a lot of the Louisiana languages)
Louisiana accents are so colorful! And each parish, heck, each city and region all over the state has unique accents! Even within the same region there are different accents & dialects. Ray’s Cajun accent is so Cajun coated/coded too! And it always fascinates me how much you can gather from peoples’ accents & dialects and inflection of speech etc…Ray, that’s a white firefly lol, you can tell! I’ve read that Creoles are Black and Cajuns are white isn’t entirely exclusive as that because there can be some Black Cajuns and there can be white Creoles but I’m not positive on that.
Two small things—I would’ve spelled cousin Beaudreaux as Boudreaux and Grandmama as Grandmamaw. But the surname Boudreaux has so many different variations that it isn’t inaccurate. I just grew up only seeing Boudreaux (from all the different parishes and cities I grew up in; had a grade school teacher named Mrs. Boudreaux, classmates with their last names spelled that way too).
I think when it comes to film and casting for specific movies that are set in the South, people tend to just think, “okay, just sound country”….NOOOO! The South has its own accents but then it gets broken down even further to state accents and then regional accents! You can’t just be so undetailed like that. They’ll be characters that’s supposed to be from Louisiana but sound like they from Alabama. Or when it’s a New Orleans based show, there’s not one person that sounds like Toya Wright or Big Freedia. Please bring back Southern accent & dialect coaches in the industry!
I’m hoping as our beautiful, ancestral, indigenous Louisiana Creole, lineage language continues to be taught, practiced & learned (to preserve it because it’s endangered [one form of it has been extinct]; I hope Louisiana officially makes it a part of school curriculum —I’m trying my very best to learn it too) that movies and tv starts to make more effort in accurately translating it in closed captions (as well as in script/screenplay; I looked at the TPATF screenplay and it doesn’t really write it out either).
*I adore hearing chère (although I spell it sha)
