A Future for the French Language in Missouri
by Henry Greenstein
The Future: Relief Efforts
Dennis Stroughmatt
and the role of music in linguistic maintenance
While still a student at Southeast Missouri State, Stroughmatt stumbled upon the remnants of Missouri French culture and was immediately hooked. Stroughmatt was born in Vincennes, Indiana, at the northern edge of the Midwestern Franco-American sphere of influence. He spent countless weekends during his early adulthood apprenticing himself to speakers of the Paw-Paw dialect such as Pete "Paco" Boyer, and focusing on its musical tradition, in part because in those days, as recently as the late eighties and early nineties, there were cultural celebrations every weekend. Now, more than twenty years later, Stroughmatt has become the annual fĂȘte's most recognizable performer (he took over from his teacher in 1998), considers himself the dialect's youngest speaker, and is the public face of the dialect (as public as anything involving Paw-Paw French can really be). An excerpt of his October 2017 performance at the fĂȘte can be found here.
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To circle back to the original Louisiana-Missouri comparisons that occupy much of the historical section of this site, music has played an integral role in the preservation of Louisiana French amid similarly hostile conditions to those that drove Missouri French to the verge of extinction. Lafayette's KRVS, a college radio station, and Ville Platte's KVPI form part of a core of bilingual stations that help disseminate the Louisiana French dialect, thus maintaining its speakers' familiarity in a climate of intense, forced exposure to English in everyday life. Obviously, Missouri French has lacked such an infrastructure throughout everyday life.
Granted, Dennis Stroughmatt does not play exclusively Missourian tunes. He will mix in the occasional country standard or generically Cajun folk song. But his rare level of fluency and continued enthusiasm for propagating Paw-Paw â he recently helped teach a seminar at Wabash Valley College â allow him to stay at the forefront of Missouri French relief efforts. Because he is still relatively young compared to the vast majority of speakers, he will undoubtedly continue to play such a role for many years.
Nathanael Alire et al.
and thoughts on idealism with regard to Missouri French
Stroughmatt's monopolistic influence in the world of Missouri French is so powerful that one of the only other relief and awareness efforts out there was inspired by his work. Coloradan college student Nathanael Alire set out on an audacious quest to save Missouri French after watching Stroughmatt's videos online and becoming immediately infatuated with the dialect's distinct sound. Stroughmatt himself has moderated his expectations of the dialect's future; many of the remaining native speakers (e.g. Natalie Villmer, one of the Old Mines denizens most frequently quoted in the occasional news articles on the dialect, who has been quoted as saying "We'll lose this language") have all but resigned themselves to the demise of their native tongue, and Stroughmatt is hardly different. He primarily wants to preserve tiny bits of the distinct vocabulary, cultural customs, and of course music that set Old Mines's culture apart from anything else in the country or the world.
Alire, on the other hand, is far more ambitious. Born into a Hispanic family hailing from New Mexico with zero Francophone history, but endowed with a distinctive perspective on dying dialects thanks to the rare variety of Spanish that runs in his family, Alire started out on a similar path to Stroughmatt by apprenticing himself to a Paw-Paw speaker (in his case, De Soto's Kent Bone), but quickly diverged from Stroughmatt's musical path when he chose to partner with St. Louis teaching startup Harvest Education. It was a fortuitous pairing indeed, as Harvest's founder Brandon Curry was himself a longtime French speaker with a passion for promoting academic topics of local interest. So the pair founded Illinois Country French Preservation Inc. and began striving toward the lofty goal of resuscitating Missouri French. They set up classes, both in once-proud Ste. Genevieve with its rows of still-standing colonial French houses and in the modern urban setting of the Central West End, where Harvest was headquartered. They supplemented their course offerings with private lessons given by Alire himself as well translation services from one Chris Valdivieso and soon received publicity on platforms such as St. Louis Public Radio, where they boasted about teaching aspiring speakers from ages 12 to 93 (move over, "youngest speaker" Stroughmatt!). Curry once said of himself and Alire, "We are young and stupid in the sense that we want to do these grand things, and we donât have any realists here telling us we canât." For quite a while, this bold approach seemed to be going smoothly.
But around March of this past year, their Facebook and Twitter pages went dead, their fellow Wix site (linked to the button above) stopped updating, and they were no longer being interviewed for local or national publications. (They also did not respond to an email I sent them during the production of this website.) If social media presence is any indication, the two founders seem to have moved on from their promising project. Despite an extremely auspicious start, for all the talk of "saving a culture" and "doubling speakers," the light of Illinois Country French Preservation Inc. has gone dim, and taken with it any hope of public exposure for the struggling Paw-Paw dialect.
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Perhaps a future of being remembered only through the occasional unique phrase or catchy folk song is in fact what awaits Missouri French, and Stroughmatt's more modest approach is truly the way to go. It's certainly worked in Louisiana, which in 2012 continued to boast more than 150,000 speakers even in the face of comprehensive budget cuts to French-language programs from then-governor Bobby Jindal. I tend to agree with Stroughmatt that when dealing with a dialect in straits as dire as those of Paw-Paw French, spreading knowledge of cultural roots is most important â hence the genesis of this project in the first place. Though the dialect's stigmatization is what put it in such a severe situation to begin with, its pure anonymity since CarriĂšre's 1939 study has kept it there. And now that the glimmer of hope presented by Alire and company seems to have faded, it is essential that more people learn about this distinctly American variety of the French language, couched in three centuries of history, so that the Franco-American culture of Old Mines may remain toujours icitte.