Chiac

Acadian
Chiac
Native to	Canada
Region	Acadian communities throughout the Maritime provinces, mainly around Moncton, Shediac and Memramcook
Native speakers	Unknown
Language family	Indo-European Italic Romance Western Gallo-Iberian Gallo-Romance Gallo-Rhaetian Oïl French Canadian French Acadian
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Linguasphere	51-AAA-am

Chiac is a variety of Acadian French heavily mixed and structured with English. It is spoken as the native and dominant language of most Acadians in southeast New Brunswick, especially among youth, near Moncton, Dieppe, Grande-Digue, Memramcook and Shediac. It is a more recent development of the French language, spurred by exposure to dominant English-language media (radio, television, internet) and increased urbanization to Moncton and contact with the dominant Anglophone community in the area since the 1960s especially. The word itself is generally considered a derivation of the name "Shediac", a town in the area.

The roots and base of Chiac are Acadian French, a spoken French often tinged with nautical terms (e.g. haler, embarquer), reflecting the historic importance of the sea to the local economy, as well as older French words (e.g., bailler, quérir, hucher, gosier), many deemed archaic by the Académie Française, testimony to three centuries of relative isolation of Acadian communities from French influence. The collected works of Goncourt Prize-winner Antonine Maillet, and her play La Sagouine in particular, illustrate very well this variation of French. What sets Chiac apart from Acadian French is that it is a vernacular French mixed with English. It uses primarily French syntax with French-English vocabulary and phrase forms (see below). It is often deprecated by both French and English speakers as an ill-conceived hybrid — either "bad" French or "bad" English. See franglais for a wider discussion of this phenomenon.

Chiac has been embraced in recent years by some Acadian groups as a living and evolving language, and part of their collective culture. Acadian writers, poets and musicians such as France Daigle, Zero Celsius, Paul Bossé, Fayo and 1755 have produced works in Chiac.

Recently, Chiac has also made its way onto local television with Acadieman, a comedy about "The world's first Acadian Superhero" by Dano Leblanc. The animated series, also a comic book, contains a mixture of Anglophone, Francophone, and "Chiacophone" characters. The popular Acadian rap group Radio Radio have also raised the profile of Chiac by rapping almost exclusively in that language. "Acadian" French has been greatly influenced by Chiac as it has spread especially among the younger generations.

Example sentences

• "Ej vas tanker mon truck de soir pis ej va le driver. Ça va être right dla fun." (I'm going to fill up my truck tonight and take it for a drive. That will be lots of fun.)
• "Espère-moi su'l'corner, j'traverse le chmin pi j'viens right back." (Wait for me on the corner, I'm crossing the road and I'll be right back.)
• "Zeux ils pensont qu'y ownont le car." (Them, they think they own the car.)
• "On va amarrer ça d'même pour faire sûr que ça tchenne." (We will tie it like this to make sure it stays.)
• "Ca t'tente tu d'aller watcher un movie?" (Do you want to go see a movie?)
• "Ej ché pas...so quesque tu va faire dessoir?" (I don't know. What are you doing tonight?)

Films

• Éloge du chiac, by Michel Brault, NFB, 1969 (27 minutes)
• Éloge du chiac Part II, by Marie Cadieux, 2009 (77 minutes)

See also

• Gøtudanskt - Danish language as spoken in the Faroe Islands
• Portuñol - A mixed language that combines Spanish and Portuguese and is spoken in border areas of various countries (such as Brazil and Uruguay, Spain and Portugal) where the two languages co-exist.
• Jopará - a mixed language spoken in Paraguay which combines Spanish and Guaraní
• Russenorsk - a pidgin language that combines elements of Russian and Norwegian
• Surzhyk - an interlanguage derived from Ukrainian and Russian, spoken in Ukraine
• Trasianka - an interlanguage derived from Belarussian and Russian, spoken in Belarus
• Balachka - dialects of Kuban Cossacks
• Russification - the policy of introduction of Russian language into non-Russian communities
• Diglossia - a situation of parallel usage of two closely related languages, one of which is generally used by the government and in formal texts, and the other one is usually the spoken informally

Further reading

• King, Ruth. "Overview and Evaluation of Acadie's joual," in Social Lives in Language - Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities: Celebrating the Work of Gillian Sankoff edited by Miriam Meyerhoff and Naomi Nagy (2008) pp 137ff
• Chiac: an example of dialect change and language transfer in Acadian French. National Library of Canada, 1987.==External links==
• "Et si on parlait chiac ? (How about speaking Chiac?)". November 4, 1998. Retrieved 2011-06-14.
• The Chiac verb particle construction - A linguistics paper (beginning on page 56 of the pdf document) examining certain features of Chiac grammar.
• Music video for Radio Radio's song "Jacuzzi", with captions.
• Interview with Radio Radio about chiac - Starts at 12:00 minutes in