The State of Louisiana French
Cajun French is an offshoot of Poitevin, which preserves many archaic words and incorporates a large vocabulary from primarily African, Afro-Caribbean, and Native American sources. Grammar is fundamentally French, but it maintains many simplifications and features that would be considered “bad French,” for example, a general lack of verb conjugation in spoken Cajun (they’re usually conjugated in writing but there’s no phonetic difference most of the time). There is a historical east-west dialect cline in Cajun French, which still generally exists.
Colonial French is a largely defunct dialect that has been assimilated by the Cajun and Creole. It is most common in Evangeline and Avoyelles parishes, near the northern apex of Acadiana. It tends to sound more like “good French.”
Louisiana Creole is a language based on African and Haitian Creole grammar, with most vocabulary deriving from French. New Orleans is the epicenter of Creole culture, and is the only major area in Louisiana where Creole is the historically dominant culture and language. Creole is also spoken in far-flung areas such as Avoyelles, Lafayette, and Natchitoches.
Louisiana French is also spoken by various Native tribes in the area, including the Houma, Chitimacha, and Tunica-Biloxi tribes, who adopted the language of their neighbors, and often, relatives.
(From here on, I'll refer generally to Cajuns, but it's more or less applicable to all Louisiana ethnicities.)
The politics of Louisiana French are complex. For much of Louisiana’s history, it was mainstream, but proletarian. Though Louisiana has been under U.S. hegemony for over 200 years, Louisiana French only began to suffer after World War I. At that time, policies were put in place banning French in public schools, and at times violently enforced. Most born before the 1950s, when bans on French were lifted, have horror stories about the abuse that took place. My grandmother mentioned an incident where she couldn’t remember the English word for “bathroom,” and was forced to urinate on herself. The emergence of highway networks and mass media only furthered the decline of Cajun French’s already dismal prestige, and many of that generation specifically avoided teaching their children French, in the hope that they would enjoy better, more American lives.
With the advent of the Civil Rights movement, Cajuns were quick to capitalize on the momentum, and CODOFIL was established in 1968. However, the director of CODOFIL ultimately was interested in the financial benefits of a bilingual population, and likewise promoted the use of international and standard French over Cajun French. A series of programs have emerged, most notably the French Immersion program, and non-Immersion French classes for elementary and middle school children.
To a large degree, the two dialects are unintelligible, although one who is adept at learning foreign languages would not have a problem learning the other. Since Poitevin is classified as a separate language of the Langues d’Oil family, and Cajun has diverged even from that, it is bizarre to me that language enthusiasts typically consider standard and Cajun French to be the same language.
This has become increasingly provocative, as Cajuns found out that their children could not understand them, even though they ostensibly knew French. Since teachers with knowledge of Cajun French are in short supply, CODOFIL and other programs quite often resort to importing teachers from other parts of the world, often with preconceived notions about what “good French” sounds like. There is currently widespread resentment of this linguistic snobbery. In many ways, teaching standard French has done little to stop the decline of Cajun French, as CODOFIL, France, Belgium, and other actors seek to replace indigenous languages with an essentially foreign one. Additionally, those in French classes and French Immersion programs tend to be wealthier and from better educated families, leading to fundamental inequalities and an artificial language hierarchy. What was once “uneducated” and “stupid” is now “nerdy” and “snobby,” which has only replaced one negative image with another. Even more strangely, these elite students are generally from families who don’t speak Cajun French at home (many are not even ethnically Cajun), and the more proletarian families who do speak it at home are less able to take advantage of French education, often because they live in parishes where it is less available.
That said, these education programs have provided new blood and a necessary lifeline for Louisiana French. For all their failings of French education in Louisiana, possibly the biggest success is the valorization of Louisiana ethnicities and cultures, which inspires many to learn Louisiana French later in life. Many (like me) have pledged on some level that our children will not grow up speaking only English. While CODOFIL has made controversial decisions in the past, it remains deeply unpopular to reduce support for it, as our current governor has.
Personally, I would hope that Cajun French is codified into a standardized dialect for use in education. I’ve found in my (admittedly brief) foray into Cajun-specific French that the grammar is much simpler, and a lot of the grammatical concepts of standard French are simply unnecessary to learning Cajun French. I don’t think it’s important to divorce Cajun from French entirely, but the hegemony of Parisian French is simply unsustainable in Louisiana. Only one of them can survive, and Cajuns have already soured on standard French. The continued threat of English language hegemony would virtually guarantee the extinction of standard French, so if standard French is to be the dominant dialect, French will simply die out. I don’t think the purists would be happy, but we are facing an existential threat.
Usually zydeco has a jazzier sound, while Cajun is more traditional in that respect. 
