Tom Klingler
 

Louisiana is unusual among the states of the Union in having a state-funded agency devoted to the promotion and preservation of one its heritage languages. Yet despite the fanfare that accompanied its creation in 1968 and the generous budget that it enjoyed in the early years of its existence, the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana remains largely unknown to the general public and has had no discernible effect on the inexorable decline in the number of French speakers in the state. The reasons for the ineffectiveness of CODOFIL’s language revival efforts are multiple, and they include the nature and policies of the organization (its elite membership and its focus on Standard French to the exclusion of Louisiana varieties, for example), as well as aspects of the linguistic situation in Louisiana that are beyond CODOFIL’s control (such as the lack of correspondence between political and linguistic boundaries). In this study, I argue that the primary explanation for CODOFIL’s ineffectiveness lies in the organization’s failure to persuade Louisiana’s Francophones of the value of preserving their language. The story of CODOFIL thus provides a cautionary example of the risks of State-sponsored language planning efforts that are not firmly rooted in the concerns of the speech communities they purport to serve.