I grew up in Maine where people speak Chiac, to Quebecois people it sounds like redneck French but in Maine, it's "Maine French". It branched from Europe's standards at a similar time as Louisiana's and Haiti's dialects also split, so they all act like time capsules of the same little period of French, separate from the French used today in France, with Canada being the middle ground of this peculiar funnel of cultural history.Whoah there. Settle down now. I was with you until French. It's my benchmark, but now that I'm many languages down the line, I don't think of it as an easy one for Anglophones. I'd sooner tackle Hindi, Korean, Nepali, or te reo Maori over French any day.
I can hold conversations in it and understand the old people when they talk, but then I moved to Tampa and found that there are so many cognates and overlapping grammatical structures with Haitian Kreyol that a steady conversation can be held. That was huge, I later met people who spoke Louisiana French and it was also stunningly similar to Chiac, but somewhat distant from any European dialects. It felt centuries departed by this point, I find it really linguistically fascinating. In college I would spend time hanging with this girl whose parents are both from France, and listening to them speak, and then speaking to my friend in Kreyol in front of them and watching their reactions was fascinating too. Florida's a strange place linguistically, that's for sure.
