A Slip of the Tongue: Frenchville Is Starting to Lose Its French : Linguistics: Central Pennsylvania community now has only five remaining residents who speak the unique dialect.

Education helped take the French out of Frenchville. Radio and television provided the coup de grace.

The central Pennsylvania community of fewer than 500, whose French-speaking ancestors hiked up the Susquehanna River 163 years ago, now has only five residents who speak the language of Napoleon and Voltaire. All are in their 70s, 80s and 90s.

Recent generations haven’t kept up their unique dialect, said Francis Perrot, 84, one of the surviving Francophones.

“They ought to have their behinds kicked,” he said.

The slip of the tongue began at the turn of the century, when mandatory education--in English--became Pennsylvania law. Two generations battled with teachers to maintain their French, but world wars, industry and television stacked the piquet deck against them.

Time soon will silence them.

“It’s a damned shame if we lose these. This is the end of the trail,” said Simon Belasco, a retired linguistics professor from the University of South Carolina who studied the Frenchville dialect in the 1970s.

“Their particular pronunciation is unique in the United States. Usually it develops and becomes something else” like the French Canadian and south Louisiana varieties, he said.

“It never developed. It stayed the same,” Belasco said. The only corruptions are new words like airplane and automobile.

Perrot, regularly spitting tobacco in his shed, recalled his first teacher.

“She said it wasn’t right to speak French because she was afraid we were talking about her,” Perrot said. “Well, of course we were, but we all spoke French before we spoke English.”

The generation behind Perrot’s had similar stories to tell.

Merle Roussey, 62, and other children would get their mouths slapped if they spoke French at elementary school. The idea was, if a person wanted to get ahead in the world he had to speak English.

“I went to school with both languages, and it was difficult to sort out what was French and what was English,” Roussey said. French remained a taboo until he was at Clearfield High School, when it was offered as an elective. He took the class, but doesn’t speak French fluently now.

Eventually, parents did not teach their children French to protect them from the same torments. The language became something parents used in front of the children if they wanted to keep secrets. Children picked up phrases and swear words, but not the language.

“I would have liked to have learned,” said Vicki Gormont Davis, whose French-speaking parents have died. “I regret we’ve lost it.”

At the beginning, French was the official language of the town and church records. A Paris merchant accepted the land as a payment for a debt in the 1820s. After buying land for $1 an acre, Frenchmen from Alsace, Normandy and Picardy arrived in Baltimore and Philadelphia and hiked up the Susquehanna.

Masses were in Latin, so it didn’t matter that early Roman Catholic priests assigned here were named Leahy, Loughran or Flanagan. In 1846, the town was assigned a French pastor, John Baptist Berbigier, who stayed 34 years.

The names on the tombstones in St. Mary of the Assumption Church cemetery are the same as found on many mailboxes in town. They have buried Valimonts, Rousseys, Liegeys, Plubells, Picards and even someone named English.

Perrot was an interpreter in the military and stayed away from Frenchville for a time after his return to the United States.

He doesn’t expect the language to survive once he and the others are gone.