Francophones in Maine see hope for language

MONTREAL For decades, Cecile Thornton had little motivation to speak French. Born into the minority francophone community in Lewiston, Maine, she says she and her family were often the target of ridicule.

“I was ashamed of my francophone roots,” she recalled in a recent phone interview in French. “There were a lot of people who laughed at and mocked us.” Thornton, whose maiden name is Desjardins, married an anglophone and didn’t teach her children French. It eventually disappeared from her daily life, and she says she lost her ability to converse in the language as a result.

That changed in 2016, when she began attending French-language meetups led by local immigrants from West Africa. Thornton says those conversations inspired her to reconnect with her mother tongue. “The African community helped me feel proud to be Franco,” she said.

Now 68 years old, Thornton has become an advocate for French speakers in Maine, one of several members of the state’s francophone community striving to preserve their language and heritage. They hope a wave of recent African immigration and a growing recognition of the state’s Franco-American population will spark renewed interest in their cause. But the number of French speakers in Maine is dwindling, leading some to fear for their future.

U.S. Census Bureau data underline the francophone community’s growing vulnerability. The agency estimated that about 30,000 of the more than 1.3 million people in the state spoke French at home in 2022, down from 33,000 in 2018 and from more than 40,000 four years before that.

Don Lévesque, a 76-year-old member of the centuries-old Acadian population in northern Maine, says his outlook on local efforts to promote French changes daily.

“Sometimes I’m optimistic, sometimes I’m not,” he confessed in an interview.

Lévesque is the president of Le Club Français in the town of Madawaska on the border with New Brunswick, where he now lives. Founded in the 1990s by a group of residents concerned about the survival of their language, Le Club Français now offers French prekindergarten and elementary afterschool programs, as well as conversational French courses for adults, he said.

Next, the organization wants to create more opportunity for Maine Acadians to develop social lives in French. But engaging younger residents is a challenge, he admitted.

“Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur,” he said.

A second French-speaking population, in southern Maine, descends from Canadian immigrants who worked in the area’s many mills in the 19th and 20th centuries. Jan Sullivan, a native francophone who leads a French conversation group at the Franco Center of performing arts in Lewiston, says African newcomers have “reawakened” the language in the community.

Though immigration has fuelled a welcome boost to French, it might not be enough to save the language, Sullivan warned.

“I think it’ll survive for a few more years, several more years,” she lamented. “But eventually, I’m afraid it’s dying.”