Mutt Contay Saw: About French (and English) in New England
by Allen Ouellette
Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

In New England, as elsewhere in the United States, colleges and universities offer degrees in languages, but few make courses in the history of those languages mandatory. Aside from the usual MA theses and Ph.d. dissertations-almost all of them stiffly written attempts to isolate academically "workable" and degree-granting minutia-there is very little in print for the students of language that attempts to explain how contemporary languages in America have been and continue to be affected by their rubbing of elbows. What is noticeably true about the French dialectical variations in and surrounding New England is generally true of the Spanish dialects spoken along our Mexican border too: Both were at one time banned in their community schools. Both have created hybrid dialects in English; Both have retained vestiges of their rhythms and stresses in these hybrids; Both have adopted English nouns and altered them appropriately; Both have applied their verb structures to English verbs; Both have adopted English cuss and curse words; Both favor religious swears (unlike American English, which favors the sexual); Both have insinuated words and expressions into contemporary American English. Mutt Contay Saw is about French and what has happened to it in New England. But it's also about English. It's entirely in English, even the French pronunciations are rendered in English. There's a brief history tracing the development of English.