CAJUN

descendant of French Canadians whom the British, in the 18th century, drove from the captured French colony of Acadia (now Nova Scotia and adjacent areas) and who settled in the fertile bayou lands of southern Louisiana. The Cajuns today form small, compact, self-contained communities and speak their own patois, a combination of archaic French forms with idioms taken from their English, Spanish, German, American Indian, and black neighbours. They variously raise cattle, corn (maize), yams, sugarcane, and cotton, and a few still perform much of their own spinning, weaving, and other home crafts. Their separateness, though often their own preference, is also the result of the prejudice of the non-Cajuns against them.