#The only thing certain is that “he'd prooobably know creole/Louisiana French”

[celtrist]

Those in Louisiana who are native speakers of French generally either speak Louisiana French (aka Cajun French) or Louisiana Creole. In the early 1920s, the state govt. prohibited Louisiana public schools from teaching in French, and students were often punished for speaking Cajun French or Creole in the classroom. As a result, many Cajun and Creole people who grew up during that time didn’t pass down the Cajun and Creole French language to their children, and they instead only taught their kids English.

(This is what happened in my own family, so although I’m ethnically Cajun, I’m sort of learning Cajun French from scratch, since I grew up not really knowing any of the language, with the exception of the words sha and do-do.) Kirby Jambon on YouTube is a great resource if you’re interested in learning more about the Cajun French language and culture. There’s also Rouganou on YouTube, who has made some pretty good videos on Louisiana Creole.

I could also talk a bit about other aspects of Cajun and Creole culture, like the large Catholic population and the cuisine (yay crawfish boils!), but I suspect that info won’t be super useful to you if you’re trying to use it to write a character who is, from what I know of the source material, a cannibalistic demon man. (Well. I guess there’s always a possibility that Alastor puts a bit of Tony Chachere’s or Slap Ya Mama on the people he eats and then like. Experiences Catholic guilt about it. That’s what I do with fettuccine alfredo.)

Huh, okay. I've been receiving some back-and-forth stuff on the subject but, relatively speaking, most people have been sure about there being some form of French speaking/dialect.

Though, like you said, it would be uncommon during the 20s and 30s. There is a chance for the character to speak/learn it as he was in his 30s-40s when he died in 33.

Definitely for the most part I've been getting that he'd speak a variation of French due to being for Orleans, but him speaking metropolitan French wouldn't be horribly inaccurate for him to speak? Cajun French was pointed out to me as something that WOULD be unlikely though as it's something more from outside the city of Orleans than in it (which again, I think checks out with previous discussions I've had on the subject!).

There's definitely been mixed responses: some people saying he would speak cajun French, some say he wouldn't, some say he'd speak international French, others say he wouldn't, and so on. So I'm sort of quickly realizing information on the topic is a bit inconsistent, more than likely not helped by the French variations (Louisiana, Creole, and maybe Cajun?) being more on the side of dead languages and perhaps not the best documented. So at best, we have first-hand accounts with families as even web searches can be a bit inconsistent as well either to themselves or with people who've had families live in Orleans and the like.