Over the course of its 300-year history, the Catholic Church in Louisiana witnessed a prolonged shift from French to English, with some south Louisiana churches continuing to prepare marriage, baptism, and burial records in French as late as the mid-twentieth century. Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720-1955 navigates a complex and lengthy process, presenting a nuanced picture of language change within the Church and situating its practices within the state's sociolinguistic evolution.

Mining three centuries of evidence from the Archdiocese of New Orleans archives, the authors...