Creole & Cajun Cuisine
This mixture of fat and flour can be white, blond, or brown and forms a base for many dishes in Creole, Cajun, and continental French cuisine.
What is a roux?
The name sign of this individual, the Executive Director of the Linguistic Society of America, is an ASL V-handshape making an arc near the ear.
Who is Margaret Vitullo?
If you are not a New Orleans local, but you start to gradually sound like one while you are here as you engage in linguistic interaction, you are experiencing this.
What is convergence or accommodation? (Cultural appropriation or code-crossing are also acceptable, depending on how you ideologized this question.)
LSAへのご来場、誠にありがとうございました。
What is Japanese?
Meghan Markle was utterly confused when Mindy Kaling complimented her characteristically carefully constructed outfit and/or appearance using this term. You can also serve these.
What is a lewk?
A French mirepoix is composed of onions, celery, and carrots. The holy trinity in Cajun & Creole cooking is composed of onions, celery, and this ingredient, as the soil in Louisiana was poorly suited for carrots.
What are bell peppers?
What is the Institute? (Linguistic Institute or LSA Institute are also okay.)
Banquette `sidewalk', gumbo, picayune, and bayou are all words that came into New Orleans English via this process.
What is borrowing? (Importation is also okay.)
Muchas gracias por su asistencia a la LSA.
What is Spanish?
This Greek letter describes a man who is not alpha (overly dominant) or beta (overly submissive), but cool and self-reliant in an admirable way, akin to Ryan Gosling's character in Drive.
What is sigma?
A form of braising, this method of Creole and Cajun cooking uses a tightly covered pan over low heat with a moderate amount of liquid and is used to create such dishes as étouffée.
Smothering
Famous for defining the word as a minimum free form and for popularizing the concept of the morpheme, this founder of the LSA wrote the article "Why a linguistic society?" for the inaugural issue of Language.
Leonard Bloomfield
Louisiana French uses je suis après lire to represent what meaning? (If you do not know the term, you can also provide an English or Metropolitan French equivalent of this sentence.)
What is the progressive? (Je suis en train de lire or I'm reading are also acceptable.)
Vielen Dank für Ihre Teilnahme an der LSA.
What is German?
Identical to the British Sign Language sign BALANCE, this gesture accompanies an infamous series of consecutive digits well beloved by zoomers and alphas.
What is [do the gesture]? (We like to keep things multimodal at the LSA.)
Urban Creole chefs had access to this ingredient that rural Cajun chefs did not, resulting in the coloration difference between Creole and Cajun jambalaya.
What is the tomato?
A sociolinguist and phonetician at the University of Washington who specializes in Jamaican Creole and Pacific Northwest Englishes, she is the incoming president of the LSA.
Who is Alicia Wassink?
New Orleans is also called Bulbancha `the place of many tongues' in this language, in recognition of its status as a place of cross-cultural interchange. The speakers of this language also introduced sassafras, bay leaf, and hominy into Creole and Cajun cooking.
What is Choctaw?
Aman ne tevote em yevihnewi. Lios em chaniavu.
What is Hiaki/Yaqui?
If you are engaging in repetitive performative behaviors in order to look cool and gain status, you may be accused of doing this.
What is aura farming?
The word jambalaya has many proposed etymologies, of which the most promising is as an adaptation of jambalaia `mishmash, mix-up, pilaf of rice', borrowed from this language.
What is Provençal? (We will also accept Occitan.)
These are the proposed sites of the Annual Meeting in 2026 and 2027.
What are San Francisco and Washington, DC?
Canal Street was the terrain neutre between the francophone residents of the French Quarter and the new anglophone settlers in Uptown. Today, the term has undergone this process to become neutral ground, and is used to refer to what Mainstream English speakers would call a median.
What is calquing (if you want to emphasize the loan translation aspect) or generalization/semantic broadening (if you want to emphasize the change in meaning)?
Grasow a-barth an LSA a wrer dhe skrifa dhywgh.
What is Cornish? (Sorry for any spelling errors!)
Deaf technologist Jeremiah Jackson-Gillihan gave this influencer his name sign, composed of the Claw-5 handshape being drawn across the cheek. He is known for his competition shows and his brand of chocolate, Feastables.
Who is MrBeast? (Jimmy Donaldson is also okay--you may be in too deep though.)