TOR BAY — When two linguists from British Columbia and France set out to map the fading edges of Acadian French, they didn’t expect to find a living legacy in one of Nova Scotia’s least known Acadian communities. But that’s exactly what happened earlier this month, when Catherine Léger and Pierre-Don Giancarli landed in the Torbé region – curious, cautious and ultimately astonished.
“They were quite surprised at how much we had done to preserve our culture and history,” said Jude Avery, educator, historian, author and president of La Société Acadienne de Torbé, which hosted the scholars for four days. “They knew the language is pretty well gone, but the culture was still very strong.”
The visit, which included interviews with Sylvester Pellerin, Gordon Pellerin, Deborah Pellerin, Brian Richard and Avery, was part of a broader linguistic project. Léger, based at the University of Victoria, and Giancarli, from the Université de Poitiers, are compiling an archive of regional Acadian speech. Their previous fieldwork focused on Chéticamp and Isle Madame. Torbé was not on their radar – until, by chance, they heard about it while driving across the province.
“When they found out about the Tor Bay area, that there were Acadians here ... they said, ‘Oh, we’ve never been there, so we’ve got to come back and explore this a bit further,’” said Avery. “So, that’s what brought them here this year – their curiosity.”
What they found was a community once nearly erased through assimilation, now methodically reclaiming its identity. “Basically, this was ... just about totally assimilated,” Avery said. “The only people that speak French are those that are late 60s, maybe mid to late 60s, upwards. You know, the younger kids are learning it now, but they didn’t get it from the homes.”
That’s where the local school comes in. Since the region’s official designation as an Acadian community in 2021 and the opening of its school École Belle Baie in 2023, language reclamation has begun in earnest. “The school has allowed us a means to reclaim our language, which is ... kind of, I guess an anomaly here, because it really has not happened anywhere else,” Avery said. “Here it’s more than rekindling. I’d say a total reclamation that’s required.”
For Léger and Giancarli, the implications were immediate. “We discovered a welcoming, open, supportive and value-driven community, with an active school staff dedicated to its students,” they wrote in a follow-up summary. Their audio recordings and transcriptions, they said, aim “to describe and explain [the language’s] possible particularities ... and its similarities with pre-classical French (circa 1550–1660).”
The research will be shared with the Société Nationale de l’Acadie and the cultural centre Maison de l’Acadie in the Poitiers region of France – long considered a cradle of Acadian emigration. “That’s where people basically go to get information and share information on the Acadians,” Avery said. “If you’re from France and you want to know more about them, that’s the place to go. If you’re from North America and you go to France and you want to connect your roots there, that’s also the place to go.”
The region has attracted scholarly interest before. “We had a linguist here in the 1990s that came from Toulouse, France ... he came and did basically the same sort of research as these people did, only he got here before it was a total assimilation. There were a larger number of us who still spoke the language.”
Still, Avery said, the pace of cultural revival accelerated only after official recognition. “It has been [a crisis], and it would have been definitely a lost case. If we had not been recognized in 2021, we would not have gotten the school and all these visitors that are now coming would not have been coming with a degree of regularity and with the inquisitiveness that they now have.”
And the visitors keep coming. Avery confirmed that Senator Réjean Aucoin, an Acadian, is planning a return visit in August.
Asked whether Torbé’s story signals a wider rediscovery, Avery didn’t hesitate. “This is just one of the steps ... there were many steps. It’s a fairly long history. And, when I say a long history, I’m talking about a long recent history. This is something that we’ve been working hard at for the last 50 years, but it really started to take hold when we were finally accepted as an Acadian region.”
One scholar at a time, the story of Torbé is now beginning to be told.
