Bayou
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Bayou is a term used in the southern states of the USA and especially in Louisiana for stagnant or slowly flowing water. To this day, the term is primarily associated with the Cajun culture, which developed particularly in the inaccessible marshland of the Mississippi estuary , where bayous are often the only means of transport.
Etymology and Definition
The word bayou probably goes back to an Indian word (cf. Choctaw bayuk for "small stream") and was then adopted by the French settlers of the Louisiana colony . In 1699 the term first appeared in the report of a French expedition to the north coast of Lake Pontchartrain , which is located immediately north of what is now New Orleans . With the further advance of the French settlers, the Cajun, new waters along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and upstream in the Mississippi Valley were given the name Bayou. At the latest after Louisiana fell to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 , the word was also adopted by the English-speaking residents of the region and used, for example, for swampy waters in the coastal plain of Texas .
Bayous in the delta of the Mississippi and the western coastal plain of the state of Louisiana, often referred to as "Bayou Country", are particularly characteristic of the landscape. Here the word is mostly used for backwater tributaries or oceans, but also in general for slow-flowing rivers or streams with mostly marshy shores. The focus of the distribution of place and water body names with the addition of bayou is in Louisiana, the south of Arkansas and in the southeast of Texas (here, for example, the Buffalo Bayou ); further examples can be found eastward to Florida and northward to Illinois .
reception
Kate Chopin's works such as Bayou Folk (1894) or Beyond the Bayou are mentioned as literary arrangements . In music, for example, the term appears in Hank Williams ' song Jambalaya (on the Bayou) or in BB King's 1998 album Blues on the Bayou ; Also known are Born on the Bayou by Creedence Clearwater Revival and Blue Bayou by Roy Orbison . In the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 there is the fictional state of Lemoyne with the region Bayou NWA .
literature
- Robert C. West: The Term “Bayou” in the United States: A Study in the Geography of Place Names. In: Annals of the Association of American Geographers 44, Issue 1, 1954, pp. 63-74.
- Edwin Adams Davis: The Rivers and Bayous of Louisiana. Pelican Publications, Gretna 1968.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Article bayou, n. In the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online version, viewed October 24, 2018)
- ^ Bayou NWA. Accessed January 31, 2019 .
- ^ Bayou NWA. Accessed January 31, 2019 .