On the ride home from Catholic Mass early on Sunday mornings, like clockwork, I’d lean up from the back seat with a request.

“Can we listen to KRVS?”

My mother, riding shotgun as my dad drove, always obliged. Her finger would flick the dial to 88.7 and suddenly our truck morphed into a dance hall as the speakers blasted accordion, fiddle, and triangle along with the wailing of French. To my young ears, the rhythms mixed into a delightful sound that begged me to gyrate in my seat. And although I could never decipher those words, my father often did his best to translate for me.

Jolie blonde, jolie fille. Tu m’as quitté pour t’en aller. T’en aller, jolie blonde avec un autre.

“Dad, what’s he saying? What’s all that mean?”

Pretty blonde, pretty girl. You left me to go away. Go away, pretty blonde with another.

After a while, I could recite every lyric to “Jolie Blonde” without knowing what half the words meant. Unknown to me at the time, this sound was distinct only to my little slice of the world in south Louisiana called Acadiana — 22 parishes that are the adopted home of the Acadians who settled in the region after their 1755 British deportation from Acadie, now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, Canada. But before and after the Acadians arrived, the area housed a vastly larger population of Creoles, those with roots tied to Europe or Africa who were born and made a home in Louisiana. It’s also the ancestral home of Native American tribes like the Houma, Chitimacha, Tunica-Biloxi, Attakapas, and Coushatta. Over generations, these groups coalesced into a people distinct within the United States — with their own customs, moral codes, food, and music. Although at one time they spoke an array of languages ranging from Native American and African languages to Spanish and German, many adopted Louisiana French and Louisiana Creole as their own. As diverse as a bowl of gumbo, containing elements derived from all across the world, south Louisiana became a cultural stew unlike any region in the rest of the state, let alone the country.

Acadiana is a place where you can still witness the result of that incredible diversity, where the people retain a distinct cultural identity, and where you can hear Louisiana French and Creole, known to locals as Kouri-Vini. The languages are on the tongues of old men who gather early in the morning at gas stations for coffee. Or at the dance halls as musicians play our regional music. Food staples bear uniquely French labels, like étouffée, boudin and courtbouillon. Meanwhile, our familial names, like Ramariez, Dupuis, Waguespack, and Dardar, provide hints of the wide variety of our places of origin.

While the culture has, most ways, remained intact, the languages have been in decline for decades. Louisiana French is spoken by an estimated 100,000 people, according to 2013 census figures. Kouri-Vini is considered an endangered language, and speakers number far fewer than 10,000. That’s down dramatically from a figure in the late 1960s that showed francophones in Louisiana numbering around 1 million — nearly a third of the state’s population at the time. And before the 20th century, French and Kouri-Vini were the most common languages in the region.

By and large, those in Acadiana born before World War II used French or Kouri-Vini as a native tongue, a trend that has almost all but disappeared. Beginning with my parents’ generation — people who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s — English prevailed as the language learned at home. Millennials like me were raised in a primarily English-speaking world, but we also carried traditions shared nowhere else in the South, such as Courir de Mardi Gras, that connected us to our own past.

The more I have learned about my culture, and the regional languages that surround it, the more I realize I was robbed of an ancestral gift that should’ve been passed on to me. If language ties culture together, if it creates a deeper understanding of a people, then surely I’ve missed out on something fundamental to my family’s story.

For years, I tried to escape the swampy land I had been raised on. I traveled every chance I had before finally settling in Nashville late in 2016. Music City had so much to offer — live bands, breweries, and the Smoky Mountains only a short drive away — but the longer I stayed, the more I realized what it lacked. I missed riding past boudin shops. I wanted to float underneath cypress trees laden with Spanish moss. Every time I spoke with my parents on the phone, I savored every word of their distinct southwest Louisiana lilt. It didn’t take me long to find my way back home.

“It’s not until you leave home that you realize what you miss and what you have,” said Louis Michot, a Louisiana French musician best known as the front-man fiddler with the Grammy-winning Lost Bayou Ramblers.