I believe Frank is what they call in Maine, "French," which means his fairly recent ancestors probably immigrated there from Quebec, probably to work in the mills. It's definitely an ethnic culture in Maine, but not widely known outside of the state/region.

On another note, I was fascinated by a recent New Yorker article about the 5000 Somali immigrants to Lewiston, ME (where I used to live.)

term that's used most frequently in Maine is Franco-American

Not Franko-Buddhean?

I always just said Maine French (to distinguish from France-French and actual from-Quebec Quebecois).

Certainly, in Maine, it makes a difference, especially among the older generations for whom Quebecois-style French is a living language. Outside the upper northeast, everybody's like, "Well, it's just a whole bunch of white people splitting hairs to find something to dislike each other over."

edit: near x-post with the similarly Maine-familiar sister!

which means his fairly recent ancestors probably immigrated there from Quebec

Do they have to have been Francophones for the designation to stick? And can the person now not be a Francophone and still be called French?

I'm scratching my head. I'm not sure if someone from a Francophone family in Quebec but who no longer speaks the language gets called something different, like Anglo.

I think all of the millworker immigration from Quebec to Maine was Francophone (and Catholic). People who are ethnically "French" in Maine mostly don't speak French as their mother tongue anymore, though there are funny words and terms. My stepmother is Franco-American (to use the more formal term) and her mother (born ca. 1930, in Maine) speaks French some. My stepmother doesn't, but she says things like "close the light" (from fermer la lumiere) and uses the word "fessie" for buttock.

My memere comes from an originally French family that lived in Quebec for a couple of hundred years before coming to the states for another couple of years before she was born. If she's letting you call her anything but American, it's French, not Canadian. She speaks French, but I think she learned it at school, or from the maid (in Maine or Massachusetts), not from her mother.

5000 Somali immigrants to Lewiston, ME

Wow. I hope they get decent jobs. Isn't Maine economy based mostly on seasonal tourism?

"close the light"

Charming.

Isn't Maine economy based mostly on seasonal tourism?

Not in Lewiston. It's not pretty.

Oh, I think Stepmother's parents spoke French a great deal -- when Step-grandfather was still alive he would drop into it whenever he didn't want the children to understand. It was a very loping, nasal variant of the (France-oriented) French I'd heard up to that point.

But yes, their children (now in late 40s, early 50s) were specifically not taught French at the dinner table, not taught it in school, etc.

I think it used to be used relatively openly to mark social class and exclusion, and vestiges of that remained into my childhood, where I told and heard French jokes of the sort that are called Polack jokes elsewhere in New England.

There's a lot of unemployment among the Somali immigrants. It's not pretty.