Obituaries of SEPTEMBER 1990, Thibodaux, Lafourche Parish, La.
Source: The Lafourche Daily Comet
Submitted by: Chris Tidwell
Last modified 14 March 2015
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These records are ordered by date of DEATH
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Sept. 25, 1990

South Lafourche Linguist dies at 77
John J. Guilbeau
John J. Guilbeau, educator and linguist who contributed greatly to spreading
the French language in Louisiana, has died of cancer at the age of 77.
Funeral service will be at 1 p.m. on Friday at Our Lady of Prompt Succor
Catholic Church in Golden Meadow. Visitation will be in the church from 11
a.m. until funeral time.
Guilbeau died Sept. 25, 1990 at 12:20 p.m. at St. Anne General Hospital in
Raceland. During his illness, Guilbeau was in the process of editing, for
publication, his latest book of the linguistic study of the French spoken in
Louisiana.
Born Sept. 15, 1913 in Leeville, Guilbeau grew up in Golden Meadow where he
attended elementary school. He graduated from Cut Off High School and
received his bachelor's and master's degrees in French and Spanish from
Louisiana State University. He earned a Ph. D. in Romance Languages from the
University of North Carolina in 1950.
Foreign studies included the University of Bordeaux, France on an
Institute of International Education scholarship and post-doctoral work in
literature, linguistics and dialect geography at the Sorbonne and at the
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.
Abroad, he taught at the Lycee Michel Montaigne in Bordeau. In the United
States he taught at Louisiana State University for 23 years, the University
of North Carolina, the University of New Orleans (where he set up the
foreign language program) and at Winthrop College in S.C.
Guilbeau was a member of the visiting committee for the Department of
Linguistics and Foreign Languages and the Department of Humanities at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1975 through 1978.
Guilbeau was named Chevalier dans l'orde des Palmes Academique in 1960 by
the
French government for his contribution to the French language in La.
He served four and one half years in the U.S. Air Force Intelligence
He wrote many publications and various papers of linguistics, literature
and folklore which he read at a number of associations throughout the
United States. He also served as general program chairman for the South-
Central Modern Language Association from 1960 to 1963.
At the time of his retirement in 1978, a scholarship in his honor was
established at Winthrop College in Rock Hill, S.C. where he lived.
He spent his time writing until November, 1989 when he moved back to his
home town of Golden Meadow to live with his sister, Jeanne Rome.

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