Ever since I moved from New Orleans to Lafayette I always wondered why every time I typed in the word Acadiana it always showed up as misspelled.

I'm not gonna lie, it's kind of aggravating that the inventor of spell check didn't get this right and I'm not even from here; so I feel your frustration. The choices you're given when spell check tries to correct you are Arcadian, Arcadians, and of course Acadian.

CAN THEY FIX THIS ALREADY!!!!

So I did my own 'GOOGLE' research and this is what I came up...

Acadiana wasn't a real word at one time. Now don't be mad at me I'm just the messenger, and this is probably common knowledge to everyone here in Acadiana, but to someone like me that wasn't born and raised here, I had no idea.

Here is the back story on how Acadiana became a household word in Acadiana.

According to the web site Trahan.org :

The term Acadiana was coined by accident around 1963, when KATC-TV 3 in Lafayette, owned by the Acadian Television Corporation, received an invoice bearing a typographical error: someone had mistakenly added the letter "a" to the end of Acadian, forming Acadiana.  Noting the error, the station’s manager found the new word catchy (particularly as it seemed to combine the words Acadian and Louisiana).  KATC began using the new word to describe the region covered by its broadcast signal.  The word soon took on a life of its own, and came to describe most of south Louisiana.

According to Wikipedia,

Then In 1971, the Louisiana State Legislature officially recognized twenty-two Louisiana parishes  for their strong French Acadian cultural, and made The Heart of Acadiana the official name of the region. The 'official' name wasn't embraced by the public. The people of Acadiana stuck with just Acadiana.

 

My conclusion is this, the person that invented spell check must have passed away in 1970 and never got around to fixing it. I'm not sure how you go about fixing the spell check problem but it's been happening since 1971.

Acadiana needs to be recognized as a correct word and not as a misspelled word.

 

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