Grand Isle, a barrier island off the south coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico, has long been a destination for vacationers, and in the nineteenth century it was especially popular among New Orleanians, whose variety of French was reportedly spoken throughout the island in the early twentieth century (Wartburg 1942: 77). Today there remain fewer than a dozen fluent speakers of French on Grand Isle. Very little has been written about the variety spoken in this area, but what sparse information we do have indicates that it differs from the French of most other parts of Louisiana in interesting ways, likely due at least in part to its connection to New Orleans, where vernacular French has today almost entirely disappeared (see Picone 2006; Picone & Valdman 2005 for discussions of the French of Grand Isle). The most salient feature of Grand Isle French is the use of a dorsal r rather than the apical variant found in nearly all other parts of the state, and Picone (2006) also notes the variable use of qui and qu’est-ce que as inanimate interrogative pronouns; yet because of a dearth of studies of this variety of Louisiana French, we know almost nothing else about it and have little indication of to what degree it is similar to or different from the French of the rest of Louisiana. The goal of our research is to better document the French of Grand Isle before it disappears entirely in order to have a more complete understanding of language variation in francophone Louisiana. In this presentation, we report the preliminary results of our fieldwork, focusing on the linguistic features we have found that set it apart from the rest of Louisiana French.