There's a common word that Franco-Americans use to discuss their half-hidden presence, knit into New England's cultural fabric over three centuries. They call it ''la survivance."
Literally, it means ''survival.'' It's there in Lowell at the monthly dinner meeting of the Club Richelieu, in Webster at St. Anne's School when Muriel Pontbriand plays a language game with her French class, and in Woonsocket, R.I., when Josee Vachon sings ''updated traditional songs'' at the Jubile festival.

As Franco-Americans examine the state of their culture, the word also carries connotations of both ''preservation'' and ''persistence.''

Descendants of the French who settled in Quebec and Acadia in the 17th and 18th centuries, they make up the second-largest ethnic group in Massachusetts, behind Irish-Americans. They often manned the region's textile mills, and like the Irish, brought their Catholicism with them. In the last national census, there were just under a million state residents of French Canadian and French ancestry. But despite their numbers, they remain a quiet presence, largely absent from high-profile public positions, their ethnicity rarely invoked. Theirs is often an inward culture, but one that remains rich, lively, and varied.

To sample it is to visit a side of New England rarely examined yet remarkably vital:

''I found le Club [Richelieu] on the Internet last year. I have an Acadian background, and my parents insisted I speak French. So I was looking for something French to do.'' - Jeannine Richard, Lowell. President, Club Richelieu.

Richard is greeting - and is being greeted by - club members in the traditional way, kisses on both cheeks and a warm '' bon soir,'' as they arrived for last month's meeting.

Richard, who is in her 50s and recently settled in Lowell after a peripatetic marketing career, grew up in a French-speaking family. She is the club's first woman president, but like the other more than 30 members found in it a place to reconnect with her roots. The club is an international social and service organization with close to 300 chapters and some 7,000 members, named not for the 17th-century French cardinal, but for his niece who founded a home for orphans in Quebec in 1665.

At this meeting, member Roger Lacerte's talk dealt with a subject that is becoming the new roots-connection for the region's Franco-Americans - genealogy. The discussion points the way to another regional touchstone.

Anne Marie Perrault, editor of the journal of the American-Canadian Genealogical Society, suggested, ''It's hard to learn a language when you're older, so doing family history is an easy, painless way to get back into the culture.'' The society is housed in an old parochial school building in Manchester, N.H., and is stocked with the birth, marriage, and death records of many families.

''The French-Canadians were excellent record-keepers,'' Perrault said, with record-keeping centralized in the Roman Catholic parishes in Quebec and in the Maritime provinces that Franco-Americans refer to as Acadia.

''I don't think my son's wife is making meat pies. But 20 years from now, maybe Peter will get interested in traditional things and she'll say, `Where's that recipe?'''

Robert Cormier, Leominster. Author, ''The Chocolate War,'' ''Frenchtown.''

Of the three things that most identify Franco-American culture - language, religion, and food - says poet Paul Marion, ''People lose contact with them in that order.''

So, says Marion, ''You find people mentioning the totemic food, like pork pies. That's the last identifier to go. Even when everything else goes, that stays.''

It certainly stays at Cote's Market in Lowell's old Franco-American district. It's a ''mom and pop'' store like any across the country, but with a refrigerated case filled with meat pies, pates, and baked beans.

On Saturdays, says owner Roger Levasseur, ''I'll have 80 pots of beans going. There's 50 servings in a pot. That's 4,000 servings, and I'll sell every one.'' These are a variant of the better-known Boston baked beans, but are cooked without molasses or sugar which makes them lighter in color and taste more of tomato.?

And there are traditions within traditions in the ''tourtieres,'' the meat pies of which Cormier spoke. His own mother's version, the author said in an interview, ''was very plain because that was the way my father liked it, just the pork and beef and onion sprinkled with salt and pepper.'' But his wife's mother's version was fancier, with potato mixed with the meat and seasoned with cloves and other spices.

''On holidays,'' said Cormier, ''We'd go to Connie's mother's and then to my mother's. They were still tourtieres, but very different.''

''What I try to give is a bit of love for the language and enough vocabulary so they can order breakfast when we go to Quebec every spring.''

Muriel Pontbriant, Webster. Teacher.

''We study French,'' pipes up one of Pontbriant's sixth-graders, ''because it's the French school.''

Officially, it's St. Anne's School. But ''Ecole Ste. Anne'' over its front door proclaims its heritage, as do the words over the schoolhouse doors ''Garcons'' and ''Filles.''

On a recent morning, Pontbriant kept up a lively round of games, songs, and demonstrations. At one point, she walked the aisles, posing as a waitress with pad in hand to take orders of ''jambon'' and crepes to prepare for next year's class trip to Quebec.

Pontbriant, who attended St. Anne's herself, grew up in a French-speaking family and learned the language before she spoke English. Of her 29 sixth-graders, half have French backgrounds, though only one said French is spoken at home.

That mirrors a concern across the Franco-American community. For many, losing the language was painful, and sometimes an unpleasant memory.

Donna Hebert lives in Amherst and is the fiddler with the group Chanterelle, which specializes in French-Canadian and Franco-American traditional music. Her mother grew up in Manchester and spoke French - until she came home from school one day and said the teacher told her she was not to come back until she could ''speak white,'' meaning English.

Her father, angered at that slur but accepting the reality, roared out - in French - ''There are no French here anymore. We speak English.''

''Within a short period of time, I came into contact with three people in their mid-40s like me who were writing about holding onto Franco-American culture and passing it on.''

Paul Marion, Lowell. Poet, editor of ''French Class.''

Last spring, Marion published ''French Class,'' a collection of journals, poems, and essays by himself and three other Franco-American writers, ''personal family stories,'' he said, but ''with common threads.''

''It was so good to hear some of those stories being told, because you can't find them elsewhere,'' he said. They are stories about how French-Canadians arrived here, what it was like in the 1920s, how the churches were built.

While ''French Class'' is a slender, paper-bound book published locally, its authors represent a vibrant ethnic thread not often examined in contemporary American writing.

Best-known among contemporary Franco-American writers is Cormier, for whom the thinly disguised Leominster of his youth is reprised in ''The Chocolate War,'' one of the most popular books for junior high school students. ''It's my background, and I like to write about it,'' said Cormier, 74, a former newspaper reporter in Worcester and Fitchburg who eventually turned to young-adult fiction.

John Dufresne, who grew up in Worcester, is another writer who draws on his Franco-American roots, particularly in his 1997 novel, ''Love Warps the Mind a Little.''

While most readers will associate Jack Kerouac with the ''Beat Generation'' of the '50s, to people like Marion - who has edited ''Atop and Underwood,'' a forthcoming collection of his early writings - he is the quintessential Franco-American writer.

''He's a content-provider,'' said Marion. ''His Lowell novels are the best account we have of what it was like for everyday Franco-Americans making their way in Lowell. He gives us the religious atmosphere, the cultural rituals.''

Marion said that Kerouac, born in Lowell in 1922, was of his parents' generation. Marion's mother was even in first grade with him. ''They could both see literature being made out of their lives.'' And, he added, ''Kerouac always identified himself as `Franco-American.'''

''The music is the most notable part of the culture, along with religion. The music, the dancing, the songs - even if you don't understand it all, it means something to you.''

Donna Hebert, Amherst. Fiddler.

In an article written for the forthcoming ''Encyclopedia of New England Culture,'' folklorist Julien Olivier calls music ''the element of Franco-American folklife which has best survived the migrations of the French to and about North America.'' It is readily transmitted, and preserved on recordings.

Hebert and singer Josee Vachon formed Chanterelle to play and record traditional songs from Quebec and New England. They appear, along with other groups, on the recently released ''Mademoiselle, Voulez-vous Danser? '' ''It's a great document of what's out there'' in New England, said Hebert.

Vachon added, ''We're adding fresh new sounds to the tradition, so we're trying to appeal to younger audience rather than presenting something `grandpere' knows.''

''Our phone number was 207-581-FROG, for Franco-American Resource Opportunity Group. It was a play on the negative image of Franco-Americans. But it empowered us as Franco-Americans.''

Josee Vachon, Amherst. Singer.

Franco-Americans ''were slow to awaken to the idea of pride,'' says Claire Quintal, former director of Assumption College's Institut Francais. ''We were `privately proud.'''

''You were proud of what the French had done in North America in the early days,'' Quintal explained, ''but your family came into New England as mill workers.'' By contrast, Quintal said, even with similar blue-collar backgrounds, '' their Irish and Italian neighbors could connect with a mother country in Europe and its culture.''

That lack of connection with a mother-country culture - French-Canadians' ties with Europe were sharply cut after their defeat by the British in 1763 and then by the French Revolution in 1789 - meant that even if they continued speaking French, they might be embarrassed that it was not ''good French.''

Then, there was the matter of ethnic slurs, of ''Canucks'' who lived in ''Frog Hollow,'' the derogatory term for Franco-American neighborhoods in many New England cities.

Vachon, 39, was born in Quebec, but grew up in New England and remembers how ''Franco-American kids were put down so much.'' But as an undergraduate at the University of Maine at Orono, it was the word ''frog,'' turned on its head, that put her on the way to being what she sees as an ''ambassador of Franco-American music.''

At Orono, Vachon became active in the Franco-American Resource Opportunity Group, working on the staff of Le Forum, a monthly bilingual newspaper that covers political, cultural, and social activities.

''I started singing because of that experience,'' Vachon said. ''They pushed us into our culture and, all of a sudden, there I was performing at Franco-American festivals.''

Where New England's Franco-American culture goes from here, as language generally slips into the background, is an open debate.

''It's problematic,'' said Quintal, citing the passage of generations and the closing of French parishes and parochial schools, with their Quebec-born nuns.

Still, suggests Julien Olivier, a folklorist in Barrington, N.H., '' every succeeding generation said: It's all over. But something new kept happening, and the culture went on and on and on.''