Researchers uncover earliest extended audio of Louisiana Creole language
The 1935 recordings made by Black linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner provide a rare oral archive of the Kouri-Vini language.
Researchers have uncovered the earliest known extended audio recordings of Louisiana Creole and Louisiana French. According to a Times of India report, the collection was made in July 1935 by Lorenzo Dow Turner, a Black linguist who travelled through Louisiana to document the speech and traditions of Black communities.
Dr Oliver Mayeux, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, discovered the collection while investigating the work of Turner. The recordings, which remained largely unexplored for decades, consist of 13 aluminium discs that were recorded at 78 revolutions per minute.
The language, also known as Kouri-Vini, emerged in the 18th century along the lower Mississippi River. It developed as enslaved West Africans adapted elements of the French language into a new grammatical structure. While it was once common in New Orleans and southern Louisiana, the variety had mostly vanished from daily use by the 1950s.
The discs include voices such as Emma Benoit, a 69-year-old sharecropper from the Lafayette area, and Odélia Edmond, who was born in New Orleans in 1862. Turner used a recording device weighing over 100 pounds to capture these interviews in locations including New Orleans, Lafayette, Chatagnier and Opelousas.
The findings suggest that Louisiana Creole included more French grammatical features than previously thought. While the language is currently at risk with only a few thousand speakers left, efforts to teach and revive Kouri-Vini are currently underway.