Lost 1935 recordings capture the voices of Louisiana Creole speakers born in the 1860s

Recordings made in 1935 of people speaking Louisiana Creole, some born in the 1860s, have been identified as the earliest extended audio of the language, the University of Cambridge said on 30 October. They include the only known recordings of the New Orleans variety of the language.

Discs labeled only “Louisiana”

The recordings were made by Lorenzo Dow Turner, a Black linguist, on large aluminum discs that each held only a few minutes of sound. They had been digitized by the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University but were labeled simply “Louisiana.” Oliver Mayeux, a linguist and research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, tracked them down after noticing a mention of a Louisiana field trip in a biography of Turner.

His search first turned up music by the classical pianist Jessie Covington Dent. Pages of Turner's address book, kept in Dent's family papers, helped Mayeux reconstruct the fieldwork. Turner worked through a network of Black doctors, who arranged interviews in their offices because those had electricity for the recording equipment.

Voices from the 19th century

All the speakers were Black, and most were in late middle age or older, born in the 19th century. They include Emma Benoit, a sharecropper who lived from 1868 to 1939, George Doyle, a former New Orleans police officer who lived from 1867 to 1937, and Odélia Edmond, who lived from 1862 to 1951. The folk figure Zozo Labrique comes up in Edmond's recording.

“Turner's lost recordings contain far more linguistic diversity than the texts we relied upon until now.” — Dr. Oliver Mayeux, University of Cambridge

Until now, the earliest audio were short snippets of sung Creole that the folklorist Alan Lomax recorded in rural Louisiana in 1934 and 1937, and linguists studying the early spoken language relied largely on written texts. The recordings let them hear variation that transcriptions missed. Mayeux's study, with a catalog and a public link to the recordings, appears in the open-access journal Language Documentation and Description, and full transcripts can be requested from him.

A language with a few thousand speakers left

Mayeux describes the origins of Louisiana Creole as a “linguistic pressure cooker.” Today only a few thousand native speakers remain, all elderly and mostly in rural areas. A revival movement teaches the language under the name Kouri-Vini and produces online learning materials.

“Language is the foundation and the root of a culture,” said Clif St. Laurent, a leading Kouri-Vini activist. Turner reportedly made the recordings for a research project that did not get funding; he later produced a major study of the African roots of New World languages. More stories about preserving the past are collected under cultural heritage.