The earliest spoken-word recordings of Louisiana Creole, a uniquely American language at risk of extinction, have been uncovered and analysed for the first time, shedding light on a tongue that defined the docks and saloons of New Orleans for well over a century.
The field recordings, taken in 1935 by pioneering Black academic and linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner, are a rare document of the lives and voices of Louisianans of colour in the early 20th century, including a former cop and a local with tales of a New Orleans legend.
While snippets of sung Creole from rural Louisiana were captured by folklorist Alan Lomax in 1934, and again in 1937, the Turner recordings are the only extended audio from a time when the language was still widely spoken, and the only recordings of the New Orleans variety, as Creole died out in the city by the 1950s.
Louisiana Creole takes much of its vocabulary from French, but has its own grammar and structure, along with distinctive words and phrases.
It emerged in the 18th century as an everyday lingua franca among French slavers and colonists, enslaved West Africans and their descendants, and free people of colour, some of whom formed middle-class communities of mixed ancestry and even owned slaves.
This Louisianan cultural melting pot created a "linguistic pressure cooker", says Dr Oliver Mayeux from the University of Cambridge, who uncovered Turner's recordings.
"Africans with little common language were forced onto plantations where French was the language of administration," said Mayeux. "Everybody is learning approximations of French and then approximations of approximations. Quite quickly, a new language is born."
The language was later adopted by Caribbean exiles escaping the Haitian revolution, along with some French-speaking Acadians expelled from Canada.
"Louisiana Creole was mostly the language of the working class and communities of colour. It was spoken throughout the port of New Orleans as well as in towns, farms and bayous across the plantation belt of the central Gulf coast," said Mayeux. "Some wealthy white people would have also learned it from their nursemaids and nannies as children."
"Turner's lost recordings contain far more linguistic diversity than the texts we relied upon until now. This is the language of the levees and cane fields. The language that drifted out from French Quarter saloons along with early jazz music at the turn of the last century."
Today, only a few thousand native speakers remain, all of them elderly and in rural areas. However, some young Louisianans have begun a revival movement for the language, teaching themselves what they call Kouri-Vini, and producing social media material so others can learn it.
By the mid-1930s, Creole was in decline. Mayeux thinks that Turner – a North Carolinian who studied Gullah speakers in Georgia and South Carolina – recorded Louisiana Creole for a research project that got rejected for funding. He later produced a major study on the African roots of New World languages.
Mayeux became interested in Turner while in South Carolina, and noticed a line in his biography mentioning a field trip to Louisiana. He tracked down the recordings among old aluminium discs, simply labelled 'Louisiana', that had been digitised by the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University.
"Turner's discs were preserved for posterity by the staff at the Archives for Traditional Music," said Mayeux, from Cambridge's Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics. "These recordings were among hundreds of files sitting on a server ready to be discovered and analysed."
Initially, Mayeux was surprised to find music by classical pianist Jessie Covington Dent, but on digging into Dent's family papers, he uncovered pages of Dow Turner's address book sketching out contacts for a Louisiana research trip, which revealed the hidden story of Turner's fieldwork.
"Turner relied on a network of Black doctors and intellectuals in New Orleans and out in the country. The physicians found him Creole-speaking interviewees and let him record in their offices. These were trusted spaces for the participants during the era of Jim Crow segregation, and, crucially, were wired for electricity."
Turner's recording instrument looked more like a cupboard, weighing more than 100 pounds, with a bulky metal microphone. Each large disc held just a few minutes of sound. Turner can be heard in the background cajoling his subjects into speaking Creole.
"For these interviewees the alien nature of the equipment alone would have made it a truly weird experience for them," said Mayeux.
"Until now, scholars have had to rely on neat written transcriptions for historical studies of the Creole language. In these recordings we can finally hear a fuller range of variation in the language, and better understand how Creole would have developed over time."
Technical insights range from agglutination, with articles mashed into nouns, and determiners like 'the' coming after a noun. "Contemporary French speakers would simply not be able to comprehend this language," said Mayeux.
All Turner's participants were Black, and most were late middle-age or older, born deep in the 19th century when Creole was near its height. Through repeated listens – pulling out details then cross-referencing with census data and archives – Mayeux was able to piece together lives behind the voices.
He even tracked down a living descendent of one participant, a sharecropper named Emma Benoit, born in 1868, who describes a life "working in the field", how she is a mother of twelve who also raised four orphans, and has been widowed for twenty years.
Benoit's great-granddaughter, Valencia Pradier Linton, told Mayeux that Benoit had lived in the house of her White father as a girl following the death of her mother, an enslaved African woman. Family lore had it that Benoit's White half-sister used to feed her under the table.
Other recordings feature a former cop, George Doyle, who tells tales of his time in the New Orleans police prior to its segregation, including a beating he took in Tremé market from a gang of White hoodlums – "a band of rats" – managing to arrest them despite the blows. Mayeux found a report of the incident in a New Orleans newspaper from 1893.
The liveliest interview was with Odelia Edmond, a garrulous New Orleanian who recalls mischievous younger years when she had hair "red like fire" and would hide under church pews to pull wedding veils from the heads of passing brides.
Edmond recounts childhood interactions with an old woman named Zozo Labrique ("Birdy the Brick"), a New Orleans folk figure famous for selling the red brick dust known to be used for protective magic in some voodoo rituals.
Edmond claims to have swindled Labrique out of thirty cents, and speaks of wanting to throw coins into the cemetery to pay back the long-deceased legend, but not doing so for fear of being considered a voodoo practitioner.
"Edmond is an extraordinary character," said Mayeux. "I found a newspaper record from when she was arraigned for battery. She had a husband who was murdered, after which she remarried. In the recording she says 'I was so glad when they killed him'."
Mayeux's own paternal grandfather, born in 1920, was a speaker of both Creole and French. However, Mayeux's father was raised with little knowledge of the languages.
"By the middle of the 20th century you see the end of intergenerational transmission. My grandfather wanted his children to speak English. This was typical of many Louisianans who saw their future as American rather than Creole or Cajun."
Mayeux's father said that when relatives would visit, they were made to leave the house if they wanted to speak that "dirty language".
However, for Mayeux, who bounced between Nigeria and Scotland growing up, becoming a "language nerd" in the process, his family's linguistic roots offer a sense of identity. He has recorded some of the last native Creole speakers, become a fluent speaker himself, and is involved in a movement to revive the language.
"Young people are learning Creole to connect with the richness of their heritage, helping them discover a distinct identity in an increasingly homogenised world," added Mayeux.
"Many are grandchildren of native speakers, yet their parents never knew the language. This three-generation pattern of linguistic reconnection is something you see with a lot of minoritised languages around the world. One of my friends cried when I played him Turner's recordings."
Clif St. Laurent, a Louisiana Creole educator and activist, said: "Hearing these, the first known recorded spoken voices of our ancestors, ignites a passion that feels almost compulsory, or at the very least, as though it were incumbent upon us to reclaim this linguistic heritage."
"Language is the foundation and the root of a culture, so teaching this language keeps our culture not only living, but thriving," St. Laurent said.
Mayeux's analyses and his research on the life histories of those captured on disc by Turner are published in the open-access journal Language Documentation and Description . The appendix includes a catalogue of recordings and a public link where the recordings can be heard in full.
