In 1935, a Black linguist recorded Louisiana Creole speakers on aluminium discs; researchers have now uncovered the earliest extended audio of a language that all but vanished from New Orleans by the 1950s

Dockworkers at New Orleans in 20th century, the creole language may have been spoken at this time. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

There is something extraordinary about how memory finds its way back to us through our senses. A familiar sound or voice can transport us to an entire world we thought existed only in the past. But if you were ever to hear the voice of someone who lived centuries before you, that sound could catapult you into a new world of memory and history, making it the most palpable realisation of a past only ever seen in photographs or recorded in texts.For a linguist, hearing the voices preserved in forgotten recordings has offered a profoundly original way of understanding how people spoke, the expressions they used, and how languages became distinct within their communities. With a collection of recordings made in Louisiana in 1935, the voices of people speaking a language that was once present in the social fabric and everyday life of New Orleans are now being brought back to life.

How were the recordings captured and then researched?

The recordings were made by Lorenzo Dow Turner, a pioneering Black linguist who travelled through Louisiana in July 1935 to document the speech and cultural traditions of Black communities. His work involved interviewing people from different walks of life, including plantation workers, teachers, schoolchildren and other residents. However, the recordings remained largely unexplored for decades, until Dr Oliver Mayeux, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, came across the collection while investigating Turner’s work. The discovery has now provided linguists with the earliest known extended recordings of spoken Louisiana Creole and Louisiana French.Louisiana Creole, also known as Kouri-Vini, has a history closely connected to slavery and colonialism in the southern United States. The language reportedly emerged in the 18th century in communities along the lower Mississippi River, where enslaved West Africans and their descendants were brought into contact with French-speaking plantation owners and administrators. Many of the enslaved people came from different African linguistic backgrounds and did not share a common language. As elements of the French language came to be learned and adapted, a new language gradually developed, drawing vocabulary from French while establishing its own grammatical structure.Over time, Louisiana Creole became an important means of communication among working-class communities and people of colour across the region. It could be heard around New Orleans, including its port and neighbourhoods, as well as in the towns, farms and bayous of southern Louisiana. The language was not limited to any one social setting, and even some wealthier white families became familiar with it through the Black women who worked as their children’s caregivers. However, the language gradually lost ground as English increasingly became dominant in public life and intergenerational transmission declined. By the 1950s, the New Orleans variety had largely disappeared from everyday use.The most notable opportunity that Turner’s collection provides us with is the chance to hear the language instead of only reconstructing it from written material. Before the discovery, researchers and academics had largely relied on written texts and transcriptions to understand historical Louisiana Creole, or on scattered references in literary texts produced a century ago, predominantly by white people. So, for the very first time, when we get to hear the voices of the community itself, we are exposed to an archive of the Black community and its speech, where its members themselves are the narrators of their story.

A look into the Creole language through the recordings

According to Dr Oliver Mayeux’s published research paper, the collection consists of 13 aluminium discs, each measuring 12 inches and recorded at 78 revolutions per minute. Turner’s recording equipment was far from the compact devices used by researchers today. It weighed more than 100 pounds and had a large microphone attached to it, making the process of recording people a rather unusual experience. He relied on a network of Black doctors and intellectuals who helped him find participants and provided access to their offices, which were trusted spaces during the period of racial segregation. The recordings were made in New Orleans, Lafayette, Chatagnier and Opelousas.Among the voices preserved on the discs is that of Emma Benoit, a sharecropper from the Lafayette area who was 69 when she was interviewed. She spoke about her life working in the fields, her marriage and the loss of her husband, who had died around two decades earlier. Her mother had been enslaved, making her account particularly valuable as a personal recollection of a generation whose experiences were rarely recorded in their own words. Another speaker, Odélia Edmond, born in New Orleans in 1862, recalled an amusing childhood incident involving a woman who sold brick dust. She remembered taking money given to her by her mother but never actually paying the woman, joking years later about the debt and whether she might have to repay it after death. Through repeated listening and comparisons with census information and archival material, Mayeux was also able to identify the people behind several of the recordings.Researchers and linguists have found that Louisiana Creole incorporated more French grammatical features than previously understood, with speakers sometimes moving between French and Creole during conversations. Some grammatical constructions, including the placement of articles after nouns, also differed considerably from contemporary French. The recordings therefore challenge earlier assumptions based largely on written accounts of the language. Although Louisiana Creole is now critically endangered, with only a few thousand speakers remaining, efforts to revive it have begun gaining momentum. Younger Louisianans are learning and teaching Kouri-Vini, creating online resources and encouraging new communities of speakers.Turner’s aluminium discs were never intended to become a window into the lives of people nearly a century later. However, the survival of these recordings is serendipitous, giving us access to the life, language and ways of being that were sustained through words and voices. For Creole, a language so deeply shaped by displacement, slavery and generations of cultural exchange, these recordings open up a new pathway for examining the expressions of a community, creating gateways for further studies, understanding and an appreciation of the power that lies within language itself. It is a history that has existed in writing for generations, but is now waiting to be heard.