Oldest Recording of Louisiana’s Vanishing Creole Language Is Published

Leo Sands, The New York Times

The rediscovery of a forgotten recording from 1935 sheds light on a language rooted in the state’s history of slavery and French colonialism.

The man was Lorenzo Dow Turner, a pioneering Black scholar of linguistics. He was crisscrossing southern Louisiana in the summer of 1935 with an enormous recording device that weighed 100 pounds and required at least two people to carry.

Ms. Benoit leaned toward the machine and began outlining the “passing of my life.” A 69-year-old widow, she was born in the ashes of the Civil War to a formerly enslaved mother and a white father. She spoke in Louisiana Creole, a language that only a few thousand people now use but was once the predominant one in parts of the state.

For linguists, the discovery sheds light on how Louisiana Creole emerged from its roots in chattel slavery, blending French, West African and Native American languages. The clips offer historians an unusually direct glimpse into the lives of the language’s long dead speakers, who have remained largely sidelined from the historical record. To the direct descendants of Ms. Benoit, they are a trove of family history.

Read more about the Creole, a language rooted in chattel slavery

Take a virtual tour of ABHM galleries, and exhibits.

Click here for more Breaking news.