Listen to the Earliest Known Recordings of a Nearly Dead American Language

A University of Cambridge linguist has recovered and analyzed recordings made in New Orleans in 1935 by Lorenzo Dow Turner, a pioneering Black linguist known for studying Gullah and its African roots. Turner carried more than 100 pounds of recording equipment and arranged interviews in Black doctors’ waiting rooms, which offered participants trusted spaces and access to electricity under Jim Crow segregation. He never analyzed the recordings himself, and they remained largely overlooked. Their voices now reveal a wider range of Louisiana Creole than written records preserve, making the recordings valuable both as linguistic evidence and as a record of people’s lives.

Louisiana Creole grew from French used on plantations, where people from Africa with different languages learned imperfect versions of the colonial language and, over time, formed a distinct one. It differs markedly from standard French: it lacks gender and number agreement and combines articles with nouns, as in “lapolis” for “policemen.” The interviews also convey everyday histories and personality. Odelia Edmond, for instance, recalled youthful pranks, encounters with a seller of voodoo objects, and her husbands’ deaths, including saying she was glad when her first husband was killed. Fewer than 10,000 people speak the language today. By documenting its sounds and varied forms, the recordings offer material that could support efforts to revive a language and culture that have nearly disappeared from Louisiana.