Earliest spoken Louisiana Creole audio sat on 1935 discs labelled 'Louisiana'

Aluminium discs cut in 1935 by the Black linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner hold the earliest known spoken audio of Louisiana Creole, according to Dr Oliver Mayeux of the University of Cambridge. His study, published on October 28 in the open-access journal Language Documentation and Description, also matches details in the speakers' stories to the written record, including a police officer's account of an assault that a newspaper reported in 1893.

A line in a biography led to the discs

Mayeux got interested in Turner while in South Carolina, when he noticed a passing reference in Turner's biography to a field trip to Louisiana. The trail led to discs marked "Louisiana" at the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University Bloomington, which had digitised them.

The first thing he found on them was not speech but music, played by the classical pianist Jessie Covington Dent. Her family papers then gave him pages from Turner's address book, listing his contacts for the trip.

The folklorist Alan Lomax had captured snippets of sung Creole in 1934 and 1937, but Turner's discs hold speech. Turner's machine weighed more than 100 pounds, and each disc could hold only a few minutes of sound.

Doctors' offices as recording studios

Turner depended on Black doctors and intellectuals, who found people to interview and let him record on their premises. Under Jim Crow segregation, those offices offered two things he needed: trust and electricity.

All the speakers were Black, and most were late middle-aged or older, so they were born when the language was near its height. It died out in New Orleans by the 1950s. Only a few thousand native speakers remain today, all elderly and mostly rural.

Three lives that can be checked

George Doyle, a former New Orleans police officer, describes the force before it was segregated. He recalls being beaten at Tremé market by a gang of White men he called "a band of rats," and arresting them anyway. Mayeux located a report of the incident in an 1893 newspaper.

Odelia Edmond, a talkative New Orleanian, remembers hiding under church pews to tug at brides' veils, and cheating the folk figure Zozo Labrique, a seller of red brick dust used in some voodoo rituals, out of thirty cents. A newspaper recorded her arraignment for battery.

Emma Benoit, born in 1868, was a sharecropper from the Lafayette area. Mayeux traced her great-granddaughter, who said Benoit had lived in her White father's house after her enslaved mother died.

What the audio adds to the written record

French supplied most of the words, yet the grammar is separate: articles fuse into nouns, and words such as "the" come after the noun. "Contemporary French speakers would simply not be able to comprehend this language," Mayeux said.

Until now, scholars of the New Orleans variety worked from transcriptions. Mayeux said the discs contain "far more linguistic diversity than the texts we relied upon until now."

A catalogue in the journal's appendix links to the recordings, which can be heard in full. Young Louisianans are meanwhile reviving the language under the name Kouri-Vini, and now have the voices of their predecessors to listen to.