In a doctor's waiting room in Lafayette, Louisiana, during the summer of 1935, a 69-year-old widow named Emma Benoit encountered an unusual scene. A bespectacled academic, Lorenzo Dow Turner, had arrived with a massive recording device resembling a wooden closet that weighed 100 pounds and required two people to transport. Turner, a pioneering Black linguist, asked Ms. Benoit to speak into the machine, prompting her to outline the "passing of my life" in Louisiana Creole.
Ms. Benoit was born following the Civil War to a formerly enslaved mother and a white father. At the time of the interview, she spoke a language that was once predominant in parts of the state but is now used by only a few thousand people. Nearly a century later, the aluminum disc recordings from this session have been analyzed and shared with the public for the first time. Oliver Mayeux, a linguist from Cambridge University, discovered Ms. Benoit's interview alongside 12 others from Dr. Turner's trip while researching materials housed at the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University Bloomington.
Dr. Mayeux stated that these clips represent the oldest known examples of someone speaking Louisiana Creole, also known as Kouri-Vini. While recordings from 1934 exist, they feature the language being sung rather than spoken. Upon hearing the rediscovered audio, Dr. Mayeux noted that the material would drastically change the understanding of the language. His research findings regarding these historic recordings were published in the journal "Language Documentation and Description".
Sources: The New York Times World.