In the United States, questions exist over how to preserve languages like Louisiana French, the Gullah Geechee language (the English-based Creole language of some coastal regions in the Atlantic southeast) and Appalachian English in the modern, digital age.
Globally, researchers at the University of Edinburgh are using artificial intelligence to strengthen and revive Scottish Gaelic and Manx. Google recently announced the availability of voice recordings of nearly 30 sub-Saharan African languages to help build tools like voice assistants and translation apps.
The consequences of the language gap can be far greater than an A.I. assistant confusing musical artists, said Christine Mallinson, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
The importance of accurate speech recognition becomes greater as important tasks like job hiring and medical transcriptions become more automated and digitized, she said.
“Social differences are encoded in language,” Mallinson said. “There’s accents, patterns of grammar, word choice. Those differences are connected to our families, our neighborhoods, our age and gender and racial and ethnic and cultural backgrounds and where we grew up.
“If A.I. speech systems make more errors for speakers of underrepresented languages or language varieties, then there can be these serious downstream consequences,” she continued.
For centuries, Louisiana French was the predominant language spoken in South Louisiana. In 1921, a new state constitution declared English the primary language. Many parents stopped teaching their children the language out of fear of discrimination, as students who spoke Louisiana French in class were often punished with knuckle-rappings.
A reversal came in 1968 when the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana was created to advance French, largely through education and community initiatives. In 2023, the Advocate of Baton Rouge estimated about 120,000 Louisianans still spoke French.
Caffery grew up in Franklin, La., an antebellum town on Bayou Teche. As a child, he ate Cajun and Creole food. His grandparents sometimes sang Old French songs and passed along phrases in the language.
“Whether you spoke it or speak it, the language is floating in the air,” he said. “There’s this feeling of there is this beautiful thing that we want to hang on to.”
His work to do just that is painstakingly detailed.
The Center of Louisiana Studies houses a vast trove of Cajun and Creole folklore recordings that include over 12,000 hours of oral histories, field recordings and music performances recorded on everything from wax cylinders to reel-to-reel tape. Barry Jean Ancelet, a professor emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is a cultural activist who has donated much of his recording collection, which dates back to the 1970s.
