Jonathan Abrams reports for the NY Times (archived) about a worthy attempt at preservation:
While relaxing a couple of years ago, Prof. Joshua Caffery found himself in the mood to unwind with some old-time Cajun music. He asked Amazon’s Alexa to play selections from Dewey Balfa, a celebrated fiddler and singer credited with popularizing the genre. Instead, Alexa frustratingly steered him to the catalog of the modern pop artist, Dua Lipa, Caffery said.
“I love Dua Lipa,” said Caffery, the director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Don’t get me wrong. But it seems problematic if you’re interested in a different kind of culture and you want to surround yourself with the music of your region. That, to some degree, is threatening my hold on these things I love.”
Louisiana French, the oral dialect of which Balfa was a cultural guardian, is part of the Bayou’s societal DNA, a link to its history, music and identity. Today, Caffery described the language as struggling and endangered, a notion reinforced by Alexa’s overlooking Balfa.
In response, Caffery assembled a small team at the center to train its own language learning model in automatic speech recognition for Louisiana French, drawing from a trove of historical artifacts and interviews. Over the months, as the learning language model is trained on bits of the language — such as an old-age French nursery rhyme — it brings centuries-old dialect closer into the digital age. […]
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.
More at the link, including audio files; thanks, Eric!
Someone mentioned James Lee Burke’s detective stories here approvingly not long ago; I forget who it was (apologies) but I agree with the assessment (though I find the novels intense enough that I don’t think I’d want to read two in close succession.)
His Louisianan hero Dave Robicheaux is of the generation that fought in Vietnam; his parents are implied to have been French-speaking. He himself utters a bit of French now and again, but you get the impression he’s a semispeaker (language is not a big focus in the stories.) Seems about right.