The birth, death and rebirth of a language: Three centuries of Louisiana Creole

Louisiana Creole, a.k.a. Kouri-Vini, is a critically endangered French-lexifier Creole language spoken today mostly in South Louisiana, USA. This presentation charts the sociolinguistic course of Louisiana Creole over three centuries of linguistic ebb and flow: from its genesis in the plantation societies along the Mississippi River, its proliferation as a lingua franca of a multilingual colony, its decline during the Americanization of Louisiana, to its present-day revitalization. Drawing on the author's ongoing monograph project to synthesise these different stages of language change into a single framework, this talk blends quantitative analysis, historical sociolinguistics, and linguistic ethnography to work towards a cross-linguistically applicable theory of variation and change in creole languages.

Oliver Mayeux is a linguist at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, where his research is broadly concerned with endangered languages and contact languages such as creoles and pidgins. He works mainly on Louisiana Creole, spoken by between 3,500 and 6,000 people living mostly in south Louisiana. Growing up between Scotland and Nigeria to an English mother and a Louisianian father, Oliver blames his childhood for his lifelong love for languages and his ‘weird’ English accent. 'Mayeux' is a fairly common Creole family name of Avoyelles Parish and is pronounced  [mɑˈjø] in Louisiana Creole and French.

At Cambridge, Oliver teaches the sociolinguistics of the French-speaking world and co-convene the Cambridge Endangered Languages and Cultures Group (CELC). He is also on the Executive Committee of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics and the Editorial Board for the Endangered Languages Yearbook (Foundation for Endangered Languages, Brill).