New Google apppreserves, teaches Louisiana Creole
17th May 2021 · 0 Comments
By Fritz Esker
Contributing Writer
The Google Arts and Culture app recently launched Woolaroo, an open-source photo-translation experiment designed to preserve many of the world’s endangered languages, including Louisiana Creole.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) publishes the “UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.” The Woolaroo app will explore 10 of these languages, including Louisiana Creole. Some of Woolaroo’s languages, like Yiddish, have millions of speakers. Others, like the pre-Colombian Nawat language of El Salvador, have only hundreds of speakers. Louisiana Creole is estimated to have 7,000 to 9,000 speakers mostly located in Louisiana, but also scattered throughout California, Illinois and Texas.
For Louisiana Creole, Google partnered with some of the writers behind “Ti Liv Kreyol” (https://sites.google.com/view/learnlouisianacreole), a contemporary book that teaches people Louisiana Creole.
“This app is only possible through the work of our partners who have gone word by word and line by line recording pronunciations,” said Chance Coughenour, a program manager with Google Arts and Culture. “We didn’t want the app to be a static thing. We wanted it to grow.”
Woolaroo users can take a photo of an object and receive a translated label of any objects in the frame. Users will also be able to listen to the correct pronunciation in Louisiana Creole. If the translation has not yet been provided, users can provide the information through the app and have it reviewed by editors before it is added to the program.
“What is most important here is that our recordings and translations are just a first step: we’ve built the foundations but now it’s up to the community to develop the app further,” said “Ti Liv Kreyol” co-author and University of Cambridge lecturer Oliver Mayeux. “My biggest hope for this project is that it becomes a springboard for younger and older generations to connect and bond over the language in a fun, interesting way. The app is special because it requires you to interact with the outside world.”
“Ti Liv Kreyol” was created by Mayeux, educator Herbert Wiltz, and University of Virginia linguistics lecturer Nathan Wendte. An expanded second edition came out in 2020 with the help of an additional co-author, Adrien Guillory-Chatman.
Mayeux, whose father is from Louisiana and whose mother is British, began work on the Louisiana Creole component of the app in fall 2019. He worked with Guillory-Chatman and the book’s illustrator Jonathan Mayers. He has a deep passion for the history of the Louisiana Creole language.
“Louisiana Creole started to come into being some 300 years ago in communities of people who were enslaved on Colonial Louisiana’s many plantations. The genesis of a new language is testament to the fact that those enslaved people were just that: people, with their own culture, traditions, hopes, dreams, ingenuity,” Mayeux said. “Transmitted from generation to generation, the language can be seen as a living link to that point in time: its words and grammar are, for me, like a call never to forget a point in history the horror of which leaves us speechless. It’s a story which must be told and kept alive.”
While Wendte was not directly involved with Woolaroo, he praised the app as a vital tool for preserving the Louisiana Creole language.
“One of the most important parts of revitalizing a language is expanding the domains in which it can be used (e.g., apps and social media),” Wendte said. “This makes a statement that this language is not dead…It is not just of the past, but of the present and the future.”
Erin Dubuclet Johnson, a local Creole language learner, has Creole ancestry on her father’s side of the family. Her grandmother and great aunt would speak Louisiana Creole to each other, but they never passed it down to her father. During the pandemic, Johnson started learning Louisiana Creole through a combination of sources (“Ti Liv Kreyol,” flash cards, and the Memrise website) and she now participates in Zoom calls with other members of a Facebook group dedicated to the language where they practice speaking it to each other.
Johnson had not heard of the Woolaroo app, but was excited to hear that more avenues are opening for those curious about the Louisiana Creole language. She said it’s a language anyone – Black, white, Creole, and non-Creole can have fun learning.
“I just want us to be able to reclaim that culture,” Johnson said. “If we have a history of speaking French and different dialects of French, I think we should embrace that. I think it should be taught in schools, even if it’s an elective course, to keep those centuries-old traditions from fading away.”
To see UNESCO’s full list of endangered languages, visit www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/index.php.
This article originally published in the May 17, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
