Kouri-Vini: The return of the US' lost language
At the Hideaway on Lee, a bar and music venue in Lafayette, Louisiana, Cedric Watson belted out the lyrics to "Oh, Bye Bye" in Louisiana French. The tune never fails to get the crowd up on its feet, dancing the spirited two-step everybody here seems to know as intuitively as how to peel a crawfish.
Watson squeezed his Hohner accordion and stomped out the beat as his band, Bijou Creole, scraped the washboard (also called a frottoir) and strummed a buoyant guitar rhythm. Soon, cowboy hat-clad dancers swirled around the floor like a pot of gumbo getting a good stir. As the Grammy-nominated musician slowed the pace with a bluesy version of "Ma Petite Femme", the dancers launched into a graceful waltz. Watson swapped the accordion for a fiddle, and changed languages from Louisiana French to the endangered Kouri-Vini.
Today, Watson is one of the brightest contemporary talents in American zydeco music. Zydeco is the traditional music of Louisiana Creoles of colour – the historical ethnic group describing mixed-race people born to European settlers and Africans in the colonial US. It blends elements of blues, R&B and soul and relies heavily on percussion techniques that reflect its African American and Afro-Caribbean roots. In addition to English and Louisiana French, it is also sung in Kouri-Vini.
Watson is part of a grass roots resurgence to revive Kouri-Vini, a historical name for the Louisiana Creole language that has been reclaimed to prevent confusion with other things "Creole", such as ethnicity, musical styles and culinary traditions.
Watson's next album, slated for release this summer, will be sung mostly in Kouri-Vini. Today, the language has fewer than 6,000 speakers, but at the beginning of the 20th Century, it was spoken by much of the Creole population in the 22-parish region of south-west Louisiana known as Acadiana.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230228-kouri-vini-the-return-of-the-us-lost-language