Oliver Mayeux

Writing my book: A language from birth, to death, to rebirth

I am currently busy writing a monograph, under contract with Cambridge University Press, which examines processes of language change in Louisiana Creole from its genesis in the plantation society, during its time as a vernacular, to its endangerment and, now, its ongoing revival. That is, the history of the language from birth, to death, to rebirth. The analysis draws on a corpus of Louisiana Creole which includes field data, social media data, and historical texts.

Fieldwork: Documentary linguistics meets documentary photography

Since 2024, Danish/Franco-Algerian documentary photographer Cécile Smetana and I have been collaborating on a long-term artistic-academic portrait of Creole-speaking Louisiana combining language documentation and analog photography.

Our three fieldtrips so far have been supported by the National Atchafalaya Heritage Area, West Baton Rouge Museum, Leica, NUNU Arts and Culture Collective, New Orleans Foundation for Francophone Cultures, and the Conseil pour le développement du français en Louisiane (Codofil).

I'm learning how much time, trust, and care it takes to create something beautiful, and how valuable it is for linguistic fieldwork to work in a new medium, a slow pace, and with an artistic method.

We are currently undertaking further fieldwork and working towards a large exhibition and publication of our work. Images from the project have so far been exhibited at West Baton Rouge Museum and shown as part of Paris Photo 2025. You can also keep up with our project informally on Cécile's Instagram page.

Linguistic legacies and the social lives of data

Data is central to much of what we do as linguists, whether we collect it in the field, analyze it in our proverbial armchair, or use it for computational purposes. But what happens to data left behind by the linguists of the past? How can we, today, recover this valuable documentation and use it to generate insights for present-day inquiry? And how can we make sure that, after we are long gone, our precious data can live on? These questions demand practical and philosophical perspectives, and touch on themes both scientific and subjective. Oh, and it usually involves a good bit of what Tobias Weber calls linguistic detective work! That's probably why many people find linguistic legacy materials so fascinating. Because, as Lise Dobrin and Saul Schwartz write, these materials have social lives of their own. I'm on the Advisory Council for DiLegMa — Discussions on Legacy Materials, an annual conference and international research network, under the auspices of which we are working on defining and understanding this under-theorized area of study.

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