“Louisiana French Oral Histories: témoignages du passé, tremplins vers l’avenir” is a collection of student-led interviews with native (and heritage) speakers of Louisiana French and occasionally Kouri-Vini (Louisiana Creole). Students in LSU’s FREN 2201 and FREN 2202 classes foster relationships with their témoins (interviewees), from whom they gather invaluable oral histories in our state’s heritage languages. These interviews are preserved in perpetuity in LSU Libraries T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, Louisiana’s largest and most comprehensive oral history repository, named for renowned historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar and LSU professor, the late T. Harry Williams. This website hosts a small representation of the interviews conducted under the guidance of Louisiana French instructors past and present: Erin Segura, Cathy Luquette, Marguerite Justus and Ashley Luoma. With future funding, we intend to make more interviews accessible to the public, especially those conducted under the guidance of Amanda Lafleur, who first implemented this assignment (inspired by the Firefox Project which documented Appalachian folkways in the 1970s) when she began teaching at LSU in 1998.

Funding for “Louisiana French Oral Histories” was provided by the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, ASPIRE Undergraduate Research Program, LSU’s College of Humanities & Social Sciences Strategic Excellence program, the Department of French Studies and La Fondation Richard Guidry. Special thanks to Amanda Lafleur, Cathy Luquette, Dr. Adelaide Russo and Jennifer A. Cramer for their guidance, translation intern Jackson Butterbaugh, web designer Kyle Tanglao, LSU’s Louisiana French students and most of all, their interviewees without whom this project would not be possible.

Funding for the Amanda Lafleur Collection's digitization has been provided by a 2021 Rebirth grant, administered by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) and provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and the NEH Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) initiative. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in these interviews do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.