Kouri-Vini — the Louisiana Creole language — was spoken in my grandparents' generation in ways it simply isn't spoken in mine. School policies, social pressure, and decades of English-only enforcement in public life did what they were designed to do — they broke the chain of daily transmission. In one or two generations, a language that had survived centuries nearly disappeared from everyday use. How the Chain of Language Transmission Was Broken Louisiana's 1921 state constit