Gullah

## Overview

**Gullah**, also called **Sea Island Creole English** and **Geechee**, is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also called "Geechees" within the community), an African-American population living in coastal regions of the American states of South Carolina, Georgia and northeast Florida (including urban Charleston and Savannah). Closely related varieties are spoken in the Bahamas, namely Bahamian Creole. The Gullah language is based on different varieties of English and languages of West and Central Africa.

## Origins

cholars have proposed a number of theories about the origins of Gullah and its development:

1. Gullah developed independently on the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida throughout the 18th and 19th centuries among enslaved Africans. They developed a language that combined grammatical, phonological, and lexical features of the non-standard English varieties spoken by white slaveholders and farmers in that region of the United States along with those from numerous Western and Central African languages. According to this view, Gullah developed separately, or distinctly, from African American English and varieties of English spoken in the South.
2. Some enslaved Africans spoke a Guinea Coast Creole English (also called West African Pidgin English) before being forcibly relocated to the Americas. Guinea Coast Creole English was one of many languages spoken along the West African coast during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries as a language of trade between Europeans and Africans and among multilingual Africans. It seems to have been prevalent in British coastal slave trading centers such as James Island, Bunce Island, Elmina Castle, Cape Coast Castle and Anomabu. This theory of Gullah's origins and development follows the monogenetic theory of creole development and the domestic origin hypothesis of English-based creoles.

The vocabulary of Gullah comes primarily from English, but there are numerous words of African origin for which scholars have yet to produce detailed etymologies. Some of these African loanwords are: *cootuh* ("turtle"), *oonuh* ("you [plural]"), *nyam* ("eat"), *buckruh* ("white man"), *pojo* ("heron"), *swonguh* ("proud") and *benne* ("sesame").

## Related Languages

Gullah resembles other English-based creole languages spoken in West Africa and the Caribbean Basin. These include the Krio language of Sierra Leone, Jamaican Patois, Bajan Creole, Trinidadian Creole, Tobagonian Creole, Guyanese Creole, and Belizean Kriol. It is speculated that these languages use English as a lexifier (i.e., their vocabularies are derived largely from English), and that their syntax (sentence structure) is strongly influenced by African languages; but research by Salikoko Mufwene and others suggests that non-standard Englishes may have also influenced Gullah's (and other creoles') syntactical features.

Gullah is most closely related to Afro-Seminole Creole, spoken in scattered Black Seminole communities in Oklahoma, Texas, and Northern Mexico. The Black Seminoles' ancestors were Gullahs who escaped from slavery in coastal South Carolina and Georgia in the 18th and 19th centuries and fled into the Florida wilderness. They emigrated from Florida after the Second Seminole War (1835–42). Their modern descendants in the West speak a conservative form of Gullah resembling the language of 19th-century plantation slaves.

There is debate amongst linguists concerning the relationship between Gullah and African-American English (AAE). There are some that postulate a Gullah-like "plantation creole" as having been the origin of AAE. Others cite different British dialects of English as having had greater influence on the structure of AAE.

## Research from Lorenzo Dow Turner

In the 1930s and 1940s the African-American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner did a seminal study of the Gullah language based on field research in rural communities in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Turner found that Gullah is strongly influenced by African languages in its sound system, vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and semantics. Turner identified over 300 loanwords from various African languages in Gullah and almost 4,000 African personal names used by Gullah people. He also found Gullahs living in remote seaside settlements who could recite songs and story fragments and do simple counting in the Mende, Vai and Fulani languages of West Africa.

In 1949, Turner published his findings in a classic work called *Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect* (ISBN 978-1570034527). The fourth edition of this book was reprinted with a new introduction in 2002.

Before Turner's work, mainstream scholars viewed Gullah speech as substandard English, a hodgepodge of mispronounced words and corrupted grammar, which uneducated black people developed in their efforts to copy the speech of their English, Irish, Scottish and French Huguenot slave owners.

Turner's study was so well researched and detailed in its evidence of African influences in Gullah that academics soon changed their minds. After Turner's book was published in 1949, scholars began coming to the Gullah region regularly to study African influences in Gullah language and culture.

## Gullah excerpt from Wikipedia article "Gullah language"

### Brer Lion an Brer Goat

Brer Lion bin a hunt, an eh spy Brer Goat duh leddown topper er big rock duh wuk eh mout an der chaw. Eh creep up fuh ketch um. Wen eh git close ter um eh notus um good. Brer Goat keep on chaw. Brer Lion try fuh fine out wuh Brer Goat duh eat. Eh yent see nuttne nigh um ceptin de nekked rock wuh eh duh leddown on. Brer Lion stonish. Eh wait topper Brer Goat. Brer Goat keep on chaw, an chaw, an chaw. Brer Lion cant mek de ting out, an eh come close, an eh say: "Hay! Brer Goat, wuh you duh eat?" Brer Goat skade wen Brer Lion rise up befo um, but eh keep er bole harte, an eh mek ansur: "Me duh chaw dis rock, an ef you dont leff, wen me done long um me guine eat you". Dis big wud sabe Brer Goat. Bole man git outer diffikelty way coward man lose eh life.