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Source: Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989) pp. 772–773. Gullah Gullah is the most conservative form of "black English" spoken in the United States today. It preserves features of vocabulary, grammar, and idiom that other kinds of black English have lost, or never had. It is a true "creole" language, the only creole English still alive in the United States and a close cousin to the flourishing creoles of the Caribbean: Jamaican, Guyanese, Trinidadian, Barbadian, and others. Like these, Gullah preserves features of African languages brought in by plantation slaves as far back as 300 years ago. Gullah is spoken chiefly on the coastal islands—the so-called rice islands—that stretch for 160 miles along the seaboard of South Carolina and Georgia, but it is also heard on parts of the adjacent mainland. Until recent years these settlements were isolated, as some still are, so that the black inhabitants, who worked in rice fields, had little contact with the English of the white and black communities ashore. Gullah was thus sheltered from the process of "decreolization," by which creole speech gradually changes under the influence of the prevailing language. Gullah, with its mixture of English and African features, is quite adequate for the daily life of its speak-ers. But outsiders do not readily understand it, and as the Gullah communities become less isolated, linguistic fea tures differing most from the surrounding American English are bound to yield. The word Gullah may come from Gola, the name of a people from Liberia and Sierra Leone (West Africa), whence some slaves were brought to the Carolina colony. This group, however, was relatively small, whereas a very large number of slaves were brought earlier and over a longer period from Angola. The latter, therefore, seems the more plausible source for the word. The Gullah people and their language, however, are far more mixed, as both the history of slave importations and the surviving African language features show. The Charleston colony, founded in 1670, is the geographical center of Gullah. Planters from Barbados started it, bringing their slaves who in the early years were from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Nigeria. Others came later from the entire coast of West Africa which stretches Over 3,000 miles from Senegal to Angola, bringing various languages and dialects. Thus, the creole English of these first slaves was constantly affected by new importations. The African features that have survived best in Gullah must have arrived early and have been reinforced by the continuing influx of Africans. Creole blacks—those born in America—looked down on the African-born as savages and made little or no attempt to keep African languages alive. But it is striking that a large number of African features in Gullah are like those flourishing in the Caribbean today, in French-, Dutch-, and Spanish-based, as well as English-based, creoles. This implies either a similar origin or else convergence so that for linguistic or other reasons the same basic features emerged as the dominant ones. These and other possibilities are now being debated by scholars in the field. In many fundamental ways at least, Gullah is strikingly like its Caribbean cousins already mentioned. The main features that set Gullah apart from the rest of American English, black or white, are sound, word form, and syntax. Vocabulary, being a superficial feature (words come and go more easily than any other part of language), will be treated briefly. In records made about 1940, Lorenzo Turner, the first linguist to study Gullah closely, found African words and phrases still in use or at least remembered, though in many cases they were being replaced by English words. Such foodstuff names as okra, yam, benne, cush, goober, and cala were at least locally known; others included buckra, "white man," hoodoo, "sorcery," and cooter, "tortoise or turtle." Turner also collected hundreds of the personal names that the Gullah give their children at birth-all of African derivation. Though the meaning and origin of these names are forgotten, the names continue to be used out of tradition. More significant, however, are features of syntax, such as the plural pronoun una meaning you all, which is prevalent in southern speech. Una, however, is not a translation of you all; it comes from one or more West African languages, and its cognates are widespread in the Caribbean, from the Bahamas to Jamaica, Belize, Tobago, the Nicaraguan shore, and Guyana. Similarly, the little word da (or duh) is used to indicate continuing verbal action. We go does not specify the time or status of the action, but we da go or we da goin shows progressive action. The latter is a feature of several West African languages, which survives also in the creole speech of the Caribbean colonies. Apart from use of -ing, verbs have a single form, usually taken from the English infinitive or else from the past: mek and tek (make, take), in common with most other English-based creoles, betray northern England origins. One other such feature is the use of dern (and them) added to a noun, especially a person's name, to mean that person and those associated with him or her (usually family members). This explains a Gullah expression such as Sancho dem, "Sancho and his bunch," as reported by Ambrose E. Gonzales. This Gullah feature was also reported from white speech in Memphis, Tenn., in the 1920s. The greatest number of Gullah words are not African but English, though many are disguised by phonetic changes, most of which are, or were, also found in general black speech: the lack of th- sounds, so that this is dis and through is tru; use of b for English v, so that very is bery and vexed is bexed; and the loss of final consonants especially from clusters, so that past, wasp, blind, and salt become, respectively, pas, wass, bline, and saal. Gullah has special pronunciations of its own, however: put is regularly pit, see'em is shum, ain't it becomes enti, and young is nyoung. Sometimes, under influence of African word endings, a vowel is added in Gullah: wikiti, "wicked"; nekiti, "naked." And a goodly number of African turns of speech are translated in Gullah: hardears, "stubborn," peel-head, "bald," and so on. The famous Uncle Remus stories of Brer Rabbit (Joel Chandler Harris) are told in the language of middle Georgia, not Gullah. But the corresponding tales in Gullah may be found in two good sources, Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast (1888), by Charles Colcock Jones, and The Black Border (1922), by Ambrose Gonzales. In Africanisms (1949) Lorenzo Dow Turner included phonetic transcriptions and translations into standard English of 14 texts that he had recorded on phonograph records. Much study has been done since, but little of it has been published. Gullah especially interests scholars of creole languages because it is the most distinctive and archaic type of American black English. But the attention is almost too late, for with the exploitation of the rice islands for tourist development the process of decreolization has accelerated. Gullah, especially in its more traditional form kept alive by isolation, is now fading fast. Dialects, however, are surprisingly vital; Gullah may survive as the intimate, home talk of rice island natives for generations. Ambrose E. Gonzales, The Black Border: Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast (with a glossary) (1922), With Aesop along the Black Border (1924, 1969); Guy B. Johnson, Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, South Carolina (1930); Raven I. McDavid, Jr., and Virginia G. McDavid, American Speech (1951); Julia Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary (1928); John E. Reinecke et al., A Bibliography of Pidgin and Creole Languages (1975); Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949, 1968); Norman E. Whitten, Jr., and John Szwed, Trans-Action (1968). Frederic G.
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