Gullah (also called Gullah-English,[2] Sea Island Creole English,[3] and Geechee[4]) is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also called "Geechees" within the community), an African American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia (including urban Charleston and Savannah) as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina.
[9] The vocabulary of Gullah comes primarily from English, but there are numerous Africanisms that exist in their language for which scholars have yet to produce detailed etymologies.
Some of the African loanwords include: cootuh 'turtle', oonuh 'you' (plural), nyam 'eat', buckruh 'white man', pojo 'heron', swonguh 'proud', and benne 'sesame'.
[10] The Gullahs' English-based creole language is strikingly similar to Sierra Leone Krio of West Africa and contains such identical expressions as bigyai 'greedy', pantap 'on top of', ohltu 'both', tif 'steal', yeys 'ear', and swit 'delicious'.
[12][11] In the 1930s and 1940s, the linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner did a seminal study of the language based on field research in rural communities in coastal South Carolina and Georgia.
[13] Turner found that Gullah is strongly influenced by African languages in its phonology, vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and semantics.
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.
[15] 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.
[citation needed] Several white American writers collected Gullah stories in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.
Jones, a Confederate officer during the Civil War, and Stoddard were both whites of the planter class who grew up speaking Gullah with the slaves (and later freedmen) on their families' plantations.
Another collection was made by Abigail Christensen, a Northern woman whose parents came to the Low Country after the Civil War to assist the newly-freed slaves.
[citation needed] Others suggest that a kind of valorization or "covert prestige"[21] remained for many community members and that the complex pride has insulated the language from obliteration.
When asked why he has little to say during hearings of the court, he told a high school student that the ridicule he received for his Gullah speech, as a young man, caused him to develop the habit of listening, rather than speaking, in public.
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".
Bole man git outer diffikelty way coward man lose eh life.This is a literal translation into English following Gullah grammar, including verb tense and aspect, exactly as in the original: Brer Lion was hunting, and he spied Brer Goat lying down on top of a big rock working his mouth and chewing.
Cause de prophet write say [...][26]Therefore when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of king Herod, lo!
Gullah is most closely related to Afro-Seminole Creole, which is 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.
Their modern descendants in the West speak a conservative form of Gullah that resembles the language of 19th-century plantation slaves.