African origins

Like other Atlantic creoles, Gullah derives from the pdigins that developed along the West African coast in the 1600s and 1700s as a way for Africans to communicate with Europeans and with members of other African tribes with whom they traded.

Lorenzo Turner's research

In the 1930s and 1940s an African American linguist named Lorenzo Dow Turner did a seminal study of the Gullah language. Turner found that Gullah is strongly influenced by African languages in its sound system, vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and semantic system.

Turner identified over 300 loanwords (BORROWED WORDS) from various African languages in Gullah and almost 4,000 African personal names used by Gullah people. He also found Gullahs living in remote sea-side settlements who could recite songs and story fragments and do simple counting in the Mende, Vai, and Fulani languages of West Africa.

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

But Turner's study was so well researched and so convincingly detailed in its presentation of evidence of African influences in Gullah that academics soon reversed course. After Turner's book was published in 1949, scholars began coming to the Gullah region on a regular basis to study African influences in Gullah language and culture.

Slide 15: gullah verbal system Gullah verbs

The following sentences illustrate the basic verb tense and aspect system in Gullah:

Uh h'ep dem -- "I help them/I helped them" (Present/Past Tense)

Uh bin he'p dem -- "I helped them" (Past Tense)

Uh gwine he'p dem -- "I will help them" (Future Tense)

Uh done he'p dem -- "I have helped them" (Perfect Tense)

Uh duh he'p dem -- "I am helping them" (Present Progressive)

Uh binnuh he'p dem -- "I was helping them" (Past Progressive)

Gullah language today

The Gullah language is spoken today by about 250,000 people in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Although some scholars argue that Gullah has changed little since the 19th century, it is clear that at least some decreolization has taken place. In other words, some African-influenced grammatical structures that were present a century ago are no longer found in the language today. Nonetheless, Gullah is still decidedly a creole language and still quite distinct from English.

For generations, outsiders stigmatized Gullah speakers, regarding their language as a mark of ignorance and low social status. As a result, Gullah people developed the habit of speaking their language only within the confines of their own homes and local communities, and avoided the possibility of being seen speaking it in public. Ironically, the prejudice of outsiders was probably a factor in helping preserve the language.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was raised a Gullah speaker in coastal Georgia. There are only 9 supreme court justices in the U.S. and they have life long terms—you have to be very smart to be one and thus, again we see intelligence and language are not always linked. When asked why he has little to say during hearings of the court, he told a reporter 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.

But in recent years educated Gullah people have begun promoting use of Gullah as a symbol of cultural pride. In 2005, Gullah community leaders announced the completion of a translation of the New Testament into modern Gullah, a project that took more than 20 years to complete.

SLIDE 16-17: NEW TESTAMENT AND TRANSLATION