Gullah language
| Gullah | |
|---|---|
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Coastal low country region of South Carolina and Georgia including the Sea Islands |
|
Native speakers
|
(550 cited 1990–2010) |
|
English Creole
|
|
| Dialects | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
Individual code: afs – Afro-Seminole Creole |
| Glottolog | gull1241 |
| Linguasphere | 52-ABB-aa |
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 on the Sea Islands and in the coastal regions of the American States of South Carolina, Georgia and northeast Florida. Dialects of essentially the same language are spoken in the Bahamas.
The Gullah language is based on English with strong influences from West and Central African languages.
Scholars have proposed two general theories about the origins of Gullah:
The two theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. While it is likely that some of the Gullahs' ancestors came from Africa with a working knowledge of Guinea Coast Creole English, and the language influenced the development of Gullah in various ways, it is also clear that most slaves taken to America did not have prior knowledge of a creole language in Africa. It is also clear that the Gullah language evolved in unique circumstances in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, thus developing its own distinctive form in that new environment.
The vocabulary of Gullah comes primarily from English, but there are words of African origin. Some of these African loanwords are: cootuh ("turtle"), oonuh ("you [plural]"), nyam ("eat"), buckruh ("white man"), pojo ("heron"), swonguh ("proud") and benne ("sesame").
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 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.
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