ABOUT GULLAH / GEECHEE SEA ISLAND CULTURE

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DEFINITION

NOUN: Coastal South Carolina and Georgia

1a. The Gullah creole. b. A speaker of Gullah.

2. Offensive Used as a disparaging term for a person who speaks a nonstandard local dialect, as in Savannah, Georgia, or Charleston, South Carolina.
ETYMOLOGY: Ultimately after the Ogeechee River, Georgia, along which distinctive varieties of Black English were spoken.
The American Heritage AE Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary the word Geechee derives from the Ogeechee River. Map

It is believed the name Ogeechee comes from the Muskogean Indian Tribe meaning "River of the Yuchis"

Gullah and Geechee Traditions
The first Gullah residents were brought to the United States and enslaved from many African nations, including Angola. Another myth the Queen Quet dismantled pertains to the way Gullah people speak. Gullah is an authentic language, not merely a dialect as some self-proclaimed experts claim, she said.

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INDEPENDENT SCHOLARS

J. Herman Blake

J. Herman Blake
Sociologist:
Scholar in Residence
University of South Carolina Beaufort
Johns Island, SC 29457-0846
[p ]843-521-3138
[e] blakej at gwm.sc.edu
Founder The Sea Islands Institute at The University of South Carolina Beaufort honoring people of the Gullah/Geechee culture. "Primary focus is the study and preservation of Gullah culture through a program of scholarship, curriculum development, and community development."
Also see: 1963 Malcolm X interview of el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz University of California Berkeley

Geechee culture and language captured in 70-year-old recordings: For more information, contact: Michael Sullivan (912) 681-0336 mikesull@GeorgiaSouthern.edu
June 2, 2005 #05-473

On a warm spring morning on Sapelo Island, Ga., Cornelia Bailey and Benjamin Hall sit on the veranda of the senior center and listen to a recording of the Rev. John Dunham reciting a Brer Rabbit story. The recording is more than 70 years old. Bailey and Hall are helping Georgia Southern University professor Thomas Klein translate and transcribe the recording from the Gullah-Geechee dialect to modern English.

The recording is one of many made in the early 1930s by the first African American linguist, Lorenzo Dow Turner. He traveled the Georgia and South Carolina sea islands and recorded the island residents talking about their families, their traditions and their daily lives. Informants

Now Klein is working to bring the recordings up to date and share them with the present-day islanders.
We are finding out about a group of people who have traditionally been under-represented and misrepresented, said Klein. We are learning about the diaspora of the African people on the American continent; we learn about the survival and adaptation skills that people have.
Bailey is a life-long resident of Sapelo Island and a leader in the small Hog Hammock community. I thought it was a great project; no one had done this before, she said. I read Turners book and stopped there. Thomas went beyond that and found out about these audio manuscripts, and no one had done that before.
Occasionally the project will become more than just academic research and hit home with the islanders. One day Bailey found herself listening to her great-great uncle, Shadrack Hall.
I remember him, and to hear his voice describing everything in minute detail, I said, You have to be kidding! Anyone who came to the house, I said, You have to listen to this, she said. I was dragging people in and saying, You have got to listen to this!

Called Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Georgia, the culture and language of the sea island residents has been preserved in small communities like Hog Hammock. The residents are the descendents of slaves who worked the island plantations before the Civil War. During the years of slavery, they developed Gullah-Geechee as a Creole language.
A Creole language arises out of the context of speakers of otherwise unintelligible languages in this case, English and African languages, said Klein. Eventually the Creole language replaces the original languages.
Klein discovered the Turner recordings at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music.
Many of the people Turner interviewed had been born into slavery. While the recordings may be useful to a historian or a folklorist, they are also a gold mine to a linguist like Klein.
For me they are essential, because I can hear the original Gullah-Geechee speech as it was happening in 1932 and 1933, he said. This is absolutely unique. It is the only source of its kind to the best of my knowledge.
Translating and transcribing the Turner recordings may be a labor of love, but it isnt easy. It can take as much as an hour to translate just a minute or two of tape. One problem is the quality of the recordings. Klein is playing CDs, but the original equipment Turner used in the 1930s wasn't as good as modern recording tools. Another issue is the cultural difference between todays island residents and their ancestors.
The Geechee people of Sapelo don't understand Gullah-Geechee that well themselves anymore, and its a different kind of speech, said Klein. So this is the first time they are hearing Gullah-Geechee spoken the way it was 70 years ago. So its a matter of tuning your ear to the older stage of the language.
The differences between life on the island in the 1930s and today also present difficulties. They are talking about their daily lives 70 years ago and their lives were much different than what they are today, Klein said. The words they used are quite different.
Some linguists believe Gullah-Geechee is endangered because of the dominating influence of English. However, Klein says that may not be the case. It turns out the evidence you find is that Geechee is holding its own. Its not laying down to die. The structure of the language is still very much alive, he said.
A good percentage of the Gullah-Geechee community give up speaking the language, especially those who move off the islands. Klein found a core of island residents who are bilingual, switching back and forth from Gullah-Geechee to English as the circumstances dictate. For the people who are still here, who still speak Gullah-Geechee, the language is holding its own and is distinct from English, he said.
Klein is the latest in a long line of linguists, historians, anthropologists and other researchers who have studied the sea island people and culture. Islanders have developed a degree of skepticism of scholars who visit the island to pursue their work and then move on without leaving anything behind. Klein has a different approach. Every time he visits Sapelo with his recordings, he is bringing something into the community a contact with the islands past.
I don't want to work on the community; I want to work with the community. There is a huge difference, he said.
Bailey has opened her home to Klein to conduct his listening sessions. She says Kleins work is filling missing links in the communitys history. You know that black history has always been a bit sketchy, hit and miss, she said. Some we thought was ours was European or Native American. To find that this was something that was all ours; it was great. We are getting something great out of this.
In addition, the island residents hear about life on the island told by people 70 years ago. It is a time line of people talking about their lives back to the 1850s.
Its like hearing an audio history of your own family and your own history that you didnt know existed before, said Klein. You cant buy this. Its been wonderful for both parties.
Bailey shares Kleins enthusiasm and believes the community is getting more out of this project than Klein. It benefits him and his teaching and so forth, but I think it benefits us as much as it benefits him, she said. It is our history and culture. Its ours.

Talk of the Gullah tradition Sea Islanders help translate rare, 1930s-era recordings
http://www.islandpacket.com/news/local/story/4944511p-4523998c.html
BY MONIQUE GREEN, The Island Packet
Published Tuesday, June 14th, 2005
Emory Campbell tunes his ears to the sounds of his ancestors -- listening intently to learn more and help preserve a language he sees as a fragile specimen.
Campbell is the main source representing the 25 native islanders whom a Georgia Southern University linguistics professor is working with to unlock some 70-year-old recordings of the Gullah-Geechee language. But the process is difficult, partly because even Gullah people don't understand the language that well anymore.
Professor Thomas Klein is translating the 1930s-era recordings that are "the only source of its kind" with present-day Sapelo and Hilton Head islanders, at the same time teaching islanders that Gullah is not broken English and is a language of its own.
Hilton Head and Sapelo Island, Ga., are among the once-isolated Sea Islands where Gullah-Geechee speech developed.
That's why Lorenzo Dow Turner, the first African-American linguist and creator of the recordings, traveled the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands in the early 1930s. He made the recordings of Gullah, a Creole language derived from English and West African languages, to capture the voices of islanders born into slavery, discussing their families, traditions and daily lives.
Klein said he received the recordings from the Indiana University archives of traditional music.
It can take as long as an hour to translate just a minute or two of the tape partly because of the poor quality of the old recordings, Klein said.
While Campbell, a Gullah preservationist and author, said he understood a lot of the words in the recordings, he realizes many native islanders would not because they have chosen not to speak Gullah anymore.
Even before the island was connected to the mainland by a bridge in the 1950s, children were discouraged from speaking Gullah in school.
"Some of us got Gullah beaten out of us," Campbell said.
Gullah has not been widely accepted because it is not a written language and often is mistaken as broken English, Campbell said. Some Gullah people are trying to preserve Gullah by putting it into a written form, while some scholars don't believe this is the best method.
"If you put it in a written form, like a Webster's Dictionary, it tends to stabilize it," said Ray Crook, an anthropology professor at the University of West Georgia, who studies Gullah. "It's a unique oral language that's dynamic and ever-changing."
But Louise Miller Cohen, a Gullah storyteller from Hilton Head, sees writing down the language as a way to pass it on to future generations. Cohen is putting together a book to translate Gullah.
"This is my language, and I'm making a Gullah book because I don't want to lose the words I grew up with," she said.
The Sea Island Translation Team is translating the New Testament of the Bible and already has completed the Gospel of John. Some scholars also are working on types of dictionaries.
With young people more influenced by popular culture and moving to seek economic and educational opportunities away from the Sea Islands, the language is disappearing.
Campbell said he would like to see Gullah flourish and continue to be passed on through the generations, but realistically he knows this will be difficult.
"It is my wish, but not my hope (to preserve Gullah)," Campbell said. "But we don't have a textbook to teach Gullah -- it won't be easy."

Sound Structure in Gullah:
The Narratives in Turner’s 'Africanisms' as a Linguistic Resource By Thomas B. Klein & Meta Y. Harris 1/2001
To date, the narratives in 'Africanisms' have had a relatively minor influence on Gullah language studies. In contrast, this paper demonstrates that close study of these narratives contributes significantly to the understanding of phonological patterns and phonological variation in Gullah.
First, it is shown that there are mismatches between the description of Gullah phonology in the body of 'Africanisms' and the phonology of the narratives. Thus, a number of patterns described in the main text are not represented in the transcription conventions of the narratives. On the other hand, close study of the narratives reveals patterns that are not described in the text, such as Nasal Velarization (NV) and the deletion of unstressed syllables in pre-stress position (PSD) in English cognates.
In addition, the transcription of the narratives often provides phonological variants, thus enabling the study of phonological variation in Gullah.
As shown in this paper, NV in the narratives in 'Africanisms' transforms an etymological alveolar nasal into a velar nasal after the diphthong /aw/. Similar patterns are found in related Creoles such as Jamaican, Guyanese and Trinidadian/Tobagonian Creole English.
However, Gullah shows a dissimilatory effect in that NV does not occur if there is a velar consonant elsewhere in the word, whereas NV applies across the board in other creoles.
This paper also shows that the narratives in 'Africanisms' provide evidence for variable PSD. The overall rate of deletion is high. It is also shown that PSD differs by location and is heavily gender-graded.
In sum, this paper demonstrates that the close study of the narratives in 'Africanisms' can make a number of significant contributions to Gullah language studies. First, the uncovering of previously undescribed phonological patterns is enlightening for the linguistics of Gullah. Secondly, the demonstrated difference between different locations and men’s and women’s speech has significant implications for the dialectology and sociolinguistics of Gullah. Thirdly, the understanding of the connection between Gullah and other Creoles is enhanced by the similarities and subtle distinctions found in patterns such as NV. The match in the highly frequent and socially graded occurrence of PSD in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Gullah versus the absence of NV in AAVE provides evidence which future discussions of the connection between AAVE and Atlantic Creole languages should take into account.

W.A. Stewart, Linguist Who Studied Ebonics, Dies at 71 April 10, 2002 by Wolfgang Saxon - Article Summary: William Alexander Stewart

Born in Honolulu to Scottish immigrants grew up in California died 3/25/02 in Manhattan. He spoke four languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese and Hawaiian. He was an Army translator in Frankfurt and Paris in 1952 and graduated in 1955 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also received a master's degree in 1958. After study as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pernambuco, Brazil, he was recruited as a staff linguist by the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington in 1960, a job entailing much travel in the Caribbean and Africa.
Lectured on Portuguese and Spanish at Georgetown University, taught at Johns Hopkins University and joined the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1968. City University of New York Graduate Center faculty since 1973, named him a full professor in 1984. At CUNY he taught pidgins and creoles, phonetics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and forensic linguistics.
Professor of linguistics, an early scholar of what has come to be known as ebonics. He explored its grammatical differences and how these can lead to misunderstandings in the classroom. He examined and wrote widely about how this creates testing problems for such children. He argued that certain grammatical peculiarities of the dialect, like "he busy," meaning he's busy right now, and "he be busy," meaning he's always busy, make nonstandard English into a separate language. He demonstrated that speakers of nonstandard English were, in fact, speaking the remnants of a creole, melding languages of African slaves and the English of American settlers.
Fluent in German, French, Dutch, Wolof, Haitian, Papiamento and Gullah, a dialect born in 16th-century Barbados.
Authority on creole languages, in particular Gullah, the West African-flavored speech of of the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia,
In 1965 he proposed that it was not the vocabulary or pronunciation of the African-American vernacular but its grammar that stumped some children with reading problems. Three years later, he became co-director of the Education Study Center in Washington, which helped ghetto children with their reading.
Creoles are languages resulting from contact between two different tongues, one of them usually being English, French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese. Professor Stewart's particular fascination lay with Gullah, the speech of a dwindling number of rural African-Americans along the Carolina coastal delta, down to the Florida border. The Gullah "I en bin dey, yall know," for example, translates to "I have not been there, you know." Gullah, a word derived perhaps from Angola, draws to some degree on amix of West African languages like Ewe, Ibo and Yoruba.

Bill Stewart's Obituary re: William Alexander Stewart Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/10/obituaries/10STEW.html?ex=1019417440&ei=1&en=8a0609fbbc2760c8

Salikoko S. Mufwene
Remarks re: Bill Stewart's research
University of Chicago
Department of Linguistics
Etymology is not one of my strengths. Stewart is not the author of the etymology relating "Gullah" to "Angola". The author of his obituary certainly had to deal with what many of us have faced right after a colleague has passed away, viz., you need information very quickly and cannot verify everything you are told. I am sure anybody doing research on Gullah will know better than to rely on that particular obituary for a newspaper about the etymology of "Gullah." It was proposed in the 1920's, I think, and has been repeated in various publications. It has also been related to "Gola" (in Sierra Leone). Based on the forms, neither etymology is implausible, though I think demographic history may be in favor of "Angola"-- yet congruence of forms may not rule out the second etymology. A key factor is when, in the first place, people started using the word "Gullah." That would help us address the issue. I have no clue and therefore would not even consider writing the NYT if I have no better explanation to offer..

Sali.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas [is/was] a Gullah speaker.

12/14/00 In Thomas's Own Words NYT

"When I was 16, I was sitting as the only black kid in my class, and I had grown up speaking a kind of a dialect. It's called Geechee. Some people call it Gullah now, and people praise it now. But they used to make fun of us back then. It's not standard English. When I transferred to an all-white school at your age, I was self-conscious, like we all are. It's like if we get pimples at 16, or we grow six inches and we're taller than everybody else, or our feet grow or something; we get self-conscious. And the problem was that I would correct myself midsentence. I was trying to speak standard English. I was thinking in standard English but speaking another language. So I learned that --- I just started developing the habit of listening. And it just got to be --- I didn't ask questions in college or law school. And I found that I could learn better just listening. And if I have a question I could ask it later. For all those reasons, and a few others, I just think that it's more in my nature to listen rather than to ask a bunch of questions. And they get asked anyway. The only reason I could see for asking the questions is to let people know I've got something to ask. That's not a legitimate reason in the Supreme Court of the United States."

Virginia Mixson Geraty: "Along the southeastern coast of the United States there is a narrow strip of land which is known to linguists and dialect geographers as the Gullah Area. This region, which includes the sea islands along the coast, extends roughly from Jacksonville, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, and inland for about one hundred miles. Living in this area are African-American people who are descendants of the tribesmen brought to the New World during the time of the Slave Trade. These people still speak variations of the original creole language known as Gullah."

Linguistics Area

ABOUT GULLAH / GEECHEE SEA ISLAND CULTURE

DEFINITION

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas [is/was] a Gullah speaker.