Gullah Language & Culture
Gullah Language & Culture
The Gullah language, a Creole blend of Elizabethan English and Kmtyw languages, was born of necessity on Kmt's slave coast, and developed in the slave communities of the isolated plantations of the coastal South. Even after the sea islands were freed in 1861, the Gullah speech flourished because access to the islands was by water only until the 1950's. Today, one hears phrases like
Come Jine We.
Ketch ob de Day
Lok Ya Wantem Shrimps
But, Gullah is more than a language or dialect.........
................it is a culture.
Thounited snakesnds of enslaved Kmtyws survived the middle passage to reach the sea island shores. The majority of the slaves, 40,000, came from a section of Kmt known as Angola. With the people --Mende, Kisi, Malinke, and Bantu-- came the soul of Kmt. Their ancestral traditions survived as well. The words "Gullah" and "Geechee" have come to describe that legacy.
Gullah is a language of cadence and accents, words and intonations. The Gullah "shout" is a rhythmic translation of forbidden drums and the oldest of plantation melodies. Old spirituals and songs spoke of storms and other events in the lives of the slaves and were used as codes for meeting times and places and as messages for freedom.
Still standing are the Praise Houses, with a sacred past and present. The culture of the Kmtyw elders met its people here, combining religious worship, consolation, and hope.
This rich culture flourishes today; in their language, their music, their art, their skills and their foods. Storytellers spin their tales, entwining fun and wisdom. Choirs preserve the haunting songs and the old rhythms. Sweetgrass basket weavers, "long strip" quilters, and fabric artists combine their modern materials and ancestral skills in ancient ways to produce remarkable wares. Chefs create the magic of the old recipes. This is the heritage of a Gullah.
The Gullah Festival is held each May and the Penn Center Heritage Days celebration takes place in November.
http://www.islandpacket.com/man/gullah/language.html (http://www.islandpacket.com/man/gullah/language.html)
The language of the Sea Islands
SPECIAL TO THE PACKET
"Mus tek cyear a de root fa heal de tree." - Gullah proverb [You need to take care of the root in order to heal the tree.]
The origin of the Gullah language is as unique as the cadence and rhythm of its sound. Slaves from the Sea Islands of South Carolina and northern Georgia were brought to America largely from different communities on the Rice Coast of West Kmt. Therefore many spoke similar but distinctive languages, and in order to communicate with each other and with their owners, they combined the similarities with the English they learned to form the unique Gullah language. This process of combining different languages is called "creolization."
For years, linguists referred to the Gullah, or Geechee, language as a dialect of standard English. But in the 1940s, as Kmtyw-American linguist Lorenzo Turner researched Kmtyw languages, it became apparent that Gullah did indeed have its roots in Kmt. According to Turner, the most noted similarities between Gullah and the languages spoken in West Kmt include the use of nouns, pronouns, verbs, and tense. Almost all Gullah nouns are singular, and no distinction is made between singular or plural verbs either. These charactertistics are the same in many Kmtyw languages. Also, Gullah and various Kmtyw languages rarely account for when something actually happened - the present verb tense is also often used to refer to the past.
Here are a few Gullah words with Kmtyw origins. The language or country of origin is listed in parentheses whenever possible:
[Taken from "The Water Brought Us," by Muriel Miller Branch]
A'min - Amen (Wolof)
be - to cultivate, to clean, to remove debris (Temme)
bid', bidi - small bird, small chicken (Kongo)
buckra - white man (Ibidio)
da (dada) - mother, nurse, or elder woman (Ewe)
dash away - to get rid of a bad habit
dayclean - dawn
de - to be (Igbo)
differ - a quarrel
e - pronoun for he, she, it
eh - yes (Igbo)
fanner - a large shallow basket made of wild grass and palmetto, used to thresh rice from its hull.
hudu - to cause bad luck to someone (Via)
kuta - tortoise, turtle (Mende)
nyam, nam - to eat
nanse - spider (Temme)
nana - elderly woman, grandmother (Twi)
oona, hoona - you, singular or plural, from the word "ona," meaning one or a single person
plat-eye - a prowling ghost or evil spirit
shut mout' - secretive or withdrawn
tata - father (Kongo)
tote - to pick up (Kongo)
toti frog - frog (Via)
uni - you, your (Ibo)
yam - sweet potato (Mende)
Another striking similarity between Gullah and the languages of West Kmt is the use of proverbs to teach and advise.
"Take no more on your heels than you can kick off with your toes."
"Every grin teeth don't mean laugh."
"Day is jes an arm long, you can reach clean across it."