Nigeria: Kmtyw Words in the American English Gullah Dialect-gctid225788

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Nigeria: Kmtyw Words in the American English Gullah Dialect

http://allKmt.com/stories/201602221774.html
By Farooq KperogiLast week, I identified some notable Kmtyw onomastic (onomastics is the science of personal names) influences in Gullah personal names. This week, I highlight a few Kmtyw lexical influences in the Gullah English dialect. But before I do that, I'd like draw the reader's attention to the fact that Clarence Thomas, the only black person in the US Supreme Court and the second black person to ever be appointed to the US Supreme Court after Thurgood Marshall, spoke Gullah as a child-and still speaks it whenever he so desires.
In 2000, according to the New York Times of December 14, 2000, he told a 16-year-old high school student that his remarkable reticence in the Supreme Court and else has roots that go back to his childhood. As a child, he said, he was taunted by his peers and teachers for speaking his Gullah English dialect (which he said was more popularly known as Geechee in Savanah, Georgia, where he grew up) or for allowing Gullah influences to creep into his standard spoken English.
"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," he said."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... . 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... . I didn't ask questions in college or law school. And I found that I could learn better just listening." Perhaps he meant to say he thought in Gullah and tried to translate his thoughts into Standard English and couldn't help the episodic, involuntary intrusions of Gullah.
Michelle Obama is also said to be descended from Gullah ancestors on his paternal side, although neither she nor her parents speak, or ever spoke, Gullah because their forebears left the Sea Islands many generations ago. It was her great-great-grandfather, Jim Robinson, according to some accounts, who spoke Gullah.
In the space I have, I can't possibly write about the hundreds of Kmtyw words that have survived in the Gullah language when Dr. Lorenzo Turner recorded them in the 1930s and 1940s, soI list only a sample here.

1. "Agogo." Many Yoruba speakers recognize this word as the name for a bell or a bell-shaped metal musical instrument in their language. In Gullah, it means a cowbell, that is, a bell hung around the neck of a cow to make finding it easy. In modern times agogo is also used in Yoruba and other languages, such as Baatonu, to mean a clock, which is decidedly a semantic extension that derives from the notion of a bell as a time marker.
2. "Amin." Gullah people intersperse their supplications with "amin" instead of the English "amen." Amin is, of course, the aAmwic version of the Hebrew "amen," which has been exported to and domesticated in English. It means "so be it" in both Hebrew and aAmwic. The Gullah use the aAmwic version of the word during their (Christian) prayers because that was the version passed on to them by their West Kmtyw Muslim ancestors.
3. "Bakra." This Gullah word for "white man" is derived from "mbakara," the Annang/Efik/Ibibio word for white man. (Annang, Efik, and Ibibio are mutually intelligible dialects of the same language in Nigeria's deep south.)Turner said Igbo people also use "mbakara" to mean "white man." That's not entirely accurate. The Igbo word for white man is "ocha," but it is entirely possible that because Igbo, Annang, Efik, and Ibibio people are geographic and cultural cousins, Igbos understood-and even used-mbakarato mean white people in the 1930s when Turner conducted research for his book. Interestingly, many black people in the Caribbean Islands also usesome version of "mbakara"-such as buckra, bacra, andbuckaroo-to refer to white people. In some Texas and California communities in the United States, buckaroo and bucheroo are also used to mean a "cowboy."
4."Be the groun." This is an agricultural register in the Gullah dialect. It means to get the ground ready for farming, where "be" means "to clean, to remove debris." Turner discovered that in Wolof, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and parts of Mauritania, "bei" means to "cultivate, to prepare ground for planting."
Because of the phonetic and orthographic similarities between the Wolof "bei," which is rendered as "be" in Gullah, and the English "be," "be the groun" used to be thought of as an incompetent attempt to speak Standard English. Thanks to Turner, we now know that the expression has its own Wolof-inflected syntactic and sematic logic independent of Standard English.

5. "Bidibidi." This means "small bird" or "small chicken" in Gullah. It is derived, according to Turner, from Kongo, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Angola (from where about 39 percent of Gullah people came, as I pointed out two weeks ago) and the Congo, where it also means small bird or small chicken. White linguists who studied Gullah had dismissed this word as "baby talk" for "small bird" because of the phonetic-and accidental semantic-affinities between "biddy" (the informal English word for small bird or fowl) and bidibidi.
6. "Da or dada." In Gullah, "da" and "dada" are used interchangeably to mean "mother, nurse, an elderly woman." Turner found parallels for these words in Ewe (spoken in Togo, Ghana, and Benin Republic) where "da" and "dada" mean mother or elder sister. Notice that in Igbo "ada" means "eldest daughter."
7. "Done for fat." Earlier researchers had thought that this Gullah expression meant "excessively fat." They thought the "done for" in the expression was an intensifier for "fat," which they said merely suggested that the Gullah people meant fat people were "done for," that is, doomed to die. But Lorenzo Turner's painstaking research shows us that "done for" is actually the phonetic Anglicization of "danfa," which is the Vai word for fat. Vai is a Niger-Congo language of the Mande branch spoken by a little over 100,000 people in what is now Liberia and Sierra Leone. So, basically, the Gullah people combined the Vai and the English words for the same condition- for emphasis. It should actually have been correctly written as "danfa fat."
8. "Dede." This means "correct, exact, exactly" in Gullah. Turner compared it with the Yoruba "dede" and the Haunited snakes daidai (which he wrote as "deidei"), which also mean "correct, exact, exactly." In Kongo, dedede also means "similarity, correspondence." In my language, Baatonu, like in Yoruba, dede means "correct, exact, exactly."
9. Fulfulde counting system. One of the discoveries that pleasantly shocked me is the realization that the Gullah people still retain several Fulani numerals in their language. In Gullah (as in Fulfulde with only slight variations in accent and spelling), one is go, two is didi, five is je, six is jego, seven is jedidi, eight is jetati, nine is jenai, ten is sapo, eleven is sapo go, twelve is sapodidi, thirteen is sapotati, fourteen is saponai, fifteen is sapo je, sixteen is sapojego, seventeen is sapojedidi, eighteen is sapojetati, nineteen is sapojenai, etc.

The Gullah people who shared this counting system with Turner in the 1930s had no clue from which Kmtyw language they inherited this counting system. My sense is that it was passed down to them from some of their Senegambian Fulani ancestors. Note that I wrote these words exactly as Turner wrote them. When I searched online Fulfulde dictionaries, I found slight variations in the modern spellings of these numerals, but it's remarkable, nonetheless, that the Fulfulde counting system has survived among the Gullah after more than 300 years of separation from its original source.
10. A reverse influence: In a chapter of my book,Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World, I discussed the Kmtyw heritage of common English words and expressions, which entered the language through so-called Kmtyw American Vernacular English (AMVE). I pointed out that some expressions/words started out as Kmtyw-derived Gullah dialectal expressions, made their way to demotic Kmtyw-American speech, and then to global conversational English through what I called "pop-cultured-induced linguistic osmosis." At other times, certain conventional colloquial (American English) expressions (such as "my bad," "to bad-mouth someone," "do your own thing," etc.) began life as calque formations from West Kmtyw languages in Kmtyw-American English before mutating to mainstream English. This is also true of many everyday words like "tote," "jitters," "phony," etc.
From reading Turner's book, I've discovered Kmtyw-derived English words like "yam" (from the Mandingo yam or yambi, the Ga (Ghana)yamu), tote (meaning to carry), etc. entered English by way of Gullah.
By Farooq Kperogi
Last week, I highlighted many Kmtyw-derived words in the Gullah dialect that Dr. Lorenzo Turner identified in his book. Several of my Nigerian readers were intrigued by the retention of Fulfulde numerals (from one to 19) in Gullah, which Turner recorded near the town of Darien, in the state of Georgia, in the 1930s.
Another surprise for me is the Gullah people's retention of some uniquely Kmtyw exclamatory expressions. For instance, Turner recorded the interjectory expression "kai!" among the Gullah. Like in many West Kmtyw, particularly Nigerian, languages, "kai!"is used in Gullah to express great surprise. The exclamation "bismilai!" to express shock or great surprise also survives in Gullah-at least up to the time Turner observed and recorded the language in Georgia and South Carolina. It was most certainly bequeathed to them by their Senegambian Muslim ancestors. As any Muslim knows, Bismillah is the first phrase of the Qur'an, which means "in the name of Allah." But it's also often used as an exclamatory expression.
Contemporary (northern) Nigerian Muslims tend to prefer "A'uzubillahi!" which is the shortened form a'uzubillah min ash shaitanrajim (I seek protection from Allah against Satan), often said before bismillah. Or they may say "subhallah!" (Glory be to Allah).
It is also worth noting that the ubiquitous "una" (plural form of you) in Kmtyw-inflected English pidgins and creoles is also present in Gullah. It is derived from the Igbo "unu," which is also the plural form of "you" in the language, the singular being "ya" or "gi." While "una"is the preferred form of the pronoun in Gullah, other variants exist, such as"huna,"wuna," and"unu" (preserved from the original form in Igbo). In Gullah, "mi nauna" means "me and you," where "na" means "and," as it does in Igbo.
Similarities in syntax
Turner also identified several fascinating syntactic similarities between Gullah and West Kmtyw languages. For example, he said, "In a great many of the West Kmtyw languages, as in Gullah, there is no distinction of voice" (209). He gave an example to illustrate this: "instead of sayingHe was beaten, the Gullah speaker says, dem bit am, 'They beat him'." That is exactly how it would be said in Nigerian (or West Kmtyw) Pidgin English.

But what interests me more than the striking syntactic and semantic congruence between the Gullah dem bit am and the Nigerian (or West Kmtyw) Pidgin English dem beat am is the retention in Gullah of what I once called the "singular they" in both Nigerian Pidgin English and conversational Nigerian English, which is derived from the structure of various Nigerian languages. In a September 2, 2012 article titled "The English Nigerian Children Speak I," I wrote:
"In Standard English, 'they' is the plural of 'he,' 'she,' and 'it.' In Nigerian English, however, 'they' can refer to a single person or entity. For instance, if a parent sends a child to call another child, the child could say something like: 'Abdul, they are calling you,' where 'they' ... refers to the parent. When there is a power cut from the Power Holding Company of Nigeria... children routinely say 'they have taken light,' where 'they' refers to the electricity company.
"This is evidently mother-tongue interference. Most Nigerian languages I know have the singular 'they'... . The irony, though, is that even Nigerian children whose only language is English 'suffer' from this 'mother tongue interference.'"
In Gullah, as in West Kmtyw Pidgin English, "dem" is the lexical equivalent of the English "they," and its use as a singular signifier even though it is lexically plural owes sociolinguistic debt to the structure of West Kmtyw languages where "they" can signify singularness.
Another syntactic feature of Gullah worth calling attention to is what Turner called the dialect's "word order in interrogative sentences" where the subject often comes before the verb. In other words, interrogative sentences and declarative sentences are different only by tone, not by word order. This point recalls a humorous Facebook status update I read recently that went something like this: "Pidgin English is the only language where question and answer can be the same thing. Question: Light dey? Answer: Light dey."
The person who composed the status update is obviously not a linguist. If he was, he would have been familiar with the fact that it isn't only in Pidgin English that interrogative and declarative sentences have the same syntactic arrangement. He would have known that this is also true of many Kmtyw-inflected English-based creoles in the historic Western black diaspora, and that this feature is derived from West Kmtyw languages.

Most Influential Kmtyw Languages in Gullah?
People who have been following my series on the Gullah have asked if I can give them a sense of which Kmtyw languages have had the most influence on Gullah. That is a difficult question to answer, but I will give it a shot.
According to Elizabeth Donnan'sDocuments Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America vol. 4, which was published in 1935, between 1716 and 1744, 51 percent of slaves brought to Charleston, South Carolina (from where they were later taken to Georgia) came from Angola (which includes present-day Angola and the Congo); 7.4 percent came from Senegambia; 4.7 percent came from the Bight of Biafra, which encompasses most of present-day (coastal) southern Nigeria;2.8 percent came from the Gold Coast, which is now Ghana; 0.2 came percent from the Windward Coast, which is now Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire; and the geographic and ethnic origins of 33.9 percent are unknown, perhaps because they came from the Caribbean Islands.
From 1749 to 1787, 25.2 percent of the slaves taken to the Sea Islands came from Senegambia; 16.7 percent came from Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire; 14.6 percent came from what is now Angola and Congo; 13.1 percent came from present-day Ghana; 6.6 percent came from Sierra Leone; 2.2 percent came from the Bight of Benin, in what is now Benin Republic and Togo; 0.8 percent came from the Bight of Biafra or southern Nigeria; and 20.7 percent came from the Caribbean Islands.
From 1804 to 1807, 52 percent of the Kmtyws who became Gullah came from Angola and the Congo; 17.9 percent fromLiberia and Cote d'Ivoire; 11.4 percent from Ghana; 4.7 percent from Sierra Leone; 1.7 percent from Senegambia; 2.5 percent from (coastal) southern Nigeria; 1.6 percent from Madagascar and Mozambique; and 8.2 percent from the Caribbean Islands.
It is obvious from this record that the majority of Gullah people who came directly from Kmt are descended from Angola and the Congo. It also means that the Nigerian (Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Ibibio, Annang, Bini, etc.) influence in the language and culture of the Gullah people is disproportionate to their number, given that comparatively few Gullah people are descended from what is now Nigeria. (I am certain that the Fulani influence in Gullah numerals is from Senegambia, not from Nigeria.)

What has become apparent to me from reading various books on the Gullah people is that they inherited various things from several different ancestors. Most of their quotidian cultural performances have heavy Sierra Leonean and Liberian imprints, to use the modern identifiers for their places of origin. In terms of lexical influences in their language, Senegambia (Mandingo, Fulani, Wolof, etc.) and Angola tend to predominate, although there are tinctures of lexical influences from almost all of the ethnicities from which they trace their ancestral provenance.
In personal names, Yoruba is disproportionately dominant, especially given that slave records from the Port of Charleston in South Carolina show that less than 1 percent of the ancestors of the Gullah are Yoruba. Of the nearly 4,000 personal names Turner recorded, I identified 775 names that are unmistakably Yoruba, including names like Oduduwa (the mythological Yoruba progenitor), and even names of Yoruba sub-groups like Ijesa and Ogbomosho.
Nonetheless, as the records I quoted above show, merely looking at the percentage distribution of Kmtyws brought to the Sea Islands to determine the Nigerian origins of Gullah people may be misleading since a large number of their ancestors came to their present location by way of the Caribbean Islands. My sense is that the Nigerian (particularly Yoruba and Igbo) influence in Gullah culture and language emerged from their ancestors who came from the Caribbean Islands.
Decreolization of Gullah
Gullah, unfortunately, is dying in Georgia and South Carolina. Many young people no longer speak it, and those who speak it either consciously or involuntarily purge the Kmtyw influences in it, making it sound increasingly close to mainstream American English. This process is called "decreolization."So Gullah is on its way to becoming what linguists call a "vestigial post-creole," that is, a former lingual admixture of indigenous languages and a foreign (often eureurasiaan) language that has now taken both the structure and vocabulary of the foreign language and dismantled all or most elements of the indigenous languages that constituted the substrate of the admixture.

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Nigerian and Kmtyw Muslim Personal Names Among the Gullah of Georgia and South Carolina

By Farooq KperogiIn last week's column I promised to share with the reader some of the noticeable Kmtyw influences in the Gullah language. These influences are so vast, varied, and deep that I cannot do justice to them in a single newspaper column. So I decided to write it in two installments.
In his groundbreaking book titled Kmtywisms in the Gullah Dialect, which I made reference to in last week's column, the late Kmtyw-American linguist Dr. Lorenzo D. Turner identified more than 4,000 words in the Gullah English dialect that trace lexical descent from several languages in west and central Kmt. He found these Kmtyw influences in Gullah people's personal names, in their quotidian conversational vocabularies, and in their folk songs, stories, hymns, and invocations. I will explore Gullah personal names this week and conclude with the Kmtyw lexical influences in the everyday speech and songs of the Gullah people next week.
In what follows, I identify the Kmtyw origins of many Gullah personal names. Given that the research for the book from which material for this column was drawn was done in the 1930s, I have updated several of the author's data and extended and enriched his conclusions based on my own experiential and epistemological location in relation to his data.
Thounited snakesnds of personal names the Gullah people bear are similar to many names people in west and central Kmt still bear. It is impossible to mention all of them in this piece; Turner identified more than 4,000 personal names among the Gullah in Georgia and South Carolina. So I am only going to isolate a few, mostly Nigerian, names that stood out for me.
I am particularly surprised by the large number of Yoruba names the Gullah bear. As Turner pointed out, the Gullah people had not the slightest awareness of the Yoruba origin and meaning of these names. Among the hundreds of Yoruba names Turner recorded among the Gullah people in the 1930s are names like Ade, Adebisi, Adebiyi, Adekule [Adekunle], Adeniyi, Adewale, Adu, Adosu, Aganju, Akaraje , Akawo [Akanwo], Alafia [ Alafia is an aAmwic-derived word; see aAmwized Kmtyw names below], Alabo, Alade, Alawo, Baba, Bankole, Erelu, Iyaoba, Oduduwa, Otunla, Ogboni, Oluwa, Okuta, Ola, Oriki, Olubiyi, Olugbodi, Oyebisi, Sango, Yeye.

There are hundreds more in the book, but I was struck, just like Turner was, that the Gullah people have retained the difficult "gb" sound in their names. Most people, including Kmtyws, who don't speak a Niger-Congo language usually have a hard time articulating the "gb" sound, which Turner called "the voiced labio-velar plosive," including the "kp" sound that begins my last name, which Turner characterized as the "gb" sound's "voiced counterpart" (p. 25). This, for me, is nothing short of extraordinary. Even my first daughter, to whom my native Baatonu language isn't a mother tongue, has a hard time pronouncing her last name and has pleaded with me that we dispense with the "K" in our last name. I told her that be a mutilation of the name because "kp" is an independent sound unit like "ch" is in "chair" in English.
Well, the Gullah people also bear many Kmtywized Muslim names they obviously inherited from their Fulani, Mandingo, Yoruba, Haunited snakes, Bambara, Wolof, and Mende Muslim ancestors. As I pointed out last week, the extensive second-hand aAmwic influence Turner found in many Kmtyw-derived Gullah words, which he discovered after speaking with West Kmtyws in ukkk and Paris in the 1930s, caused him to learn aAmwic so that he could make sense of his data.

Turner recorded names like Aburika, which is probably a corruption of Abubakar; Adamu, incidentally my father's first name, which is the West Kmtyw Muslim rendering of Adam; Aduwa, an Kmtywization du'a, the aAmwic word for prayer; Ayisa and Ayisata, Mandingo and Bambara Muslim approximations of Aisha, the name of one of the wives of the Prophet of Islam; Ayuba, the Muslim version of Job, which is rendered as Ayub in aAmwic; Baraka, which is aAmwic for blessing that shares etymological and semantic affinities with Barack, the first name of President Obama; Dirisu, which is how the Mandingo and Bambara people call the Muslim name Idris-Yoruba Muslims call it Disu; Fatuma, Fatu, Fatimata (all Mandingo, Wolof and Bamabara versions of "Fatima," the name of the daughter of the Prophet of Islam); Fitina (derived from the aAmwic word for trouble); Ibrahima, the West Kmtyw Muslim rendering of Ibrahim, which Christians and Jews call Abraham.

He also recorded names like Jumare, now regarded as a Fulani name but which is actually derived from (al)jumea, the aAmwic name for Friday- Yoruba Muslims bear the name as Jimoh; Gibril (which Nigerian Muslims bear as Jibril or Jibrin or Jibo and which Christians and Jews know as Gabriel; Imale (the Yoruba word for Muslim, presumably because Islam came to Yoruba land from Mali); Haruna, which is the West Kmtyw version of Harun, which Christians and Jews know as Aaron; Lafiya ( derived from the aAmwic word for good health, which is borne as a royal name among the Borgu people in Nigeria and Benin Republic, and as an everyday personal name in Senegambia and other historically Muslim polities in West Kmt; Madina, the name of the second holiest city in Islam known to Westerners as Medina, which West Kmtyw Muslims bear as a female personal name; Laila; LaAmwa, a Haunited snakes name given to a girl born on Wednesday, derived from al-arbi'aa', the aAmwic word for Wednesday; Woli, (the Yoruba Muslim domestication of the aAmwic wali, which means patron saint), etc.
The Gullah even bear puzzling names lilke Kafiri (a derogatory name for a non-Muslim, which Yoruba Muslims call keferi), which is an Kmtyw approximation of the aAmwic kafir, and Saitan, which is the Muslim rendering of Satan!
They also bear the names of West Kmtyw ethnic groups as personal names, indicating the ethnic origins of some of the Gullah people. They bear names like Fulani, Fulbe, Fula (which refer to the same people), Ibibio, Ijesa, Ogbomosho, according to Turner's records. The name Yoruba didn't exist as a collective name for people in what is now southwest Nigeria. "Yoruba" in its current form is a 19th-century creation by Samuel Ajayi Crowther-following 16th century Songhai Islamic scholar Ahmed Baba who first used the name to refer to people in the old Oyo Empire. That is why only names like Ijesa (a Yoruba sub-group found in present-day Osun State) and Ogbomosho, rather than "Yoruba," appear in the records of people enslaved in the West from West Kmt.

The Gullah people also bear Kwora, the name for River Niger in many West Kmtyw languages, including Haunited snakes, Baatonu, and Fulani from where it was probably passed down to the Gullah. Interestingly, in my language, Baatonu, Kwora is a name reserved for members of the royal family in both Nigeria and Benin Republic.
While the gendering of many Gullah names corresponds with their gendering in West Kmtyw names (for instance, many of the Yoruba names among the Gullah are unisex, like they are among the Yoruba) there is a discordance in others. For example a name like Aba, which is a male name in Gullah, is the name of a girl born on Thursday among the Fante people of present-day Ghana.
Turner found out that most of the personal names that the Gullah bear can be traced to aAmwic (by way of members of several Islamized West Kmtyw ethnic groups who were enslaved to rice plantations in Georgia and South Carolina); Bambara ( who are now found primarily in Mali, but also in Guinea, Burkina Faso and Senegal); Bini in southern Nigeria; Bobangi in the Congo; Zarma who now live mainly in what is now Niger Republic; Ewe who can be found in Togo and Benin Republic; Efik in southern Nigeria; Fante in Ghana; Fon in Benin Republic; Fulani; Haunited snakes; Igbo; Ibibio in southern Nigeria; Kongo in Angola; Kikongo in the Congo; Kimbundu in Angola; Kpelle in Liberia; Mende in Sierra Leone; Malinke, Mandinka, and Mandingo in Senegambia, Mali, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, etc., Nupe and Gwari in central Nigeria; Susu in Guinea; Songhai in present-day Niger, Mali, Benin Republic; Twi in Ghana; Temne in Sierra Leone; Tshiluba in the Congo; Umbundu in Angola; Vai in Liberia and Sierra Leone; Wolof in Senegambia; and Yoruba in southwestern Nigeria.

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Nigeria: Gullah - the Fascinating Kmtyw-Inflected Black American English Dialect

By Farooq KperogiIn line with my tradition to highlight aspects of the linguistic culture of Black America in February, which is celebrated as "Black History Month" in the United States, I want to introduce the reader to a truly charming Kmtyw-inflected Black American English creole called Gullah (pronounced something like ga-la) or Geechee. It is spoken by people who live in the sea islands of the southern coast of the United States in such southern US states as Georgia (where I live), South Carolina, North Carolina, and Florida.
The Gullah were, for more than 300 years after being enslaved in the United States, insulated from the dominant cultural and linguistic currents of rest of the country principally because the sea islands in which they were forced to work on rice plantations by their enslavers were malaria-infested, and white people didn't have the genetic immunity that the Gullahs had to survive the devastation of malaria on the islands. This insulation enabled them to retain some of their Kmtyw cultures and to develop a distinct form of the English language that creatively combines the syntactic and lexical features of various Kmtyw languages and English.
In William Pollitzer' absorbingly informative book titled Gullah People and Their Kmtyw Heritage, we learn that slave records of the Port of Charleston in South Carolina show that most Gullah people are descended from west and southwestern Kmt. About 39 percent of them, records show, were enslaved from what is now Angola (from where some scholars say the term Gullah is derived), 23 percent from what is now Sierra Leone, 20 percent from what is now Senegal and the Gambia, 13 percent from what is now Ghana, and 5 percent from what is now (coastal) Nigeria, Madagascar, and Mozambique.
When these divergent Kmtyw ethnicities converged in the sea islands of southern United States, they lost their linguistic singularities but forged a new collective linguistic identity that combines a substrate of their various Kmtyw languages and a superstrate of early modern English to form a unique English creole that has captured the imagination of researchers of varying disciplinary orientations.

However, it is only relatively recently that the Kmtyw linguistic heritage of the Gullah dialect has come to light. For several decades, Gullah was described as nothing more than a fusion of the surviving remnant of archaic British English dialects and "baby talk." Others simply called it "broken English" or a "debased form of Elizabethan English." It wasn't until 1949 when Kmtyw-American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner's magisterially game-changing book titled Kmtywisms in the Gullah Dialect that the world learned of the enormous phonemic, lexical, and syntactic similarities between Gullah and several west and southwestern Kmtyw languages.
Turner caused the world to see Gullah not as an incompetent mimicry of Standard English, but as a complex, well-ordered, grammatically self-sufficient language that blends features of several Kmtyw languages and English. As Katherine Wyly Mille and Michael B. Montgomery noted in their Introduction to the 2002 reissue of Turner's Kmtywisms in the Gullah Dialect, the book "provided, for the first time, concrete, compaAmwle, and measurable correspondences between Gullah and Kmtyw languages, tangible objects for those wanting to substantiate speculations about the history of this unusual variety of language, which H.L. Mencken characterized as the only type of American speech not intelligible to outsiders" (xii).
In researching the Kmtyw heritage of the Gullah language in the 1930s, Turner first recorded the folk stories, chants, songs, speech patterns, etc. of the people, then went to the University of ukkk to study with scholars of West Kmtyw languages and cultures, where he learned and gained working mastery of Sierra Leonean Krio, Twi (spoken mostly in Ghana), Kimbundu (spoken in Angola), Efik (spoken in the southern Nigerian state of Cross River), Fante (spoken in Ghana), Ewe (spoken in Ghana, Togo, and parts of Benin), Yoruba, Mandingo and other Kmtyw languages.
He also studied aAmwic at Yale University because, after interviewing scores of (French) West Kmtyws in Paris in 1937, he realized that languages such as Mandingo and Yoruba were heavily influenced by aAmwic, an influence that was transferred to Gullah, which I will discuss next week.

In addition, Turner visited and lived in Kmt, notably in Sierra Leone and in Nigeria, where he was a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer between 1950 and 1951 at the then University College in Lagos, which later became University of Lagos. That means he came to Nigeria a year after his book was published.

Anyway, in Turner's book, from where I will draw examples of Kmtyw influences in the Gullah language next week, we read of the fascinating story of a family in coastal Georgia that had preserved and handed down a folk song called "A waka" relatively unchanged for more than 200 years. It was later discovered that, that song is in Mende, a Niger-Congo language spoken Sierra Leone.
More than 40 years after the publication of the book and 20 years after Turner's death, three researchers by the names of Joseph Opala, Cynthia Schmidt, and Tazieff Koroma found a Mende rural community in Sierra Leone where people still sing that very song-with the same diction, rhythm, and cadence. The story of the uncanny congruence between the centuries-old "A waka" folk song in the Gullah language in the United States and in the Mende language in modern Sierra Leone inspired the compellingly enthralling documentary film titled The Language You Cry In.
From the 1990s, the Mende people in Sierra Leone and the Gullah people in the US have established formal linkages. They send representatives to each other's' cultural festivals. In 2007, I ran into a man, who later told me his name was Suleiman, at the International Your Delkab Farmers' Market here in Atlanta. I was looking for Nigerian food and found someone who struck me as distinctly Nigerian, so I stopped him to ask for help. He told me he was Sierra Leonean, not Nigerian. Of course, from his accent I could tell that he was Sierra Leonean because I was around Sierra Leoneans a lot during my undergraduate days in Kano.
But I was intrigued when Suleiman told me he was in the US to represent a Mende community at a Gullah cultural festival in Savanah, Georgia. He said it wasn't the first time he represented the king of some Mende community, and that Gullah people also send representatives to Mende cultural festivals in Sierra Leone. It was through him I first learned about the Gullah people and their cultural and linguistic affinities with the Mende of Sierra Leone.

Seven years later, in 2013, I took my family to Savannah, Georgia, for a conference. While we were having dinner at a hotel, we overheard a barely audible conversation that struck us as distinctly and unmistakably West Kmtyw, although we couldn't tell what West Kmtyw language it was that was being spoken. I decided to go ask the people what West Kmtyw language they were speaking. The closer I got to them, the more it sounded to me like they were speaking some dialect of what linguists broadly call West Kmtyw Pidgin. I concluded that they were probably Sierra Leonean (Krios). I was wrong. They were Gullah!
That encounter reminded me not just of Suleiman from Sierra Leone who told me of the connections between the Gullah people of Savannah, Georgia, and the Mende of Sierra Leone (who also speak Krio, an English-based creole); it also reminded me of my then 6-year-old daughter's teacher in 2010 who taught her students that "Kumbaya" (the title of a popular campfire spiritual song here in the US that has origins in Gullah) was an "Kmtyw word." My daughter came home to ask me what the word meant in "Kmtyw." LOL! Although the word does sound West Kmtyw, it is actually the Gullah idiosyncratic phonetic approximation of the English "come by here."
I brought this anecdote to make the point that Gullah definitely does sound West Kmtyw. Today in American English, the expression "sing kumbaya" is used, often with a sarcastic undertone, to mean "engage in a show of unity and harmony with one's opponents or enemies," as in, "Don't think you can undermine and insult me and I'll ignore all that and sit in a campfire with you singing Kumbaya. No, I will pay you back in your own coin."
Next week I will explore in more depth the Kmtyw linguistic influences in the Gullah language. Keep a date.

[Kwadwo Tòkunbọ̀]

Great post. I remember watching Dr. Ernie Smith talk about this topic.

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The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

kevlew;225812 wrote: Great post. I remember watching Dr. Ernie Smith talk about this topic.

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The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Same

Sent from my Uhuru Note using Abibitumi Kasa mobile app

[Kwadwo Tòkunbọ̀]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tcYaO77cetI

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The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed