Facultad de humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación: Licenciatura en Lingüística-

Prof. María Noel Caño-GuiralMaría Zinnia Bardas Hoffmann

Gullah dialects

The Gullah Language 

• Gullah is an English-based, creolized language that naturally evolved from the unique circumstances of, and was spoken by, the slaves in South Carolina and Georgia.

• It is not written language. It is sometimes referred to as the patios of the Lowcountry.

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• Along with many of the African and English words and expressions, it also contains some other foreign languages or whatever could be picked up, depending on the nationality of the slave owner.

• The word Gullah is believed to be a mispronunciation of the African word Gora or Gola, which were names of tribes living in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

What does this map tell us about the Gullah people? 

Living in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida ( and about 30 miles inland) is the Gullah/Geechee Nation, comprised of the descendants of Africans once enslaved in the Lowcountry and Coastal Empire.

The words Gullah and Geechee refer to West African ethnic groups. “However, amongst ourselves, we don’t use these designations,” notes historian Marquetta L. Goodwine. “We know we’re all kin. We’re all the same culture, heritage, and legacy.”

Gullah language combines elements of West African dialects with English pidgin bases. Gullah is the only surviving English-based Creole language in America. The language developed as a way for Africans of various tribes to communicate with one another, a way that plantation owners would not understand.

Gullah is an oral history, and younger generations have kept the traditional spirit of Gullah alive through language, religion, arts, crafts, stories, and song. Gullah/Geechee people reflect a more African influence in their behavior, self-expression, and beliefs than any other African American group in the United States of America.

• The Lord’s PrayerTranslated to Gullah by Alphonso Brown

Our Fadduh awt’n Hebb’n, all-duh-weh be dy holy ‘n uh rightschus name. Dy kingdom com.’ Oh lawd leh yo’ holy ‘n rightschus woud be done, on dis ert’ as-’e tis dun een yo’ grayt Hebb’n. ‘N ghee we oh Lawd dis day our day-ly bread. “N f’gib we oh Lawd our trus-passes, as we also f’gib doohs who com’ sin ‘n truspass uhghens us. ‘N need-us-snot oh konkuhrin’ King een tuh no moh ting like uh sin ‘n eeb’l. Fuh dyne oh dyne is duh kingdom, ‘n duh kingdom prommus fuh be we ebbuh las’n glory. Amen.

•                                Listen to the Lord’s Prayer in Gullah 

• The Twenty Third PsalmTranslated to Gullah by Alphonso Brown

De Lawd, ‘E duh my sheppud. Uh een gwoi’ want. ‘E meck me fuh lay down een dem green passuh. ‘E Khah me deh side dah stagnant wahtuh. ‘E sto’ muh soul; ‘E lead me een de pat’ ob right-juss-niss fuh ‘E name sake. Aae doh Ie wark shru’ de whalley ob dem grayb yaad Ie een gwoi’ skayed uh dem dead people, fuh Ie know de Lawd, ‘E duh deh wid me; ‘E stick wha’ ‘E khah een ‘E han’ ‘n de staff een de udduh han’ gwoi’ cumpit me’ ‘E fix up uh table fuh me fuh grease muh mout’ ‘n muh enemies een gwoi’ git none. ‘E ‘noint muh head wid uhl. Muh cup obbuh flo.’ Sho’ nuff all ‘E goodnes,’ ‘n ‘E muhcy gwoi’ be wid me all de day ob muh life ‘n Ie gwoi’ lib deh een de house ob de Lawd fuh ebbuh ‘n ebbuh. Amen

Listen to the 23rd Psalm in Gullah

http://gullahtours.com/gullah/hear-and-read-gullah

“I Have A Dream,” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.Translated to Gullah by Alphonso Brown

Ie say tuh unnuh teday, mye frien’, eeb’n dough we duh face dees haad time yuh ob teday ‘n temorruh, Ie still hab uh dreem. ‘E uh dreem wuh staat way down een America dreem.

Ie hab disshuh dreem dat one day dis America gwi’ come up ‘n be tru’ mout’ ob de law wah call de Creed: “We hol’ dees trut’ fuh be sef-ebbuhdent, dat all man duh mek equal.”

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Ie hab uh dreem dat my fo’ leetle chill’n gwi one uh dees day lib een America weh deh een gwi’ be judge by de culluh ob deh skin but by dey weh dey khaah ‘e sef. Ie hab uh dreem teday!

Ie hab uh dreem dat one uh dees ol’ day, way down een Allybameh…yeh, right down een Allybameh, dat leet’l black by’s ‘n leet’l black gals gwi’ be able fuh jy’n up han’ wid leet’l white by’s ‘n gals ‘n wark tegettuh like sistuh ‘n brudduh. Ie hab uh dreem!’.”

Ie hab uh dreem dat one uh dees ol’ day, ebby wally gwi’ be raise up, ebby hill ‘n mount’n gwi’ be mek lo’ down, de haad ruff place gwi’ be mek plain, ‘n de crookit place gwi’ be mek skrate, ‘n de glory ob de Lawd gwi’ be sho’ up, ‘n ebbyboddy gwi see um tegedduh.

Dees duh wah we look fo’. Did yuh duh de fate dat Ie gwi’ hol’ teh de Sout’ wid.

Wid dis fate, we gwi’ be able fuh cut fum de mount’n ob nutt’n, a stone ob hope. Wid dis fate, we gwi’ be ab’le fuh change up de uglynes’ ob we nayshun ento uh bootiful tegedduhness ob brudduhhood.

Wid dis fate we gwi’ be able fuh wark tegedduh, ‘n pray tegedduh, skrugg’l tegedduh ‘n raise up tall fuh freedum tegedduh, ‘n ‘e stan’ so, dat we gwi’ be free one day.

‘N dah sho’nuf gwi be de day. Dis gwi’ be de day wen all Gawd chill’n gwi’ hice de chune wid new mee’nin, “My country ‘tis ob dee, sweet lan’ ob libuhty, ob dee Ie sing. Lan’ weh my fadduh dead, lan’ ob de Pilgrum pride, fum ebby mount’n side leh freedum ring.” “’N eff America gwi’ be uh bettuh nayshun, dis mus’ be fo’ real.

Ebonics

• It´s  (a blend of the words ebony and phonics) is a term that was originally intended to refer to the language of all people descended from enslaved Black Africans, particularly in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America.

• Since the 1996 controversy over its use by the Oakland School Board, the term Ebonics has primarily been used to refer to African American Vernacular English (AAVE.

• The word Ebonics was originally coined in 1973 by African American social psychologist Robert Williams in a discussion with linguist Ernie Smith (as well as other language scholars and researchers) that took place in a conference on "Cognitive and Language Development of the Black Child", held in St. Louis, Missouri.

• His intention was to give a name to the language of African Americans that acknowledged the linguistic consequence of the slave trade and avoided the negative connotations of other terms like "Nonstandard Negro English

• We need to define what we speak. We need to give a clear definition to our language...We know that ebony means black and that phonics refers to speech sounds or the science of sounds.

• Thus, we are really talking about the science of black speech sounds or language.

• 1975, the term appeared in Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks, a book edited and cowritten by Williams

• A two-year-old term created by a group of black scholars, Ebonics may be defined as "the linguistic and paralinguistic features which on a concentric continuum represent the communicative competence of the West African, Caribbean, and United States slave descendant of African origin. It includes the various idioms, patois, argots, idiolects, and social dialects of black people" especially those who have adapted to colonial circumstances. Ebonics derives its form from ebony (black) and phonics (sound, the study of sound) and refers to the study of the language of black people in all its cultural uniqueness.

• Other writers have since emphasized how the term represents a view of the language of Black people as African rather than European.

• he term was not obviously popular even among those who agreed with the reason for coining it. Even within Williams's book, the term Black English is far more commonly used than the term Ebonics.[

• John Baugh has stated that the term Ebonics is used in four ways by its Afrocentric  proponents.

It may:

• 1. be "an international construct, including the linguistic consequences of the African slave trade";

• 2. refer to the languages of the African diaspora as a whole;or it may refer to what is normally regarded as a variety of English: either

• 3. it "is the equivalent of black English and is considered to be a dialect of English" (and thus merely an alternative term for AAVE), or

• 4. it "is the antonym of black English and is considered to be a language other than English" (and thus a rejection of the notion of "African American Vernacular English" but nevertheless a term for what others term AAVE, viewed as an independent language and not a mere ethnolect).

Lorenzo Dow Turner 

• An overheard conversation inspired Lorenzo Dow Turner, PhD’26, to become a linguistic detective. While teaching summer school at South Carolina State College in 1929, Turner listened as two students spoke what sounded like broken English.

• To others, that’s all it was—a remnant of a pidgin language that slaves adapted from white influences. Turner, who had a Harvard master’s degree in education along with an English PhD from Chicago, heard the echoes of something more formal, although he couldn’t understand a word.

• He asked the students what language they were speaking. “We’re Gullah,” they said, referring to cloistered communities of slave descendants on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Their response sparked what would grow into the defining ambition of Turner’s professional life: tracing the roots of Gullah vocabulary and culture. Other linguists had studied it before, but they determined that it contained no vestiges of African languages.

• Reed Smith of the University of South Carolina believed that Gullah emerged as slaves altered the European-influenced English of white settlers. The Africans, he wrote in a 1926 pamphlet, would “wrap their tongues around it, and reproduce it changed in tonality, pronunciation, cadence, and grammar to suit their native phonetic tendencies.”

• About the time Turner first heard Gullah, University of North Carolina’s Guy B. Johnson declared, “This strange dialect turns out to be little more than the peasant English of two centuries ago.” He found the perceived absence of African language influences “startling” but attributable to slavery’s devastating cultural effects.

• Turner believed African influences remained. Although there is very little in Gullah that is not drawn from English, says University of Chicago linguistics scholar Salikoko Mufwene, PhD’79, Turner was the first to prove that “one cannot account for the origins ... ignoring the languages that the slaves had brought from Africa.”

• Born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina on October 21, 1890, Turner was the youngest of four sons of Rooks Turner and Elizabeth Freeman. His father completed his masters degree at Howard University, although he had not begun first grade until he was twenty-one years old.

• His mother gained the education allowed to black women at the time (six years). Two of Turner's brothers earned degrees in medicine and law. Turner's family's strong emphasis on education inspired him and helped him achieve academic success.

• Turner earned a master's degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Chicago. He taught at Howard University from 1917 to 1928, and during his last eight years, he served as Head of the English Department. After leaving Howard, he founded the Washington Sun newspaper, which closed after one year.

• In 1946 he began teaching at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he was Chairman of the African Studies Program. In the early 1960s, he cofounded the Peace Corps training program to prepare young volunteers for service in Africa. Turner retired from Roosevelt in 1967.

• Lorenzo Dow Turner is best remembered as the father of Gullah studies. His interest in the Gullah people began in 1929 when he first heard Gullah speakers while teaching a summer class at South Carolina State College (now University).

• Although established scholars then viewed Gullah speech as a form of substandard English, Turner sensed that Gullah was strongly influenced by African languages.

• He set out to study the language. For the next 20 years, he made trips to the Gullah region in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, interviewing Gullahs (often in isolated locations) and making detailed notes on their language. He also made recordings in the 1930s of Gullah speakers talking about their culture, folk stories and other aspects of life.

• As part of his studies, Turner traveled to several locations in Africa, specifically Sierra Leone, to learn about the development of Creole languages, as well as to Louisiana and Brazil, to study Creole and Portuguese, respectively.

• He did research at University of London School of Oriental and African Studies (on various African language systems).

• He wanted to be able to provide context for the obvious "Africanisms" he discovered in his Sea Islands research.

• "Such depth and breadth allowed Turner to locate Gullah culture and language within the broader complexities of the African diaspora in the New World, ... firmly outside the reductionist theoretical model of cultural assimilation."

• When Turner finally published his classic work Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect in 1949, he made an immediate impact on established academic thinking.

• His study of the origin, development and structure of Gullah was so convincing that scholars quickly accepted his thesis that Gullah is strongly influenced by African languages.

• He showed the continuity of language and culture across the diaspora. Many scholars have followed Turner over the years in researching the African roots of Gullah language and culture. He created a new field of study by his work and an appreciation for a unique element of African-American culture.

• Lorenzo Dow Turner was strongly influenced by the American linguistic movement, which he joined at its inception.

• Through his Gullah research, he gave shape to several academic specialties: Gullah studies, dialect geography and creole linguistics, as well as being an important predecessor to the field of African American studies, which developed in the 1960s and 70s.

• Turner died of heart failure at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, on February 10, 1972.

• To gain entry into that close-knit environment.

• Turner sought out community leaders to verify his credentials.

• “The Gullah culture is still a very closed culture. You can’t get in and just get things done. You have to be introduced, and people have to say that you are bona fide,” Amos says. “He was a very cordial and polite man, and he would sit down and talk and get himself friendly with the people.”

• The effort paid off with a glimpse into the conditions that allowed the culture to endure slavery. On Sapelo Island, Georgia, for example, “the slaves were the majority of the population; they were very isolated,” Amos says.

• “There was the white family that owned the island and the plantation, and then everybody else was black. Even sometimes the overseers—the drivers, as they were called—were African. So in that sense the culture could develop and could be kept.”

Zora Neale Hurston

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

Fear, Off, Anger         Zora Neale Hurston 

• Born on January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston was the fifth out of eight children. At the age of three, Hurston and her family moved to Eatonville, where they lived on five acres of land in an eight-room house.

• Her writings reveal no recollection of Alabama, and Hurston said that Eatonville always felt like home.She was immersed in black folk life.

• Her father, John Hurston, was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter who became the mayor of Eatonville.

Eatonville

Eatonville Gullah food and folklore

• Charlotte Jenkins is the author of "Gullah Cuisine: By Land and By Sea," a collection of stories and recipes taken from Charlotte and her husband Frank Jenkins' lives and traditions in and outside their Gullah family kitchens. 

 Gullah Tours 

• The language and culture still thrive today in and around the Charleston/Beaufort, South Carolina region. Gullah Tours explores the places, history, and stories that are relevant to the rich and varied contributions made by Black Charlestonians..

• Of course, if Gullah was spoken throughout the tour, you would not understand, nor would you enjoy the beautiful and interesting sites of Charleston.

Glossary*http://gullahtours.com/gullah/gullah-words

ANUDDUH another

DEEF deaf

DEN then, than

 DISSO just so

                                   YEZ                       ear, ears (human or animal)   

                                  YEYE eye, eyes; so pronounced when preceded by a soft vowel sound ” ‘E yeye red”his or her eyes are      bloodshot with anger

                                 ZACKLY  exactly (See “puhzackly”) 

BANDUN abandon, abandons, abandoned, abandoning

BAWN born

B’KAUSE because

BITTLE victuals, food

BODDUN bother, bothers, bothered, bothering; worry,worries, worried, worrying

CHILLUN child, children

CHUPID stupid

DON’ don’t, doesn’t

DUNNO don’t know, doesn’t know, didn’t know

FAMBLY family, families; family’s, families’

• Gullah Fambly” by: Carter Elysse Nunez (kudipeaches)

[just for tay tay :) <3]

• I ‘memba grinin’ De rice, mashin’ up tettuhMe fingas fumblin’Wile me mind try fuh keep’upWit Granmuddah hans’ rhythmUnk playin’ him heart on de guitarChillun wat come frum cross’de’wayFuh nyam all we riceAn’ clap dey feet tuh “We Gwine Fuh Heb’n” Miss Rosa bringin’ de chit’l’n’Granpapa stirrin’ him secret sauce ;We all know it gonna ‘cawch we tongueBut still we douse de chickin’ en itSwattin’ ‘way dem crow wat try dey beakOn de fried cawn

• Mama pullin’ down me skirtAn’ rubbin’ wet thumbs on me face cheekSome o de boys ruffhouseKnockin’ oba de lemon teaAuntie Rae grippin’ dem yezSlappin’ de black off dem bumInside jokes flyin’ thru de air‘Bout hog tyin’ we drunk cuzin RisDirty plates spread all ‘round de houseDawgs baa’kin fo’ lef’obas ;Wen me bret fin’ly spentIe grin knowin’ next Chuesday gwine be de same.© 2011 KUDiYAH CA’LYSSe. All Rights Reserved http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/gullah-poetry

To speak or not to speakThe Rights of Persons Belonging to

Linguistic Minorities• UN Sub-Committee on the rights of minorities Dr Fernand de

Varennes Murdoch University, Australia21 March 1997

Minority Rights and Other "Linguistic Rights": What the UN Declaration Does Not Containt• It is essential to emphasise certain limitations to the UN Declaration

in relation to language. It apparently was never intended to be a comprehensive code of all human rights, recognised or nascent in international law, which directly or indirectly relate to language.

• Strictly speaking, it should mainly be seen to address those rights linked to Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the only "minority" provision in the covenant.

• The origins of the UN Declaration can thus explain certain omissions. Freedom of expression, for example, is not mentioned specifically in the UN Declaration, even though it is now clear that this freedom protects the private use of language.

• For persons who belong to linguistic minorities, freedom of expression can be an extremely important right in relation to the private use of a language, but it is not a right which they can claim as members of a minority group.

• Everyone has freedom of expression, whether one belongs to a majority or to a minority. Seen in this light, it is clear that whilst freedom of expression may be of great significance for the protection of linguistic minorities in some countries, it does not originate per se from Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

• It is not contained explicitly in the UN Declaration because some individual human rights that may have a role in matters such as language (and religion or culture) are not minority rights. Since they are not minority rights, they fall outside the UN Declaration.

• The UN Declaration is also silent on the right to an interpreter in criminal proceedings when an accused does not understand the language used by the court.

• Once again, as this is an individual right and not a minority right, it is not mentioned in the UN Declaration, despite considered by many to be a fundamental right in international law.

• A final example of a relevant individual right which the UN Declaration does not directly address is the growing acknowledgment of the impact of non-discrimination in the area of language preferences by public authorities.

• Although the interpretation of this aspect of

the right of non-discrimination in international law is still going through a process of clarification, there is increasing support for the view that the operation of non-discrimination must take into account the need to balance a state's legitimate interests and goals in prescribing certain preferences with the ensuing disadvantage, denial or burden this may effect on individuals.