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Gullah
Gullah-English, Sea Island Creole English
Native to: United States
Region: Coastal low country region of South Carolina and Georgia including the Sea Islands
Native speakers: (350 cited 1990–2010)
Language family: English Creole
is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also called "Geechees" within the community), an African-American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia (including urban Charleston and Savannah) as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina. Closely related varieties are spoken in the Bahamas and are called Bahamian Creole.
Gullah is based on different varieties of English and languages of West Africa and Central Africa.
Scholars have proposed a number of theories about the origins of Gullah and its development:
Gullah developed independently on the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by enslaved Africans. They developed a language that combined grammatical, phonological, and lexical features of the nonstandard English varieties spoken by that region's white slaveholders and farmers in that region, along with those from numerous Western and Central African languages. According to this view, Gullah developed separately or distinctly from African American Vernacular English and varieties of English spoken in the South.
Some enslaved Africans spoke a Guinea Coast Creole English, also called West African Pidgin English, before they were forcibly relocated to the Americas. Guinea Coast Creole English was one of many languages spoken along the West African coast in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries as a language of trade between Europeans and Africans and among multilingual Africans. It seems to have been prevalent in British coastal slave trading centers such as James Island, Bunce Island, Elmina Castle, Cape Coast Castle and Anomabu. This theory of Gullah's origins and development follows the monogenetic theory of creole development and the domestic origin hypothesis of English-based creoles.
The vocabulary of Gullah comes primarily from English, but there are numerous words of African origin for which scholars have yet to produce detailed etymologies. Some of the African loanwords are: cootuh ("turtle"), oonuh ("you [plural]"), nyam ("eat"), buckruh ("white man"), pojo ("heron"), swonguh ("proud") and benne ("sesame").
LINKS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah#:~:text=The%20Gullah%20(%2F%CB%88%C9%A1%CA%8C,culture%20with%20some%20African%20influence.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gullah-language
https://glc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Gullah%20Language.pdf
https://www.hiltonheadisland.org/gullah/stories-and-recollections/
https://www.sciway.net/afam/sc-gullah-heritage.html
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.scriptureearth.gul.nt.apk
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