Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents two online excerpts about West African Pidgin English and United States Gullah language.
The content of this post is presented for historical, cultural, linguistic, and educational purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Dr. Peter W. Vakunta, and thanks to Farooq A Kperogi. Thanks also to the research and writing of Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner and thanks to all others who are quoted in this post.
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Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/09/similarities-between-african-pidgin.html for the closely related pancocojams post entitled "Similarities Between African Pidgin English And Jamaican Patois (Online Excerpts)".
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ONLINE EXCERPT #1
From https://www.postnewsline.com/2010/06/american-gullah-cousin-to-west-african-pidgin-english.html AMERICAN GULLAH, COUSIN TO WEST AFRICAN PIDGIN ENGLISH?
BY DR. PETER W. VAKUNTA, 06 June 2010
"Creolization is an intriguing linguistic phenomenon. A creole is a stable language that has originated from a pidgin that has been nativized. The vocabulary of a creole language consists of cognates from parent languages, though there are often clear phonetic and semantic shifts. Creoles arise in the context of trade, colonialism, and slavery when people of diverse linguistic backgrounds are thrown together and must forge a common means of communication. Creolized languages are essentially hybrids that blend linguistic influences from a variety of different sources. Like human beings, global creoles have ancestors. Such is the case with the American Creole commonly referred to as Gullah or Geechee. Gullah is spoken by a distinctive group of African Americans in the southeastern United States. These people live in small farming and fishing communities along the Atlantic coastal plain and on the chain of Sea Islands which runs parallel to the coast. Because of their geographical isolation and strong community life, the Gullah have been able to preserve more of their African cultural heritage than any other group of African Americans.
Historically, the Gullah region once extended north to the Cape Fear area on the coast of North Carolina and south to the vicinity of Jacksonville on the coast of Florida; but today the Gullah area is confined to South Carolina and Georgia Low country. The name "Gullah" might have been derived from Angola, where some Gullah people might have originated. Some scholars suggest that the term comes from Gola, an ethnic group living in the border area between Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa. The name "Geechee," another common name for the Gullah people, comes from Kissi, an ethnic group living in the border region between Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. The Gullah are known for preserving their African linguistic and cultural heritage. They speak an English-based creole language containing many African loanwords. Gullah has significant affinities with African languages in terms of grammatical and syntactic structures.
The origin of Gullah language is as unique as the cadence and rhythm of its sounds. Slaves from the Sea Islands of South Carolina and northern Georgia were brought to America largely from different communities of West Africa. Many spoke distinctive languages, and in order to communicate with each other and with the slave masters, they combined words from their native tongues with the English they learned to form the unique Gullah language. For years, language scholars made the mistake of viewing the Gullah language as "broken English," because they failed to recognize the strong underlying influence of African languages on this lingua franca. But linguists today view Gullah as a full and complete language with its own recognizable grammatical structure. The first scholar to make an in-depth study of Gullah language was the late Dr. Lorenzo Turner, who published his findings in 1949.
As an African American, Dr. Turner was able to win the confidence of the Gullah people, and studied many aspects of their language that were previously unknown. He found that Gullah men and women all have African nicknames or "basket names" in addition to their English names for official use. His research showed that the Gullah language, like other Atlantic Creoles, contains a substantial number of vocabulary words borrowed directly from African substrate languages. Dr. Turner also made the spectacular discovery that certain Gullah men and women, living in isolated rural areas of South Carolina and Georgia in the 1940s, could still recall simple texts in various African languages—texts passed from generation to generation and still intelligible to date. He provided evidence that buttressed the contention that Gullah creole language is similar to Sierra Leonean Krio. Mende and Vai phrases are embedded in Gullah songs; Mende passages are recurrent in Gullah stories; and an entire Mende song, apparently a dirge, exists in Gullah. Dr. Turner also found some Gullah people who could count from one to nineteen in the Guinea/Sierra Leonean dialect called Fula. Although his Gullah informants knew that these expressions were culled from African languages and in some cases knew the proper translation, they did not know which specific African languages they were reciting.
A British historian, P.E.H. Hair, later published a review of Dr. Turner's work in which he noted that Sierra Leonean languages have made a "major contribution" to the development of the Gullah language. Dr. Hair pointed to the astonishing fact that all of the African texts known to be preserved by the Gullah are in languages spoken in Sierra Leone. Mende, which accounts for most of the African passages collected by Turner, is spoken almost entirely in Sierra Leone, while Vai and the specific dialect of Fula are found on the borders with Liberia and Guinea. Hair also noted that a remarkably large proportion of the four thousand African personal names and loanwords in the Gullah language come from Sierra Leone. He calculated that twenty-five percent of the African names and twenty percent of the African vocabulary words are from Sierra Leonean languages, principally Mende and Vai. Hair concluded that South Carolina and Georgia is the only place in the Americas where Sierra Leonean languages have exerted this degree of influence. Gullah language speakers use Sierra Leone Krio expressions such as bigyai (greedy), pantap (on top of) udat (who?), and usai (where?) among others. According to Hair, the most noted similarities between Gullah and the languages spoken in West Africa include the peculiar way in which nouns, pronouns, verbs, and tenses are used. Almost all Gullah nouns are singular, and no distinction is made between singular and plural verbs. These traits are noticeable in many African languages as well.
Here are a few Gullah words with African origins. The language or country of origin is listed in parentheses whenever possible:
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)
[Taken from "The Water Brought Us," by Muriel Miller Branch]"...
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This excerpt has been reformatted to enhance its readability.
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ONLINE EXCERPT #2
From https://www.nairaland.com/2960917/african-words-american-english African Words In The American English - Culture – Nairaland
[Pancocojams Editor’s Note: This excerpt was given as one long comment that quotes the book Global English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World by Farooq A Kperogi. I reformatted this excerpt to enhance its readability.]
"African Words In The American English by badaru1(m): 6:46am On Feb 28, 2016
[…]
Most Influential African Languages in Gullah? People who have been following my series on the Gullah have asked if I can give them a sense of which African 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’s Documents 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 Africans who became Gullah came from Angola and the Congo; 17.9 percent from Liberia 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 Africa 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 Africans 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 African 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 European) 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.
[...]
In a chapter of my book, Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World, I discussed the African heritage of common English words and expressions, which entered the language through so-called African American Vernacular English (AMVE). I pointed out that some expressions/words started out as African-derived Gullah dialectal expressions, made their way to demotic African-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 African languages in African-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 African-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.”…
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