"Girl! You ain’t only gonna be actin’ ‘umanish you gwine be an actualized ‘uman!" (Last Night and the Night Before, pg. 74)
"The Vixten dialect is one that I imagine with soft notes of Gullah sounds that one might find in the city decedents of Coastal Georgia/South Carolina Low Country people. (Think: The rapper T.I. and his wife Tiny)" (Donnetta Lavinia Grays, playwright)
The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of Africans who were enslaved on the rice, indigo, and Sea Island cotton plantations of the lower Atlantic coast. Many white plantation owners in this region prioritized purchasing slaves from what they called the “Rice Coast” or “Windward Coast” (the traditional rice-growing region of West Africa), which stretched from Senegal down to Sierra Leone and Liberia. Enslaved people from this area were sold at a higher price and ultimately became the largest group of enslaved people imported into South Carolina and Georgia during the 18th century.
These Low Country enslaved Africans became known as the Gullah people (and thus, their dialect and geographical region were named the same), but some people in more southern Georgia sea islands identified as Geechee, which prompted the hybrid term Gullah Geechee. Because there is no written historical record of the origin of the term Gullah or Cheechee, scholars have speculated Gullah might be a derivation of the "Golas" people of West Africa or possibly a shortened form of "Angola," which is where many of these enslaved Africans were originally from. Geechee potentially emerged from the enslaved people living around the Ogeechee River in Georgia’s Lowcountry.
https://youtu.be/R0DGijYiGQU?si=VqkZtjVVzx1Gb_j5
https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2018/05/07/usoa-gullah-ron-2.cnn
https://www.thestoop.org/home/2019/1/23/episode-22-gullah-geechee
Because many Africans crossing the Atlantic spent time on the Caribbean islands before arriving on American soil, the Gullah Geechee culture has strong Caribbean influences. Their traditional African practices interacted with these Caribbean influences and created a unique culture with distinctive language, cuisine, and religion. They enjoyed a diet based primarily on rice, used African nicknames, continued to tell African folktales, and were known for using traditional African techniques for basket weaving, carving walking sticks, and making cast nets for fishing. Because of their geographical isolation, they have been able to preserve more of their African cultural heritage than any other group of Black Americans.
The Gullah Geechee language is a type of Creole language. It is known as the only distinctly African creole language in the United States. It began as a simplified form of communication among people who spoke many different languages, including African ethnic groups and European slave traders. The vocabulary and grammatical roots come from African and European languages and use West African intonation. Many early scholars mistakenly viewed the Gullah language as "broken English," but linguists today understand Gullah is a full and complete language. Enslaved people often came from regions with strong oral traditions so the Gullah language was especially important in storytelling (even more so because it was illegal for enslaved people to learn to read and write). Here is an abridged glossary of Gullah words.
Gullah uses a substantial group of vocab words borrowed directly from African languages. The first scholar to seriously study the Gullah language was Dr. Lorenzo Turner. He learned the Gullah people living in isolated rural areas of South Carolina and Georgia in the 1940s could still recall simple texts in various African languages. He identified Mende and Vai phrases in Gullah songs and found some Gullah people who could count from one of nineteen in the Guinea/Sierra Leone dialect of Fula. Through his studies, he found that although these Gullah speakers knew that these expressions were in African languages (and sometimes knew the proper translation), they did not know which specific African languages they were reciting.
“We have the highest retention of African tradition in America,” says Carlie Towne, minister of information of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, in an interview with CNN. “African-Americans have assimilated more so they don’t have those African traditions that we have – they don’t treasure them, they don’t honor their tradition like we do. And we’ve been able to hold onto that because of isolation, because of the strong will and our self-determination. We still eat the same foods [as] our ancestors [when they] came from Africa.”
The influence of Gullah Geechee culture is everywhere. Their language has influenced traditional Southern vocabulary and speech patterns; their musical influence can be heard in genres like gospel, soul, hip-hop, and jazz; and Gullah women's inventive one-pot cooking styles were the origin of the shrimp gumbo, she-crab soup, and shrimp and grits still on Charleston restaurant menus today's.
The Gullah Geechee are continuously trying to preserve the ways of their African ancestors, and they are adamant about passing on their way of life to the next generation. Though many don't know their story and historical significance, they have a vibrant online presence full of different forms of media that celebrate their culture (select media included on this page).
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/xNXbUbpWwmqq3iZ9/
The Little Gullah Geechee Book: A Guide for the Come Ya
https://youtu.be/zSO5pcPfhnk?si=r2vCZAFlnB2cGxIV
<aside> ℹ️ Dramaturgical research prepared by Emma Sipora Tyler (for educational purposes)
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