Speaking Gullah

Until quite recently, it was commonly believed that those who spoke Gullah were speaking what many termed “broken English.” Few realized that this language is living evidence of a remarkable transformation that took place from Africa to African-American culture. People speaking Gullah is a testimony to one of the greatest acts of human endurance in the history of the world: the survival of African people away from their home.

The language that the Gullah people developed was born on African soil as a pidgin, an auxiliary language. As is the case with pidgins, it was developed for communication purposes, spoken among various African groups in business transactions and intertribal affairs. By the height of the slave trade in the early 17th century, pidgins were firmly in place among African groups. When different Africans were captured and housed together in West Coast African holding cells, the pidgins spoken in freedom, became their method of communication in captivity.

As time went on, the main auxiliary language combined the most prominent pidgins, other linguistics features and speech patterns common among them with the English words and vocabulary spoken to and about them by the master class. This creolization set the stage for what is now still spoken and called Gullah. It was sustained because of the large numbers of Africans on rice and sea-island cotton plantations, the isolation that characterized the regions along the coast and the continued influx of pure Africans smuggled into these isolated areas after the slave trade was prohibited.

The language as it exists today still contains African words and language features that  can be traced to African groups today.  The absence of the verb to be, final t's , and the use of only two pronouns 'e ( he, she it) and onna (you, us them)  bears witness to the fact that whatever its history, the Gullah language has its own flavor, rules and regulations.