The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #65010   Message #1954376
Posted By: Azizi
01-Feb-07 - 07:02 AM
Thread Name: Origins: Kumbaya
Subject: RE: Origins: Kumbaya
Steve, I wish I were a scholar or researcher with sufficient knowledge and skills that I would be able to answer your question. But I'm not. Maybe I'll be that [plus a singer and a dancer and more in another life :o)

But here are some excerpts from online resources on the Gullah language which I found:

"The Gullah language is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also called "Geechees"), an African American population living on the Sea Islands and the coastal region of the U.S. states of South Carolina and Georgia.

Gullah is based on English, with strong influences from West and Central African languages such as Mandinka, Wolof, Bambara, Fula, Mende, Vai, Akan, Ewe, Kongo, Umbundu, and Kimbundu...

In the 1930s and 1940s an African American linguist named Lorenzo Dow Turner did a seminal study of the Gullah language. Turner found that Gullah is strongly influenced by African languages in its sound system, vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and semantic system. Turner identified over 300 loanwords from various African languages in Gullah and almost 4,000 African personal names used by Gullah people. He also found Gullahs living in remote sea-side settlements who could recite songs and story fragments and do simple counting in the Mende, Vai, and Fulani languages of West Africa. Turner published his findings in a classic work called Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949). His book, now in its 4th edition, was most recently reprinted with a new introduction in 2002.

Before Lorenzo Turner's work, mainstream scholars viewed Gullah speech as substandard English, a hodgepodge of mispronounced words and corrupted grammar uneducated black people developed in their efforts to copy the speech of their English, Irish, Scottish, and French Hugenot slave owners. But Turner's study was so well researched and so convincingly detailed in its presentation of evidence of African influences in Gullah that academics soon reversed course. After Turner's book was published in 1949, scholars began coming to the Gullah region on a regular basis to study African influences in Gullah language and culture"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah_language

-snip-

"The origin of the Gullah language is as unique as the cadence and rhythm of its sound. Slaves from the Sea Islands of South Carolina and northern Georgia were brought to America largely from different communities on the Rice Coast of West Africa. Therefore many spoke similar but distinctive languages, and in order to communicate with each other and with their owners, they combined the similarities with the English they learned to form the unique Gullah language. This process of combining different languages is called "creolization."

For years, linguists referred to the Gullah, or Geechee, language as a dialect of standard English. But in the 1940s, as African-American linguist Lorenzo Turner researched African languages, it became apparent that Gullah did indeed have its roots in Africa. According to Turner, the most noted similarities between Gullah and the languages spoken in West Africa include the use of nouns, pronouns, verbs, and tense. Almost all Gullah nouns are singular, and no distinction is made between singular or plural verbs either. These charactertistics are the same in many African languages. Also, Gullah and various African languages rarely account for when something actually happened - the present verb tense is also often used to refer to the past.
http://www.islandpacket.com/man/gullah/language.html

[this article then presents a number of Gullah words and their West African language source]

-snip-

"The Gullah language, a Creole blend of Elizabethan English and African languages, was born of necessity on Africa's slave coast, and developed in the slave communities of the isolated plantations of the coastal South. Even after the sea islands were freed in 1861, the Gullah speech flourished because access to the islands was by water only until the 1950's. Today, one hears phrases like

Come Jine We.
Ketch ob de Day
Lok Ya Wantem Shrimps
http://www.coastalguide.com/gullah/

[This is a short tourist blurp that doesn't go into detail about the language]