African Words in the American English Gullah Dialect By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Last week I identified some notable African onomastic (onomastics is the science of personal names) influences among the Gullah people. This week I highlight a few African lexical influences in the Gullah English dialect. But before I do that, I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that Clarence Thomas, the only black person in the US Supreme Court and the second black person to ever be appointed to the US Supreme Court after Thurgood Marshall, spoke Gullah as a child—and still speaks it whenever he so desires. US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks Gullah In 2000, according to the New York Times of December 14, 2000, he told a 16-year-old high school student that his remarkable reticence in the Supreme Court and elsewhere has roots that go back to his childhood. As a child, he said, he was taunted by his peers and teachers for speaking his Gullah English dialect (which he said was more popularly known as Geechee in Savanah, Georgia, where he grew up) or for allowing Gullah influences to creep into his standard spoken English. “When I was 16, I was sitting as the only black kid in my class, and I had grown up speaking a kind of a dialect. It's called Geechee. Some people call it Gullah now, and people praise it now,” he said. “But they used to make fun of us back then. It's not standard English. When I transferred to an all-white school at your age, I was self-conscious, like we all are…. And the problem was that I would correct myself midsentence. I was trying to speak standard English. I was thinking in standard English but speaking another language. So I learned that — I just started developing the habit of listening…. I didn't ask questions in college or law school. And I found that I could learn better just listening.” Perhaps he meant to say he thought in Gullah and tried to translate his thoughts into Standard English and couldn’t help the episodic, involuntary intrusions of Gullah. Michelle Obama is also said to be descended from Gullah ancestors on her paternal side, although neither she nor her parents speak, or ever spoke, Gullah because their forebears left the Sea Islands many generations ago. It was her great-great-grandfather, Jim Robinson, according to some accounts, who spoke Gullah. First Lady Michelle Obama has Gullah roots I can’t possibly write about the hundreds of African words that have survived in the Gullah language when Dr. Lorenzo Turner recorded them in the 1930s and 1940s, so I list only a sample here. 1. “Agogo.” Many Yoruba speakers recognize this word as the name for a bell or a bell-shaped metal musical instrument in their language. In Gullah, it means a cowbell, that is, a bell hung around the neck of a cow to make finding it easy. In modern times agogo is also used in Yoruba and other languages, such as Baatonu, to mean a clock, which is decidedly a semantic extension that derives from the notion of a bell as a time marker. 2. “Amin.” Gullah people intersperse their supplications with “amin” instead of the English “amen.” Amin is, of course, the Arabic version of the Hebrew “amen,” which has been exported to and domesticated in English. It means “so be it” in both Hebrew and Arabic. The Gullah use the Arabic version of the word during their (Christian) prayers because that was the version passed on to them by their West African Muslim ancestors. 3. “Bakra.” This Gullah word for “white man” is derived from “mbakara,” the Annang/Efik/Ibibio word for white man. (Annang, Efik, and Ibibio are mutually intelligible dialects of the same language in Nigeria’s deep south.) Turner said Igbo people also use “mbakara” to mean “white man.” That’s not entirely accurate. The Igbo word for white man is “ocha,” but it is conceivable that because Igbo, Annang, Efik, and Ibibio people are geographic and cultural cousins, Igbos understood—and even used—mbakara to mean white people in the 1930s when Turner conducted research for his book. Interestingly, many black people in the Caribbean Islands also use some version of “mbakara”—such as buckra, bacra, and buckaroo—to refer to white people. In some Texas and California communities in the United States, buckaroo and bucheroo are also used to mean a “cowboy.” 4. “Be the groun.” This is an agricultural register in the Gullah dialect. It means to get the ground ready for farming, where “be” means “to clean, to remove debris.” Turner discovered that in Wolof, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and parts of Mauritania, “bei” means to “cultivate, to prepare ground for planting.” Because of the phonetic and orthographic similarities between the Wolof “bei,” which is rendered as “be” in Gullah, and the English “be,” the expression “be the groun” used to be thought of as an incompetent attempt to speak Standard English. Thanks to Turner, we now know that the expression has its own Wolof-inflected syntactic and sematic logic independent of Standard English. 5. “Bidibidi.” This means “small bird” or “small chicken” in Gullah. It is derived, according to Turner, from Kongo, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Angola (from where about 39 percent of Gullah people came, as I pointed out two weeks ago) and the Congo, where it also means small bird or small chicken. White linguists who studied Gullah had dismissed this word as “baby talk” for “small bird” because of the phonetic—and accidental semantic—affinities between “biddy” (the informal English word for small bird or fowl) and bidibidi. 6. “Da” or “dada.” In Gullah, “da” and “dada” are used interchangeably to mean “mother, nurse, an elderly woman.” Turner found parallels for these words in Ewe (spoken in Togo, Ghana, and Benin Republic) where “da” and “dada” mean mother or elder sister. Notice that in Igbo “ada” means “eldest daughter.” 7. “Done for fat.” Earlier researchers had thought that this Gullah expression meant “excessively fat.” They thought the “done for” in the expression was an intensifier for “fat,” which they said merely suggested that the Gullah people meant fat people were “done for,” that is, doomed to die. But Lorenzo Turner’s painstaking research shows us that “done for” is actually the phonetic Anglicization of “danfa,” which is the Vai word for fat. Vai is a Niger-Congo language of the Mande branch spoken by a little over 100,000 people in what is now Liberia and Sierra Leone. So, basically, the Gullah people combined the Vai and the English words for the same condition— for emphasis. It should actually have been correctly written as “danfa fat.” 8. “Dede.” This means “correct, exact, exactly” in Gullah. Turner compared it with the Yoruba “dede” and the Hausa daidai (which he wrote as “deidei”), which also mean “correct, exact, exactly.” In Kongo, dedede also means “similarity, correspondence.” In my language, Baatonu, like in Yoruba, dede means “correct, exact, exactly.” 9. Fulfulde counting system. One of the discoveries that pleasantly shocked me is the realization that the Gullah people still retain several Fulani numerals in their English dialect. In Gullah (as in Fulfulde with only slight variations in accent and spelling), one is go, two is didi, five is je, six is jego, seven is jedidi, eight is jetati, nine is jenai, ten is sapo, eleven is sapo go, twelve is sapo didi, thirteen is sapo tati, fourteen is sapo nai, fifteen is sapo je, sixteen is sapo jego, seventeen is sapo jedidi, eighteen is sapo jetati, nineteen is sapo jenai, etc. The Gullah people who shared this counting system with Turner in the 1930s had no clue from which African language they inherited this counting system. My sense is that it was passed down to them from some of their Senegambian Fulani ancestors. Note that I wrote these words exactly as Turner wrote them. When I searched online Fulfulde dictionaries, I found slight variations in the modern spellings of these numerals, but it’s remarkable, nonetheless, that the Fulfulde counting system has survived among the Gullah after

moreAfrican Words in the American English Gullah Dialect (II) By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter:@farooqkperogi

Last week, I highlighted many African-derived words in the Gullah dialect that Dr. Lorenzo Turner identified in his book. Several of my Nigerian readers were intrigued by the retention of Fulfulde numerals (from one to 19) in Gullah, which Turner recorded near the town of Darien, in the state of Georgia, in the 1930s. Dr. Lorenzo D. Turner Another surprise for me is the Gullah people’s retention of some uniquely African exclamatory expressions. For instance, Turner recorded the interjectory expression “kai!” among the Gullah. Like in many West African, particularly Nigerian, languages, “kai!” is used in Gullah to express great surprise. The exclamation “bismilai!” to express shock or great surprise also survives in Gullah—at least up to the time Turner observed and recorded the language in Georgia and South Carolina. It was most certainly bequeathed to them by their Senegambian Muslim ancestors. As any Muslim knows, Bismillah is the first phrase of the Qur’an, which means “in the name of Allah.” But it’s also often used as an exclamatory expression. Contemporary (northern) Nigerian Muslims tend to prefer “A’uzu billahi!” which is the shortened form a’uzu billah min ash shaitan rajim (I seek protection from Allah against Satan), often said before bismillah. Or they may say “subhallah!” (Glory be to Allah). It is also worth noting that the ubiquitous “una” (plural form of you) in African-inflected English pidgins and creoles is also present in Gullah. It is derived from the Igbo “unu,” which is also the plural form of “you” in the language, the singular being “ya” or “gi.” While “una” is the preferred form of the pronoun in Gullah, other variants exist, such as “huna,” “wuna,” and “unu” (preserved from the original form in Igbo). In Gullah, “mi na una” means “me and you,” where “na” means “and,” as it does in Igbo. Similarities in syntax Turner also identified several fascinating syntactic similarities between Gullah and West African languages. For example, he said, “In a great many of the West African languages, as in Gullah, there is no distinction of voice” (209). He gave an example to illustrate this: “instead of saying He was beaten, the Gullah speaker says, dem bit am, ‘They beat him’.” That is exactly how it would be said in Nigerian (or West African) Pidgin English. But what interests me more than the striking syntactic and semantic congruence between the Gullah dem bit am and the Nigerian (or West African) Pidgin English dem beat am is the retention in Gullah of what I once called the “singular they” in both Nigerian Pidgin English and conversational Nigerian English, which is derived from the structure of various Nigerian languages. In a September 2, 2012 article titled “The English Nigerian Children Speak I,” I wrote: “In Standard English, ‘they’ is the plural of ‘he,’ ‘she,’ and ‘it.’ In Nigerian English, however, ‘they’ can refer to a single person or entity. For instance, if a parent sends a child to call another child, the child could say something like: ‘Abdul, they are calling you,’ where ‘they’ … refers to the parent. When there is a power cut from the Power Holding Company of Nigeria…children routinely say ‘they have taken light,’ where ‘they’ refers to the electricity company. “This is evidently mother-tongue interference. Most Nigerian languages I know have the singular ‘they’…. The irony, though, is that even Nigerian children whose only language is English ‘suffer’ from this ‘mother tongue interference.’” In Gullah, as in West African Pidgin English, “dem” is the lexical equivalent of the English “they,” and its use as a singular signifier even though it is lexically plural owes sociolinguistic debt to the structure of West African languages where “they” can signify "singularness." Another syntactic feature of Gullah worth calling attention to is what Turner called the dialect’s “word order in interrogative sentences” where the subject often comes before the verb. In other words, interrogative sentences and declarative sentences are different only by tone, not by word order. This point recalls a humorous Facebook status update I read recently that went something like this: “Pidgin English is the only language where question and answer can be the same thing. Question: Light dey? Answer: Light dey.” The person who composed the status update is obviously not a linguist. If he was, he would have been familiar with the fact that it isn’t only in Pidgin English that interrogative and declarative sentences have the same syntactic arrangement. He would have known that this is also true of many African-inflected English-based creoles in the historic Western black diaspora, and that this feature is derived from West African languages. 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. Concluded

Copy the BEST Traders and Make Money : http:///fxzulu than 300 years of separation from its original source. 10. A reverse influence: 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. To be concluded next week

This is a loosening of the attempt by Ibo to foothold that Gullah natives (South Carolina, Coastal Georgia,) are preponderantly descendants of Ibo slaves.

The records does not support a claim that Gullah country and the natives are Ibos or Eboes as often claimed.

Nice writeup, but why do u jam packed every word together like that? No meaningful spacing nor paragraph.

onomastics is the science of personal names

thats interesting, didnt know there was a word for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomastics



also, can you space the write up.

Sorry dude, I got a headache before even reading half of your story.