User:Sampynn/sandbox

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• Ghahramani, L., McArdle, K., & Fatorić, S. (2020). Minority community resilience and cultural heritage preservation: A case study of gullah geechee community.Sustainability (Basel, Switzerland), 12(6), 2266. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12062266
• Morgan, P. D. (2010). African american life in the georgia lowcountry : The atlantic world and the gullah geechee University of Georgia Press.
• Manigault-Bryant, L. S. (2014). Talking to the dead : Religion, music, and lived memory among gullah-geechee womenDuke University Press.
• Hamilton, K. (2012). Mother tongues and captive identities: Celebrating and "disappearing" the Gullah/Geechee coast. The Mississippi Quarterly, 65(1), 51-68. https://doi.org/10.1353/mss.2012.0032

EDITS TO MAKE in the sections below:

Origins and Dialects [edit]

Gullah is based on different varieties of English and languages of Central Africa and West Africa. Scholars have proposed a number of theories about the origins of Gullah and its development:

1. Gullah developed independently on the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by enslaved Africans. They developed a language that combined grammatical, phonological, and lexical features of the nonstandard English varieties spoken by that region's white slaveholders and farmers in that region, along with those from numerous Western and Central African languages. According to this view, Gullah developed separately or distinctly from African American Vernacular English and varieties of English spoken in the South.
2. Some enslaved Africans spoke a Guinea Coast Creole English, also called West African Pidgin English, before they were forcibly relocated to the Americas. Guinea Coast Creole English was one of many languages spoken along the West African coast in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries as a language of trade between Europeans and Africans and among multilingual Africans. It seems to have been prevalent in British coastal slave trading centers such as James Island, Bunce Island, Elmina Castle, Cape Coast Castle and Anomabu. This theory of Gullah's origins and development follows the monogenetic theory of creole development and the domestic origin hypothesis of English-based creoles.

Gullah has a variety of dialects and the name of this dialect is dependent on the location in which it is spoken. South Carolina coastal residents (i.e Charleston, South Carolina) call their language Gullah, Southern Georgia coastal residents (i.e Savannah, Georgia) will often refer to themselves and their language as saltwater Geechee, and South Carolina southern interior speakers often refer to their mother tongue as GG.

Vocabulary[edit]

The Gullah people have several words of Niger-Congo and Bantu origin in their language that have survived to the present day, despite over four hundred years of slavery when African Americans were forced to speak English. [are you adding this citation to what is already there?]

The vocabulary of Gullah comes primarily from English, but there are numerous Africanisms that exist in their language for which scholars have yet to produce detailed etymologies. Some of the African loanwords include: cootuh ("turtle"), oonuh ("you [plural]"), nyam ("eat"), buckruh ("white man"), pojo ("heron"), swonguh ("proud") and benne ("sesame"). [again it seems an academic source is already present on the article so is this an addition?]

Linguists noticed the Gullah Geechee peoples language has about 25% of words from Sierra Leone, a country in West Africa. Also, songs sung in the Gullah Geechee Nation were traced to the Mende people, an ethnic group in Sierra Leone. [same question as above. Please note citations should come outside of periods per Wikipedia guidelines]

Turner's research[edit]

In the 1930s and 1940s, the linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner did a seminal study of the language based on field research in rural communities in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Turner found that Gullah is strongly influenced by African languages in its phonology, vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and semantics. Turner identified over 300 loanwords from various languages of Africa in Gullah and almost 4,000 African personal names used by Gullah people. He also found Gullahs living in remote seaside settlements who could recite songs and story fragments and do simple counting in the Mende, Vai, and Fulani languages of West Africa.

In 1949, Turner published his findings in a classic work called Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (ISBN 9781570034527). The fourth edition of the book was reprinted with a new introduction in 2002.

Before Turner's work, mainstream scholars viewed Gullah speech as substandard English, a hodgepodge of mispronounced words and corrupted grammar, which uneducated black people developed in their efforts to copy the speech of their English, Irish, Scottish and French Huguenot slave owners.

Turner's study was so well researched and detailed in its evidence of African influences in Gullah that academics soon changed their minds. After the book was published in 1949, scholars began coming to the region regularly to study African influences in the Gullah language and culture.

Storytelling[edit]

The Gullah people have a rich storytelling tradition that is strongly influenced by African oral traditions but also by their historical experience in America. Their stories include animal trickster tales about the antics of "Brer Rabbit", "Brer Fox" and "Brer Bear", "Brer Wolf", etc.; human trickster tales about clever and self-assertive slaves; and morality tales designed to impart moral teaching to children. This intergenerational transmission of knowledge is crucial in the preservation and revitalization of the Gullah language.

Several white American writers collected Gullah stories in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. The best collections were made by Charles Colcock Jones Jr. from Georgia and Albert Henry Stoddard from South Carolina. Jones, a Confederate officer during the Civil War, and Stoddard were both whites of the planter class who grew up speaking Gullah with the slaves (and later freedmen) on their families' plantations. Another collection was made by Abigail Christensen, a Northern woman whose parents came to the Low Country after the Civil War to assist the newly-freed slaves. Ambrose E. Gonzales, another writer of South Carolina planter-class background, also wrote original stories in 19th-century Gullah, based on Gullah literary forms; his works are well remembered in South Carolina today.

The linguistic accuracy of those writings has been questioned because of the authors' social backgrounds. Nonetheless, those works provided the best available information on Gullah, as it was spoken in its more conservative form in the 19th century.

Gullah Today[edit]

Gullah is spoken by no more than 10,000 people in coastal South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. [keep the previous citation too] Although some scholars argue that Gullah has changed little since the 19th century and that most speakers have always been bilingual, it is likely that at least some decreolization has taken place. In other words, some African-influenced grammatical structures in Gullah a century ago are less common in the language today. This is most likely due to the numerous contact languages Gullah has been influenced by including African American Vernacular English, other Southern Creole varieties and the dominant English language in the United States. Nonetheless, Gullah is still understood as a creole language and is certainly distinct from Standard American English.

For generations, outsiders stigmatized Gullah-speakers by regarding their language as a mark of ignorance and low social status. As a result, Gullah people developed the habit of speaking their language only within the confines of their own homes and local communities. That causes difficulty in enumerating speakers and assessing decreolization. Gullah was often not spoken in public situations outside the safety of their home areas, and many speakers experienced discrimination even within their own community. Some speculate that the prejudice of outsiders may have helped to maintain the language. [great!] Others suggest that a kind of valorization or "covert prestige" remained for many community members and that the complex pride has insulated the language from obliteration. Within the United States, Gullah remains a "cultural curiosity" in which its' role in media, academia and art is examined within the most limited context and has very little power over standard American English. Linguistic minorities such as Gullah have close to no presence in society today. In this sense, Gullah/Geechee's historical stigmatization leaves no power to this community to influence American or even African American social norms.

US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was raised as a Gullah-speaker in coastal Georgia. When asked why he has little to say during hearings of the court, he told a high school student that the ridicule he received for his Gullah speech, as a young man, caused him to develop the habit of listening, rather than speaking, in public. Thomas's English-speaking grandfather raised him after the age of six in Savannah, Georgia.

In recent years educated Gullah people have begun promoting use of Gullah openly as a symbol of cultural pride. In 2005, Gullah community leaders announced the completion of a translation of the New Testament into modern Gullah, a project that took more than 20 years to complete. {keep citation in original] As of 2017, Harvard University began offering Gullah/Geechee as a language class in its African Language Program. It is taught by Sunn m'Cheaux, a native speaker from South Carolina.

Sources[edit]

• Christensen, Abigail 1892 (1969), Afro-American Folk Lore Told Round Cabin Fires on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, New York: Negro Universities Press.
• Gonzales, Ambrose Elliott (1969), With Aesop Along the Black Border, New York: Negro Universities Press.
• Gonzales, Ambrose Elliott (1998), The Black Border: Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast, Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company.
• Jones, Charles Colcock (2000), Gullah Folktales from the Georgia Coast, Athens: University of Georgia Press.
• Parsons, Elsie Clews (1923), Folk-Lore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina, New York: American Folk-Lore Society.
• Sea Island Translation Team (2005), De Nyew Testament (The New Testament in Gullah) Open access PDF, New York: American Bible Society.
• Stoddard, Albert Henry (1995), Gullah Animal Tales from Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, Hilton Head Island, SC: Push Button Publishing Company.
• Brown, Alphonso (2008), A Gullah Guide to Charleston, The History Press.
• Chandler Harris, Joel (1879), The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus Atlanta Constitution.
• John G. Williams: De Ole Plantation. Charleston, S. C., 1895 (Google-US)