By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi Last week , I highlighted many African-derived words in the Gullah dialect that ...
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
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