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Gullah

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Gullah (gŭl`ə), a creole language creole language , any language that began as a pidgin but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the original mother tongue or tongues.
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 formerly spoken by the Gullah, an African-American community of the Sea Islands Sea Islands, chain of more than 100 low islands off the Atlantic coast of S.C., Ga., and N Fla., extending from the Santee River to the St. Johns River. The ocean side of the islands is generally sandy; the side facing the mainland is marshy.
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 and the Middle Atlantic coast of the United States. The word is probably a corruption of the African Gola or Gora, names of African tribes living in Liberia, but it may also be derived from Angola, whence many of the Gullahs' ancestors came. The Gullah dialect, spoken now by only a few hundred people, is a mixture of 17th- and 18th-century English and of a number of West African languages (among them Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba). The African influence on Gullah can be seen in the phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Some African words in Gullah have entered American English, including goober ("peanut"), gumbo ("okra"), and voodoo ("witchcraft"). Du Bose Heyward's novel Porgy (1925), upon which Gershwin's opera is based, was written in the Gullah dialect.

Bibliography

See M. Crum, Gullah (1940); L. D. Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1973).



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Among her perspectives are the distinctive accents of today that echo earlier ways of speaking, and the creation of the new language known as Gullah, still spoken in private by many people.
They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages, including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina low country.
In 1971 Boo Taylor is a 13-year-old boy, the adopted son of the only white physician on the island, who witness the brutal slaying of a another child that plunges him into the legend of Joker Tribbit and Tribbit's widow, the notorious Gullah witch named Bathsheba.
 
 
 
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