Gullah: The Language That Crossed the Atlantic

The word "goober," meaning peanut, comes from the Kimbundu word "nguba," spoken along the west central coast of Africa. The word "gumbo," the okra plant and the dish built around it, comes from the Umbundu word "ocingombo." The word "buckra," meaning a white person, comes from the Efik word "mbakara." These words are not borrowings from a foreign language that happened to stick. They are the residue of a transfer of entire languages across the Atlantic, conducted under duress, and surviving for three centuries on a chain of islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia.

Gullah is a creole language. It uses English as its primary source of vocabulary, but its grammatical structures come from Wolof, Mande, Kwa, and Bantu languages of West and Central Africa. It is not a dialect of English. A speaker of standard American English who heard fluent Gullah spoken quickly and continuously would not fully understand it. The grammar is different at the structural level.

The reason Gullah survived where other enslaved languages did not is partly geography. The Sea Islands' physical isolation, separated from the mainland by tidal marshes and saltwater channels, meant that enslaved people on the islands lived in communities that were majority Black and had limited daily contact with white populations. The conditions that made the rice economy brutally hard were the same conditions that gave language a chance to survive.

An estimated five thousand to fifteen thousand people speak Gullah today, a significant decline from twentieth-century estimates. The Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor and Penn Center maintain active language documentation and preservation programs. The people doing that work are not trying to preserve a museum piece. They are trying to keep something alive that has already survived more than it should have had to.