Language and Dialects

It can be argued that an understanding of the role of language is absolutely critical to an understanding of the transformation of the African into the African American. Slaves born in America—as opposed to those who were born in West Africa—were only conversant in an English that was expanded to include a minimum of African words and/or phrases that had been passed down to them by the older members of their own slave community. Those slaves who had been captured in West Africa, ones who had suffered through the Middle Passage, obviously labored—for both practical and sentimental reasons—to retain and promote their African language. During the early days of slavery in the American South, from the seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, bondmen were required to function both in their own black/African world and in their masters' white world. Thus, for those in bondage, the creation of a world exclusive to them was supremely important. The retention of African language and the formation of new black dialects were ways by which slaves expressed separateness from their masters and reflected their human desire and ability to preserve important aspects of their pasts while, at the same time, adjusting to the new realities of life in a new world. Slaves were challenged not only to learn the languages of their slave owners but to also create a form of speech uniquely their own. Thus, early in their North American experience, newly arrived slaves began to lay the foundation of a linguistic combination that would eventually be classified as black English. Black English, in the manner of all living languages, is organic and is thus continuously in a state of transformation.

Typically, African languages were successfully preserved for a few generations. This was made possible, in part, by the frequency by which newly captured slaves from any given region or tribe in West Africa were transported to an American colony where their tribal or ethnic members already resided. For example, in the early years of American slavery, Igbos were often shipped to Virginia, whereas those of the Bambara tribe were relocated to lower Mississippi, and in both cases the new arrivals ensured perpetuation for a while longer of the native African languages. Unfortunately, as time passed, fewer and fewer slaves on farms and plantations had any direct link to Africa, and as a result the African languages eventually became extinct. Obliteration of the African languages was also the result of mobility within the slave population. For example, if an Igbo were sold off his Virginia plantation to a slaveholder in Georgia, both reason and opportunity to retain his or her native language would be greatly reduced.

Many slaves—particularly ones who had been born in Africa or were only one or two generations removed from that continent—resisted the language of their owners. Although most slaves for practical reasons picked up rudimentary English or French during their first years in the New World, many chose in their personal interactions in their own community to communicate solely in their African tongues. However, slaves' need to communicate with Africans and African Americans of dissimilar ethno-linguistic backgrounds, combined with their challenge to effectively communicate with their American-born progeny, forced them to eventually find a non-African language means of verbal communication. In Anglophone North America, some form of English was the obvious solution. Obviously, white English was not acceptable; an African could not allow himself to parrot those words, tones, and inflections that he heard from the very fount of oppression. With pride and in resistance, he altered the language transmitted to him from the white's world and created a syntax that gave his form of English an African character.

Still other slaves felt little desire to resist the languages of their owners. Some even became fluent in several European languages, among which were English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. These unusual individuals may have developed such facility either in coastal areas of West Africa or in the Americas; in both locales, tribal African could have been exposed to multiple European tongues.

Ethnographic studies reveal that Africans enslaved in North America, despite many difficulties, were successful for varying lengths of time to retain their native languages, rich with their own grammatical structures and words. However, such success greatly depended upon geographical and cultural considerations. For example, in those cases in which a critical mass of individuals sharing a common linguistic background either resided together or in close proximity to one another, languages had a reasonable likelihood of survivability, albeit not necessarily in a pure form. Those languages and dialects were thus sheltered from the process of "decreolization," a process by which Creole speech is gradually changed by the influences imposed by the prevailing language of a given place or people. For example, by 1730, Africans and African Americans of similar ethnic background were sufficiently numerous in coastal South Carolina and Georgia to successfully maintain enough African linguistic interaction to eventually produce a distinctive linguistic tongue that came to be called Gullah. The term Gullah may have come from the word Gola, the name of a people indigenous to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Concentrated primarily in coastal South Carolina and lowland Georgia, speakers of this dialect perpetuate a genuine "Creole" language, the only Creole English in use in the United States in the twenty-first century.

In the early twenty-first century, the speaking of Gullah is limited to some inhabitants of the coastal islands—the socalled rice islands—that stretch for approximately 160 miles along the seaboard of South Carolina and Georgia; to a very limited degree, it is also used by blacks residing in very limited areas on the adjacent mainland. The Charleston colony, founded in 1670, was originally the geographical hearth of Gullah. This language form had roots in the Caribbean, where slaves who claimed Gold Coast ancestry spent time in bondage before being relocated to the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. It was later influenced by others who interjected elements of languages and dialects common to the coastal area of West Africa, stretching from Senegal to Angola, an expanse of 3, 000 miles. For many decades, those island settlements where Gullah was spoken were relatively isolated, producing a population of rice farmers who had little need to learn white or even black English. They survived using a language very much different from that spoken by the vast majority of their fellow countrymen, both black and white. Gullah is interesting to ethno-linguists as a curiosity and as an exception. It is, however, a cousin of some of the Creoles still in use in the Caribbean: Jamaican, Guyanese, Trinidadian, Barbadian, and others.

Many Americans, although they do not know it, incorporate Gullah words in their everyday speech. These include such food terms as okra, yam, benne, cush, and goober, as well as other words such as buckra ("white man"), hoodoo ("sorcery"), and cooter ("tortoise or turtle").

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gornez, Michael A. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Palmer, Colin A. Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America, Vol. 1: 1619-1863. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998.

Webber, Thomas L. Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.

Wilson, Charles Reagan, and William Ferris, eds. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

                                  Katherine E. Rohrer