Gullah
   HOME



picture info

Gullah
The Gullah () are a subgroup of the African Americans, African American ethnic group, who predominantly live in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. Gullah language, Their language and culture have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms as a result of their historical geographic isolation and the community's relation to its shared history and identity. Historically, the Gullah region extended from the Cape Fear (headland), Cape Fear area on North Carolina's coast south to the vicinity of Jacksonville, Florida, Jacksonville on Florida's coast. The Gullah people and their language are also called Geechee, which may be derived from the name of the Ogeechee River near Savannah, Georgia. ''Gullah'' is a term that was originally used to designate the Creole language, creole dialect of English spoken by Gullah and Geechee people. Over time, it ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Gullah Language
Gullah (also called Gullah-English, Sea Island Creole English, and Geechee) is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also called "Geechees" within the community), an African American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia (including urban Charleston and Savannah) as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina. Origins 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: # 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, along with those from numerous Western and Central Af ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Hoodoo (spirituality)
Hoodoo is a set of spiritual observances, traditions, and beliefs—including magical and other ritual practices—developed by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States from various traditional African spiritualities and elements of indigenous American botanical knowledge. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure men or conjure women, and root doctors. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include roots, rootwork and conjure. As an autonomous spiritual system, it has often been syncretized with beliefs from religions such as Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Spiritualism. While there are a few academics who believe that Hoodoo is an autonomous religion, those who practice the tradition maintain that it is a set of spiritual traditions that are practiced in conjunction with a religion or spiritual belief system, such as a traditional African spirituality and Abrahamic religion. Many Hoodoo traditions draw from the beliefs of the ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Black Seminoles
The Black Seminoles, or Afro-Seminoles, are an ethnic group of mixed Native Americans in the United States, Native American and African American, African origin associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are mostly blood descendants of the Seminole people, free Negro, free Africans, and escaped former slavery in the United States, slaves, who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Many have Seminole lineage, but due to the stigma of having mixed origin, they have all been categorized as slaves or Freedmen in the past. Repeated invasions and the fight against enslavement, and the preservation of culture mark the history of the Afro-Seminoles. Historically, the Black Seminoles lived mostly in distinct bands near the Native American Seminoles. Some were held as slaves, particularly of Seminole leaders, but the Black Seminole had more freedom than did slaves held by whites in the South and by other Native American tribes, including the right to bear arm ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


African-American English
African-American English (AAE) is the umbrella term for English dialects spoken predominantly by Black people in the United States and, less often, in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to more standard American English. Like all widely spoken language varieties, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically (that is, features specific to singular cities or regions only), in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries. Name The broad topic of the English language, in its diverse forms, as used by Black people in North America has various names, including Black American English or simply Black English. Also common is the somewhat controversial term Ebonics and, more recently in academic linguistics, African American Language (AAL). H ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

South Carolina Lowcountry
The Lowcountry (sometimes Low Country or just low country) is a geographic and cultural region along South Carolina's coast, including the Sea Islands. The region includes significant salt marshes and other coastal waterways, making it an important source of biodiversity in South Carolina. Once known for its slave-based agricultural wealth in rice and indigo, crops that flourished in the hot subtropical climate, the Lowcountry today is known for its historic cities and communities, natural environment, cultural heritage, and tourism industry. Demographically, the Lowcountry is still heavily dominated by African American communities, such as the Gullah/Geechee people. As of the 2020 census, the population of the Lowcountry was 1,167,139. Geography The term "Low Country" originally referred to all of the states below the Fall Line, or the Sandhills, which run the width of the states from Aiken County to Chesterfield County. The Sandhills, or Carolina Sandhills, is a 15–60& ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

African Americans
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. African Americans constitute the second largest ethno-racial group in the U.S. after White Americans. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States. In 2023, an estimated 48.3 million people self-identified as Black, making up 14.4% of the country’s population. This marks a 33% increase since 2000, when there were 36.2 million Black people living in the U.S. African-American history began in the 16th century, with Africans being sold to European slave traders and transported across the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere. They were sold as slaves to European colonists and put to work on plantations, particularly in the southern colonies. A few were able to achieve freedom th ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Bahamian Creole
Bahamian Dialect, also described as Bahamian dialect or simply Bahamian, is an English-based creole language spoken by both Black and White Bahamians, sometimes in slightly different forms. In comparison to many of the English-based dialects of the Caribbean, it suffers from limited research, possibly because it has long been assumed that this language is simply a variety of English. However, socio-historical and linguistic research shows that this is not the case and it is, in fact, a creole language, related to but distinct from English as spoken in The Bahamas. The Bahamian dialect tends to be more prevalent in certain areas of The Bahamas. Islands that were settled earlier or that have a historically large Black Bahamian population have a greater concentration of individuals exhibiting creolized speech; the dialect is most prevalent in urban areas. Individual speakers have command of lesser and greater dialect forms. Bahamian dialect shares similar features with other ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Sea Islands
The Sea Islands are a chain of over a hundred tidal and barrier islands on the Atlantic Ocean coast of the Southeastern United States, between the mouths of the Santee and St. Johns rivers along South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. The largest is Johns Island, South Carolina. Sapelo Island is home to the Gullah people. All of the islands are acutely threatened by sea level rise due to climate change. History Settled by indigenous cultures thousands of years ago, the islands were selected by Spanish colonists as sites for founding of colonial missions. Historically the Spanish influenced the Guale and Mocama chiefdoms by establishing Christian missions in their major settlements, from St. Catherine's Island south to Fort George Island (at present-day Jacksonville, Florida). Both chiefdoms extended to the coastal areas on the mainland. The Mocama Province included territory to the St. Johns River in present-day Florida. The mission system ended under pressur ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Barbadian Creole
Bajan ( ), or Bajan Creole, is an English-based creole language with West/Central African and British influences spoken on the Caribbean island of Barbados. Bajan is primarily a spoken language, meaning that in general, standard English is used in print, in the media, in the judicial system, in government, and in day-to-day business, while Bajan is reserved for less formal situations, in music, or in social commentary. Ethnologue reports that, as of 2018, 30,000 Barbadians were native English speakers, while 260,000 natively spoke Bajan. Languages Bajan is the Caribbean creole with grammar that most resembles Standard English. There is academic debate on whether its creole features are due to an earlier pidgin state or to some other reason, such as contact with neighbouring English-based creole languages. Due to emigration to the Province of Carolina, Bajan has influenced American English and the Gullah language spoken in the Carolinas. Regionally, Bajan has ties to Belizean ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


English-based Creole Language
An English-based creole language (often shortened to English creole) is a creole language for which English was the '' lexifier'', meaning that at the time of its formation the vocabulary of English served as the basis for the majority of the creole's lexicon. Most English creoles were formed in British colonies, following the great expansion of British naval military power and trade in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The main categories of English-based creoles are Atlantic (the Americas and Africa) and Pacific (Asia and Oceania). Over 76.5 million people globally are estimated to speak an English-based creole. Sierra Leone, Malaysia, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, and Singapore have the largest concentrations of creole speakers. Origin It is disputed to what extent the various English-based creoles of the world share a common origin. The '' monogenesis hypothesis'' posits that a single language, commonly called ''proto–Pidgin English'', spoken along the West African coast in th ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ogeechee River
The Ogeechee River is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map, accessed April 26, 2011 blackwater river in the U.S. state of Georgia. It heads at the confluence of its North and South Forks, about south-southwest of Crawfordville and flowing generally southeast to Ossabaw Sound about south of Savannah. Its largest tributary is the Canoochee River, which drains approximately and is the only other major river in the basin. The Ogeechee has a watershed of . It is one of the state's few free-flowing streams. Course The Ogeechee runs from the Piedmont across the Fall Line and Sandhills regions. There it flows across the coastal plain of Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean. From a shallow clear running stream with several shoals, rapids, and a small falls at Shoals, below Louisville the river becomes a lazy meandering channel through cypress swamps and miles of undeveloped forests. Geology Rocks The Ogeechee River b ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]