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LG449 Out of Africa: Pidgins and Creoles

Prof Peter L Patrick

References on Gullah

Gullah is of particular interest to creolists as the best-known, and one of the few, Creoles which developed on the North American mainland. The relationship between Gullah and African American English is complex and interesting, both in terms of their origins, and their current linkage and development. The references below are a sampling of the extensive literature. Good places to begin are underlined. All references are included in my online bibliography of African American English (along with other relevant works – check!), which is located at

http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/aavesem/Biblio.html

[Items not held by our library are noted below; you can borrow *starred items* from me.]

 

Bailey, Guy, Natalie Maynor, and Patricia Cukor-Avila, eds. 1991. The emergence of Black English: Texts and commentary. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishers.

          This volume collects texts from the Ex-slave Elders, including one from Gullah speaker Wallace Quarterman, which is discussed by several essays here as well.

Bernstein, Cynthia, Thomas Nunnally & Robin Sabino, eds. 1997. Language variety in the South revisited. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. [PE 2922]

          A general survey of language in the US South that includes several individual works on Gullah. See also Montgomery & Bailey, a similar survey a decade earlier.

Cooley, Marianne. 1997. An early representation of African-American English. In C Bernstein, T Nunnally & R Sabino, eds., Language variety in the South revisited. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 51-58.

* Cunningham, Irma A.E. 1970. A syntactic analysis of Sea island Creole (“Gullah”). PhD dissertation, University of Michigan. [Published 1992 as PADS 75: Publications of the American Dialect Society 75. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.] [not in library]

Feagin, Crawford. 1997. The African contribution to Southern States English. In C Bernstein, T Nunnally & R Sabino, eds., Language variety in the South revisited. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 123-139.

* Holm, John A. 1983. On the relationship of Gullah and Bahamian. American Speech 58: 303-318. [not in library]

Jones-Jackson, Patricia. 1984. On decreolization and language death in Gullah. Language in Society 13: 351-362.

Jones-Jackson, Patricia. 1986. On the status of Gullah on the Sea Islands. In M Montgomery & G Bailey, eds., Language variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 63-72.

Jones-Jackson, Patricia. 1987. When roots die: Endangered traditions on the Sea Islands. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press.

McMillan, James B, & Michael B Montgomery. 1989. Annotated bibliography of Southern American English. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. [Z 1251.S7 -- will not circulate]

Montgomery, Michael B., ed. 1993. The crucible of Carolina: Essays in the development of Gullah language and culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Montgomery, Michael B. and Guy Bailey, eds. 1986. Language variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

          A general survey of language in the US South that includes works on Gullah. See also Bernstein et al., a similar survey a decade later.

Mufwene, Salikoko S. 1994. On decreolization: The case of Gullah. In Marcyliena Morgan, ed. 1994, Language and the social construction of identity in creole situations. Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies. 63-99.

Mufwene, Salikoko S., ed. 1993. Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press. [various articles]

Nichols, Patricia C. 1991 Verbal patterns of black and white speakers of coastal South Carolina. In WF Edwards & D Winford, eds., Verb phrase patterns in Black English and Creole. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 114-128.

Rickford, John R. 1985. Ethnicity as a sociolinguistic boundary. American Speech 60(1): 99-125. [see me for a copy]

Rickford, John R. 1986. Some principles for the study of Black and White speech in the South. Michael B. Montgomery and Guy Bailey, eds., Language variety in the South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 38-62.

Rickford, John R. 1997. Prior creolization of African American Vernacular English? Sociohistorical and textual evidence from the 17th and 18th centuries. Journal of Sociolinguistics 1(3): 315-336. Reprinted in JR Rickford 1999, African American Vernacular English.

*Sutcliffe, David. 1998. Gone with the wind? Evidence for 19th century African American speech. Links & Letters 5: 127-145. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. [not in library]

Troike, Rudolph C. 2003. The earliest Gullah/AAVE texts: A case of 19th-century mesolectal variation. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics 18 (2): 159-229.

Turner, Lorenzo Dow. 1949 [2002]. Africanisms in the Gullah dialect. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.  

          This book is the indispensable starting point. Turner demonstrated once for all the extent of the African substratum influence in Gullah, and answered academics who still contended that African culture had been wiped out by the slavery experience.

Weldon, Tracey. 2003. Copula variability in Gullah. Language Variation and Change 15(1): 37-72.

Weldon, Tracey. 2007. Gullah negation: A variable analysis. American Speech 82(4): 342-366.

 

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Last updated 28 April 2008