From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Gullah is the name of both an ethnic group and its English-African creole language.
The Gullah are a people of African slave ancestry living in the Sea Islands and the coastal regions of nearby South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida.
The Gullah language is a fast-paced pidgin language and was derived from a combination of English colonial speech and languages of West Africa for slaves to communicate with both Europeans and African tribes. It strongly resembles the Krio language of Sierra Leone, and draws elements from other West African languages as well. The chorus words to the Christian hymn Kum Ba Yah are said to be Gullah for "Come By Here". English words also attributed to Gullah are juke (jukebox), goober (Southern term for peanut) and voodoo.
- See also: Lorenzo Dow Turner's Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (ISBN 1-57003-452-4)
- See also: Languages in the United States and List of dialects of the English language
