On the Relationship of Gullah and Bahamian

Bibliographic Data

ID8728134
AuthorsJohn Holm (0000-0002-9890-3640, corresponding author)
Year1983
Volume58
Issue4
Pages303-303
Publication date1983-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Speech (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/455145
OpenAlexW2319165036
LanguageEN
Citations received6

B OTH GULLAH AND BAHAMIAN appear to have an immediate ancestor in the eighteenth-century creole English spoken on plantations in the American South.' The intertwining history of the Carolinas and the Bahamas, coupled with linguistic similarities most evident in their lexicons, suggest that and Bahamian are in fact sister dialects of Atlantic English.2 The Dictionary ofBahamian English (Holm with Shilling 1982) casts new light on Cassidy and Hancock's 1980 debate in American Speech on the place of Gullah. As Hancock points out, Of all the western hemisphere anglo-creoles, is the least satisfactorily accounted for in its relationship both to other such languages and to the varities of black vernacular English spoken in the United States, with which it is often linked (1980, p. 17). Cassidy found that the lexical evidence from Hancock's 1969 comparative study virtually requires a common English pidgin source for the language of slaves taken from Barbados to Surinam, Jamaica, and South Carolina from 1651 to 1670. It suggests, though it does not require, creolization in Barbados, perhaps already begun in Africa (1980, p. 13). Hancock, doubting the existence of an early, stabilized Barbadian creole, traced Gullah's ancestry to an early Guinea Coast English that later evolved into Sierra Leone Krio, as well as other varieties of creolized English. He has now (1982; forthcoming) elaborated this position in a preliminary classification of the varieties of Atlantic English. In this family tree, Guinea Coast English has a Lower Guinea branch, which has a Caribbean branch, which has an Eastern or Lesser Antillean branch, which has a Leewards branch, which has a branch, which has Islands and Afro-Seminole on one branch, with Bahamian and Caicos on the other. Although this might seem to imply a mother (Gullah)/daughter (Bahamian) relationship between the two varieties discussed here, Hancock uses Gullah to refer to the earlier American plantation creole and Sea Islands Creole to refer to the variety of currently spoken on the Islands of South Carolina.3 Hancock, then, agrees with the position presented here that and Bahamian are sisters. The use of the term sister here is to be understood as a metaphor for a close relationship in both heredity and development, but not in the strict

Linguistics · Sociology · Historical Studies in Central America · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Socioeconomics of Resources and Conservation · History · Philosophy

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