Gullah

The lecture which a lot of us found the most interesting was delivered by Tracey L. Weldon, PhD who discussed “Gullah” – the African-American language, popular among inhabitants of coastal regions of the U.S. states of North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. The professor began the talk with a linguistic introduction into dialects in general – explaining how people distinguish between good and bad English on the basis of power and prestige of the speaker. Then the proper topic commenced; we got to know the origins of Gullah. There exist two contradictory hypotheses about the source of this Creole language. First of them represents the belief that Gullah was born in the south-eastern states of U.S., as an independent formation, confluence of American English and African speech. The second one proclaims that this dialect came into being before African slaves’ arrival to America. The lecturer herself thinks that the first assumption is much more possible than the second one, but she finds in both of them a grain of truth. We also received very useful and interesting handouts that provided information on the lecture topic and examples of Gullah vocabulary, idiomatic expressions and verbal system. For me that was the most attractive session, not only because of the topic, which is something totally new and unfamiliar for me, but also due to the interesting way of introducing the issue by professor Weldon. I really hope we will have an opportunity to hear the Creole language during  our study tour.

Karolina