The native languages of the people living in the islands of the Caribbean are usually creole languages that attest to the history of colonization that these islands have. Two examples of Caribbean islands where creole languages are spoken are Jamaica and Trinidad. Within these islands, the creole languages that the natives speak are English-lexified because of British colonization. Although the social attitudes towards these English-lexified creoles vary in terms of whether they are languages suitable to be used in professional writing or not, the fact is that some professional Jamaican and Trinidadian writers have produced written stories in their native English Creole languages. Two such individuals are the Jamaican writer, Olive Senior, whose short story entitled “Do Angels Wear Brassierers?” is written in Jamaican Creole, and the Trinidadian writer, Earl Lovelace, whose short story entitled “Joebell and America” is written in Trinidadian Creole. Senior’s “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” presents the experiences of a precocious little Jamaican girl named Beccka whose behavior and childish concerns overwhelms her mother Cherry and her aunt Mary. On the other hand, Lovelace’s “Joebell and America” presents the experiences of a Trinidadian man named Joebell who possesses a strong desire to migrate to America to make a better life for himself and his girlfriend Alicia. Both stories enable the authors to legitimize the English-lexified creole languages used because they demonstrate how the language of the people can be used by the people to create authentic literary works that do not have to abide by prescriptive standards of English for readers to understand what is being said. Senior’s “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” and Lovelace’s “Joebell and America” epitomize the experiences of the Caribbean folk through realism created by the kind of morphosyntax, vocabulary, and movement along the creole continuum that characterize both Jamaican Creole and Trinidadian Creole Englishes.

In the story “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” the morphosyntax of many of the sentences used reflects that which characterizes the speech of many native Jamaican Creole speakers; this enables Senior to give the narrator and also the characters a realistic voice while also staying true to the setting of the story. For instance, when the narrator states, “Next morning Auntie Mary still vex” (Senior, 1), the reader gets the idea that this is a simple sentence which is not following the prescriptive standards of English since there is an absence of the copula verb ‘was’ between the words ‘Mary’ and ‘still,’ an absence of the determiner, ‘the,’ at the beginning of the sentence, and an absence of an the inflectional morpheme, ‘ed,’ at the end of the word, ‘vex,’ which is often used to indicate verb tense in a story. This sentence reinforces Mark Sebba’s statement that one of the major characteristics of creole languages is that they “are usually grammatically simple” (Sebba, 36), but it also shows the great extent to which a sentence in Jamaican Creole that does not abide by the rules of standard English grammar can still express a complete thought. Even though the sentence is ‘simple,’ the writer succeeds in communicating to the reader the emotional state that the character Mary was experiencing the morning after she was first offended by Becka’s statement that she was not going to pray for her since she “tek weh [her] best glassy eye marble” (Senior, 1).

Like the morphosyntax of some of the Jamaican Creole sentences in Senior’s story “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” some of the sentences in Lovelace’s story “Joebell and America” also exemplify the ‘simple’ morphosyntax characteristics of Trinidadian Creole English. For example, in Part One of the story which is narrated by one of Joebell’s gambling companions, the sentence “Joebell find that he seeing too much hell in Trinidad so he make up his mind to leave and go away” (Lovelace, 215) does not abide by the prescriptive grammatical standards of Standard English. This is so because unlike in Standard English prose narration, which is usually in the past tense, this opening sentence of the story is entirely in the present tense. In this sentence, there is an absence of the past form of the verb ‘find’ after the word ‘Joebell,’ and an absence of the copula verb ‘was’ which in standard English would likely be between the words ‘he’ and ‘seeing.’ Furthermore, the nonstandard phrase ‘seeing too much hell’ is used in the sentence which suggests that Joebell was experiencing hardships in Trinidad. There is also an absence of a comma between the words ‘Trinidad’ and ‘so,’ to correctly join the two independent clauses in the sentence, and an absence of the past tense of ‘make.’ The redundant use of the phrase ‘go way,’ after the word ‘leave’ is also used for emphasis to tell the reader that Joebell decided to leave Trinidad and migrate to somewhere else. Nevertheless, even though the morphosyntax arrangement of this sentence may seem to be ‘wrong,’ the fact is that the reader is able to comprehend what the narrator is saying about Joebell, his feelings about his life in Trinidad, and his decision. The sentence further echoes the real-life experiences of many Caribbean people who like Joebell, desire to leave the socio-economic hardships of life in the Caribbean and go to America. In this way, Lovelace is able to use a written representation of the syntactic features of Trinidadian Creole not just to build the characterization of his story and set the basis of the story’s plot, but to also add realism to the story in his attempt to authentically represent the Caribbean voice through this language.

Some of the vocabulary from the English-lexified creoles used in both stories also enable both writers to show how the orthography of a creole language can add realism to a story written in that language, even though the form of the story might not follow the prescriptive standards of English story writing. In Senior’s “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” the word ‘Den’ in the sentence “Den no so me saying?” (2) – which in Standard English would be “that is exactly what I am saying” – is a word which stays true to the vocabulary of Jamaican Creole and also gives an idea of the phonological features of the language since there is usually a ‘d’ sound instead of ‘th’ in front of words such as ‘then’ and ‘that.’ In this sentence – which is a statement uttered by Katie in her agreement with Mary as they gossip about Beccka and her mother Cherry – the reader is able to experience aural imagery and thereby can almost hear the two ladies gossiping in Jamaican Creole. Furthermore, the phrase “hard ears” which suggests that Mary was saying that Beccka was stubborn, is another example of how the vocabulary used in the story helps to build characterization and make the story realistic through the orthography of Jamaican Creole, without following the way in which words are used in Standard English writing and speech. In addition, Senior continues to do this by using the word ‘pickney’ in the story when Mary and Katie are talking about Beccka; ‘pickney’ is a “creole variant” of the “standard variant,” ‘child’ (Sebba, 214).

In Lovelace’s “Joebell and America,” it can be assumed by the reader that the use of the word ‘bigness’ in the phrase “she hear him talk about all this bigness far away” (Lovelace, 220) means ‘great things,’ but the word ‘big’ in Standard English is already an adjective, and the inflectional morpheme, ‘ness,’ is only usually added to a noun to create an adjective to express quality and state of being. Therefore, Lovelace’s use of this adjective ‘big,’ and his addition of a morpheme to it which would normally be used to create an adjective is an exception to the prescriptive rules of Standard English Lexicon; however, it adds realism to his story in helping the reader see the great extent to which Alicia was impressed by Joebell’s talk of America. This feature of the orthography of Trinidadian Creole used in the story expresses the general belief that Caribbean people have of America that it is a great place where great things happen, and where a better quality of life awaits. The use of phrases such as “high high,” “big big” and “lazy lazy” in the story also shows how much Lovelace endeavors to write his story in his native tongue to realistically express the Caribbean experience through his characters because these are examples of reduplication which is usually a characteristic of English-lexified creole languages in the Caribbean, and which enables the speaker to emphasize what they are saying.

The creole continuum is another aspect of the orthography of both stories which enables both writers to authentically produce works that stay true to the native languages that each writer speaks, and therefore portray the Caribbean experience through their characters in a realistic way. In “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” the creole continuum that exists in Jamaican Creole is presented particularly in the dialogue that various characters engage in; for instance, we find that a more mesolectal variant of Jamaican Creole is used in the dialogue between Katie and Mary in the following excerpt:

Mary: Well I dont know about that. Beccka certainly dont born with no two head or nothing wrong with her. Is just hard ears she hard ears.

Katie: Den no so me saying?

This example depicts the extent to which both women have come in contact with Standard English as their speech lies between basilect, which Sebba describes as “base or broadest form of creole” (Sebba, 34), and acrolect which is the “[at the] top or the standard form of the lexifier” (Sebba, 34).  This is possibly why Mary is the head of the Mothers’ Union at her church which is a position of power and prestige that requires her utterances to move away from the basilect form and closer to the acrolect. The fact that she speaks in a manner not far from ‘basic’ Jamaican Creole, but close to Standard Jamaican English could also be a direct result of her coming in contact with a more standard variety of English at church which is usually reinforced through the use of the English Bible. Further in the story we also see where the dialogue between Beccka and the Archdeacon of Mary’s church engage in a dialogue which is mainly characterized by acrolect from the Jamaican Creole continuum. Senior possibly uses this to illustrate in a realistic way the position of prestige the archdeacon has in the church and in the wider community, and to show that he was indeed an Englishman. This situation adheres to Sebba’s statement that “the Jamaican [language] situation as a post-creole continuum reflect[s]…social conditions” (Sebba, 13). Senior is therefore able to successfully build characterization and give his readers an idea of how the position one holds in the Jamaican society can greatly influence that individual’s speech. This he does by realistically presenting the effects of the characters’ social positions and interactions on their utterances.

Lovelace presents the creole continuum in his story mainly through the narration because Part One is narrated from the point of view of one of Joebell’s gambling companions, and Part Two is narrated by Joebell himself. In Part One, many of the sentences are written in a more mesolectal form of Trinidadian Creole. The following sentence is an example of this: “but a couple years earlier, Joebell make prison for a wounding, and before that they had him up for resisting arrest” (Lovelace, 215). In this sentence, the word ‘earlier’ is in the comparative form of the adjective ‘early’ and is thereby following the rules of standard English grammar; however, in the same sentence the phrase ‘make prison,’ which means that Joebell ‘went to prison,’ reflects a more basilect form of the language, and is not adhering to rules of standard English grammar since the word ‘make’ is used in a nonstandard way.

In Part Two of the story, Lovelace gives the reader an indication of Joebell’s personality as a very charming individual who has lofty ambitions by giving this character not just utterances in mesolect as he does with the narrator of Part One, but also acrolect. For example, Joebell states the following in an acrolect form of Trinidadian Creole: “That is why I love America. They love a challenge. Something in my style is a challenge to them…” (Lovelace, 229). Through this sentence, the writer is giving Joebell the power to entreat the reader to see him as this smart charismatic man who has the ability to outsmart custom agents in his attempt to enter America illegally, all this to prepare the reader to see that although he was later unsuccessful in ‘challenging’ these custom agents with his ‘style,’ it does not make him any less smart and charismatic. Lovelace does this to build characterization because the acrolect form of creole languages usually puts the speakers “at the top” (Sebba, 215) and thereby causes others to hold them in high regard, and “the most [basic] creole [speakers] at the bottom” (Sebba, 215) which causes others to see those speakers as unintelligent and uneducated. Hence, like Senior, he also adds realism to his story through his movement along the creole continuum by encouraging the reader to develop opinions about his characters just as how the wider society forms opinions of English-lexified Creole speakers in the Caribbean simply through how they speak.

Through the orthography of “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” by Olive Senior, and “Joebell and America” by Earl Lovelace, both authors are successful in entreating their readers to delve into the psyche of their characters and grasp in a realistic way a taste of the Caribbean experience. While both authors do not adhere to the standardized system of writing throughout, they are very successful in creating a voice for the characters and expressing their own voice through Jamaican and Trinidadian Creole Englishes. In other words, they skillfully use the type of morphosyntax, vocabulary, and movement along the creole continuum that characterize their respective native English Creole languages to authentically represent their culture, and in the process subvert the rules of prescriptive English grammar to a certain extent. By doing so, I believe that they have achieved something even greater; they have added resilience and legitimacy to their native languages that are continually seen as ‘bad English,’ ‘broken English’ and the ‘language of the ignorant.’

 

 

 Works cited:

Lovelace, Earl. “Joebell and America.” Rotten English: A Literary Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. 215-231. Print.

Sebba, Mark. Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Senior, Olive. “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” Kunapipi, 8(2), 1986.  Available at:http://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol8/iss2/3

 

 Gullah (also called Geechee or Sea Island Creole)

One of the legacies of the plantation system, which still exists today, manifests itself in the utterances of a group of African Americans who reside primarily in the coastal areas of South Carolina, Georgia, and Northeast Florida. These individuals are known as the Gullah or Geechee people who are direct descendants of slaves who were brought to these regions from Africa. The Gullah language which they speak is also known as Geechee or Sea Island Creole and is described by Thomas B. Klein (2013) in “The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Language” as being “the only English-lexified creole language spoken indigenously in the continental United States.” The fact that Gullah is a creole language makes it a direct result of the plantation system. It developed on the plantations among slaves in the 18^th Century in South Carolina, Georgia, and Northeast Florida as a result of the contact between the English that their colonizers spoke to and around them (and forced them to learn), and the African languages they brought with them when they were forcibly plucked from their homeland (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2018).

History of Gullah

The history of Gullah is very similar to that of many creole languages that currently exist in post-colonial regions where there was contact between an imperialist culture and the culture of enslaved Africans. Historians have postulated that the slaves who were taken to work in the coastal areas on the rice plantations in South Carolina, Georgia, and Northeast Florida in the 18^th Century were those taken as captives from the Caribbean, and from the Mandingo, Bamana, Wolof, Fula, Temne, Mende, Vai, Akan, Ewe, Makongo, and Kimbundu tribes in Africa, (“Digital Kenyon,” 2018). Since these individuals were from different tribes and spoke various African languages, it became difficult for them to communicate with each other in a common African language, and so, as a necessity for effective communication to take place between them, “they appropriated English as a common language, and it was in turn modified by the African languages they originally spoke” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2018). Hence, Gullah developed as a pidgin and later became a creole when the descendants of these slaves acquired and became native speakers of this language.

In the 1930s, Lorenzo Dow Turner, who was an African American linguist educated at Howard and Harvard Universities, became the first individual to conduct research and recordings of Sea Island dialects. Turner particularly focused his research on Gullah and thus became the first individual to conduct scholarly research of the history and structure of this language that the wider American society considered to be merely broken English. According to the article “Lorenzo Dow Turner: Connecting Communities Through Language” by Alcione M. Amos (2011), Turner immersed himself into the Gullah culture and conducted his interview of Gullah speakers in Charleston, Brunswick, Beaufort and Savannah using a recording device weighing about a hundred pounds. These recordings, along with his later visits to West Africa and research into the languages there, enabled him to debunk the old theories that many had of Gullah as being a poorly spoken form of English. Turner discovered that some of “the grammatical constructions and [many] words of Gullah had nothing to do with English” (Amos, 2011, p. 10) but rather were African in origin. A British historian named P.E.H. Hair later published a review of Turner’s research on Gullah in which he noted that “Sierra Leone languages have made a ‘major contribution’ to the development of the Gullah Language” (Opala, 2018). He supported this view by pointing out that all the African texts known to have been preserved by the Gullah people were in languages spoken in Sierra Leone.

The name Gullah is described in “The Survey of Pidgin and Creole languages” as possibly being an “adaptation of Angola [which] is joined by another which traces it to the Gola people of Sierra Leone” (Klein, 2013). This source also states that “other linguistic groups by this name are also known in the modern West African states of Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau. Furthermore, there are Gala and Ngala people in Nigeria” (Klein, 2013). The alternative name Geechee which is used to refer to the Gullah people living in Georgia is believed to be a derivative from the Kisi people who can be found in Sierra Leone, and other groups by this name are also found in Liberia. Another theory claims that the name comes from the Ogeechee River in Georgia.

Current status of Gullah

Gullah is currently spoken in the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, North Carolina, the coastal region of Jacksonville, North Carolina, the coastal lowlands to Jacksonville, South Carolina, and in diasporic communities in Florida, Detroit Michigan, and New York City (Simons, 2017). In general, the language currently exists in the Southeastern region of the United States. A 2010 US Census revealed that there are about 350 monolingual Gullah speakers, and about 10,000 bilingual speakers of the language (Simons, 2017). Gullah is not spoken at all levels of society and is considered as the variant of English which has “diverted the most from educated white middle-class English varieties” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2018).  However, the preservation of cultural identity has played an important role in the preservation of Gullah. The few Gullahs who migrate to other parts of America for school or work for example, to escape poverty, return home not speaking the same way; nevertheless, a significant number of these individuals learn to code-switch successfully and thereby endeavor to maintain their cultural solidarity with their communities. In other words, “if they spoke Gullah before they left coastal South Carolina or Georgia, people who return, often after long periods of residence in New York…typically revert to this vernacular. For them it is one of the ways to identify themselves with home” (Mufwene, 1997, p.72).

As with many other creole languages, there is no standardized writing system for Gullah as it is predominantly a spoken language kept in the confines of the Gullah community because of the negative stigma the wider society has attached to it as being “bad English.” Mufwene (1997) reinforces this idea when he states that “Gullah speakers stop speaking their vernacular away from home especially when they interact with people of different backgrounds” (p. 73) because of this negative stigma. However, the Gullah people have produced media to educate others about the language and their culture in both Gullah and English; these include blogs, webpages such as gullah.net on the educational website knowitall.org, the website gullahgeecheenation.com, and a newsletter named “De Conch.” There are also songs in Gullah and videos on YouTube featuring Gullah Story tellers such as Carolyn “Jabulile” White who tells traditional Gullah stories in the language.  In 2005, after 26 years, the translation of the New Testament of the King James version of the Bible into Gullah was completed. According to Klein (2013), this translation called “De Nyew Testament [was done] by a native speaker panel in South Carolina…and is the first book in Gullah by native speakers for native speakers.” Klein further speculates the linguistic prestige associated with this bible might facilitate a recreolization of Gullah speech.

Features that set Gullah apart from other English-lexified creoles

Gullah is said to be similar to Bahamas Creole English and has ninety percent lexical similarity with Afro-Seminole (Simons, 2017); however, there are a few linguistic features that set this language apart from similar ones. According to “Encyclopedia Britannica” (2018),

Gullah tense and aspect are marked by null or free morphemes, a form of speech that [very] rarely occurs in other English [-lexified Creoles] and usually only in archaic or marginal nonstandard dialects spoken by rural whites. [For example,] the verb go pronounced as /gə/, is typically used to mark the future tense, as in he go see um (he’ll see him/her/it); the locative verb duh /də/ marks the progressive aspect, as in Uh ain duh fun (I’m not kidding); duhz/does /dəz/ is used to express habits, as in How you duhz cook this? (How do you (usually) cook this?); and the verb done (finish) combines with a verb stem to mark the perfect aspect rather emphatically, as in Sara done tell me (Sara (has) told me).

A linguist named Ian Hancock also found that Gullah possesses features of vocabulary, grammar and phonology that are found in Krio spoken in Sierra Leone but are not found in any other English-lexified creole similar to Gullah. These include among others, Krio expressions such as bohboh (boy), titi (girl), enti (not so?), and an auxiliary verb, blant, which appears in Gullah as buhbuh, tittuh, enty, and blang (Opala, 2018). This discovery further reinforces that of Turner’s research which revealed the vast extent to which Sierra Leone languages contributed to the development of Gullah.

Perceived legitimacy of Gullah

Since Gullah is predominantly seen as being an oral language, this causes many to question its legitimacy. It has been frequently dismissed as being “broken English” and the fact that its speakers who bear its name are a part of the minority group in America further causes the wider society to view it as being “just another unintelligible creole.” According to the article “Gullah Grammar Sketch” by David B. Frank (2015), “no proper language survey has been conducted [recently] to count the speakers of Gullah, and it is likely that none ever will get done” (p. 2); this suggests the little extent to which the wider society views Gullah unlike other languages such as English and Spanish. Undoubtedly, many who are Gullah descendants and those who see the value of cultural preservation endeavor to legitimize and preserve the Gullah language through various forms of media, and through academic research. On the other hand, others merely see it as a language of entertainment to be used only within the Gullah community or for storytelling. Based on my reading of the comments on Carolyn “Jubilile” White’s Gullah story telling in the video entitled “Wikitongues: Carolyn speaking Gullah and English” on YouTube, hearing the language seems to promote cultural pride for some individuals; for example, one individual wrote, “I’m proud to be Charleston Born and Bred; beautiful message she spoke” (Bridget King, 2017); and another wrote, “I’m from Awendaw, which is considered Charleston, SC. I understood everything, this is how my family talks when were all get together. Hearing this warmed my heart” (Allyson Snipe, 2017). On the other hand, some of the comments on the YouTube video entitled “A story told in traditional Gullah Language at African American Heritage Day” suggests that others have a negative attitude towards the language (and its speakers), for example: “I see being loud and obnoxious has no bounds with these people, no matter how ‘different’ they are” (Sbep125, 2016), and “sounds like gibberish” (Rusty Shackleford, 2017).

Conclusion

Although it is similar in many ways to other English-lexified creoles of other post-colonial regions, the Gullah language is also different to a certain extent because it is the only English-lexified creole spoken indigenously in the United States, and it possesses unique features of vocabulary, grammar and phonology. Lorenzo Turner’s interviews of the Gullah people in the 1930s, his recordings of those interviews, and his overall research of the language helped to inform people that Gullah was not merely “broken English” but rather an intelligible language containing not just features from English but many words that were African in origin. Today, Gullah is predominantly spoken in small communities within the Southeastern region of the United States with many of its speakers code-switching upon returning to those communities. The media that exist in the language enables the Gullah people to promote the legitimacy of Gullah and their culture, but since it is considered as an oral language and the fact that it is a creole, many individuals from the wider society still see it as merely “bad English” or “gibberish.” The negative stereotyping of the language by many, the minority status that the Gullah people have in the US, and the fact that Gullah has no standardized writing system, could negatively impact how it is received and used by future generations. Therefore, there is a possibility that Gullah might remain as it currently is for many years to come.

 

 

Works Cited

Amos, A. M. (2011). Lorenzo Dow Turner: Connecting Communities Through Language. The Black Scholar, 41(1), 4-15.

Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange. (n.d.). Retrieved February 11,2018, from http://digital.kenyon.edu/gullah/

Frank, D. B. (2015, September 25). Gullah Grammar Sketch – dbfrank.net. Retrieved February11, 2018, from http://www.bing.comGullah. (2018). In Encyclopædia Britannica.

Gullah. (2018). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from   http://academic.eb.com.york.ezproxy.cuny.edu/levels/collegiate/article/Gullah/38490

Klein, T. B. (2013). Gullah. In: Michaelis, Susanne Maria & Maurer, Philippe & Haspelmath,Martin & Huber, Magnus (eds.) The survey of pidgin and creole languages. Volume 1:English-based and Dutch-based Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mufwene, S. S. (1997). The Ecology of Gullahs Survival. American Speech, 72(1), 69-83.

Opala, J. A. (n.d.). The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection.Retrieved February 10, 2018, from https://glc.yale.edu/gullah-rice-slavery-and-sierra-leone-american-connection

PHFMedia. (2013, February 14). A Story told in the Traditional Gullah Language at African American Heritage Day. Retrieved February 12, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijl7Sg3ZAd0

Simons, Gary F. and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2017. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Twentieth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.

Wikitongues. (2013, August 04). WIKITONGUES: Carolyn speaking Gullah and English. Retrieved February 15, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCd5W4gwJsI