7.

Transplanted Languages

7.1 Introduction

For tracing the complicated history of transplanted languages, a combination of linguistic and sociocultural evidence is required. The techniques of structural linguistics must be applied to the synchronic and the diachronie phenomena; areal evidence, both in its geographic and its social dimension, must be brought to bear upon this problem.

Field surveys of the current dialects of the parent language and of the transplanted language, the structural interpretation of the findings, and the regional and social patterning of the variants constitute the most promising point of departure. The structure of the parent language at the time of the transplantation and its subsequent changes should be considered next. Finally, changes in the transplanted (colonial) language after the settlement, whether indigenous or imported from the parent stock as the result of continuing contacts, should be determined.

After the purely linguistic relationships between the parent language and its offshoot have been established as far as the available data permit, the sociocultural factors that may account for them are investigated.

The most important points to consider are: (1) the regional and the social provenience of the settlers; (2) the location of early settlements and the chronology of lines of expansion; (3) the social organization of the colony and its subdivisions; (4) commercial and cultural contacts with the “homeland” during and after the settlement period; (5) the status of the literary language shared with the homeland during the colonial period and after the achievement of political and cultural independence; (6) the influence of the natural environment, of other ethnic groups, and of sociocultural innovations upon the lexicon.

The multiplicity and the variety of factors that shape the history of transplanted languages are such that sharply divergent developments may be expected. To illustrate this point, I have chosen to discuss four typical cases in fields familiar to me for which rather good evidence is available: American English, Pennsylvania German, Afrikaans, and Gullah.

The development of American English in its relation to British English is treated above (Chapter 5). The salient facts are as follows. (1) The phonology and morphology of Standard British English were already highly standardized when colonies were planted in North America. However, regional variations in the Standard were more prevalent than at present and folk dialects still predominated among the middle and the lower classes of society. (2) The folk dialects spoken by the majority of the settlers gave way to varieties of Standard British English current among the elite of the several colonial centers. (3) These regional variants of SBE were carried inland during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries as the colonies expanded. After Independence was achieved, the dramatic “Westward Movement” of the population spread them to the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast in little more than half a century, blending them progressively. As a result, the major dialect areas of American English are strikingly congruent with settlement areas. (4) The use of the same literary language has served to keep American English close to British English. Nevertheless, many new words and new applications of old words were introduced to cope with features of a different natural environment and with the many sociocultural changes. (5) Contact with speakers of other languages has led to the adoption of a considerable number of foreign words.

In principle, the history of American Spanish and American Portuguese is not unlike that of American English.

A radically different development is illustrated by Pennsylvania German. As pointed out in some detail below, it differs markedly from Standard German in its phonology. In the lexicon and in morphology the differences are less striking, but still rather considerable. This divergence between Pennsylvania German (essentially a Rhine Frankish folk dialect of west central Germany) and Standard German (based on East Central German) would tend to keep the two apart. However, it was primarily the sociocultural setting that discouraged the importation of Standard German features. From the beginning until the present, Pennsylvania German has been the spoken vernacular of a highly integrated farming area. Literary German, heard in church, read in Luther’s Bible and in the daily press, and taught in grammar school for many generations, was a thing apart. It never became the medium of communication in the family or between neighbors. Embedded in an English-speaking country, Pennsylvania German adopted a fair number of English words and modeled some of its expressions on English idioms. But its integrity as a Rhine Frankish dialect (Pfälzerisch) has survived through two and a half centuries.

Afrikaans, now one of the two official languages of the South African Republic, has had a unique development. Its vowel system is essentially that of Standard Dutch, tinged with some dialectal features peculiar to the provinces of South and North Holland (Rotterdam, Amsterdam). The consonant system exhibits rather marked changes: contrastive voiced fricatives are lost and final consonant clusters have been simplified. The most drastic deviation from Standard Dutch is found in the morphology of the verb, which is stripped of most of its inflections. None of these simplifications are attested in the folk dialects of the Netherlands. They came into being in the Cape Colony (Capetown).

The sociocultural background of this pidginized Dutch of South Africa is rather clear. The population of Capetown, established as a port of call by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, had a highly mixed population in which the Dutch-speaking minority constituted an elite. Africans (chiefly Hottentots) were numerous and intermarriage between Europeans and Africans was not uncommon. Under these circumstances a simplified Dutch became the medium of communication between the diverse elements. This spoken vernacular was fully established in the Cape Colony when the Boers made their trek into the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in the nineteenth century. The striking regional uniformity of Afrikaans from Capetown to Johannesburg, a distance of 800 miles, testifies to this fact.

The original domain of Gullah, an English-based pidgin language, was the slave trade carried on by the Royal African Company in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In North America it became established on the plantations worked by African slaves and has survived to this day along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia.

The lexicon of Gullah is almost entirely English. On the other hand, the phonemic system is simplified, and the noun and the verb have lost their grammatical categories and the inflections expressing them. Dealing with Africans speaking a variety of mutually unintelligible languages, the slave trader used a simplified English, which was ultimately acquired by the slaves and their masters on the American plantations as their medium of communication. The policy of the plantation owners to purchase slaves speaking different African languages—for fear of organized revolt—supported this practice.

An authoritative account of the character and the genesis of pidgin and creole languages is available in R. A. Hall’s recently published book on this subject [1966].

7.2 Pennsylvania German

7.21 Phonological Features

The German spoken in southeastern Pennsylvania since colonial times is essentially a descendant of Rhine Frankish, a major regional dialect of German spoken along the middle course of the Rhine in an area comprising the political domains of the Palatinate (Rheinpfalz) and Hesse-Darmstadt, with such cities as Zweibrücken, Kaisersläutern, Mannheim, and Darmstadt.

The most striking Rhine Frankish features in the phonology of Pennsylvania German (PG) are pointed out below and illustrated by a few examples. Standard German (SG) equivalents, given in conventional orthography, will serve to set the characteristic features of PG off from SG.

(1) The rounded front vowels and diphthongs of Middle High German are merged with the unrounded vowels and diphthongs of corresponding tongue positions and movements:

(2) The diphthongs / ei, öu, ou / of MHG are merged with old monophthongs:

(3) Contrastive MHG /ī ≠ ei / and /ū ≠ ou / are preserved as / ai ≠ ē / and / au ≠ ā / in PG, while they are merged in SG:

These developments have produced a simple and symmetrical system of syllabic sounds, which PG shares with Rhine Frankish:

Characteristic features of the Rhine Frankish and the Pennsylvania German consonant system are:

(1) the lack of /t / and /pf /:

(2) The weakening of the old strong stops /p, k / to voiceless / b, g / in all positions except initially before a stressed vowel:

(3) The weakening of intervocalic / b, g / to the voiced fricatives /w, j /:

(4) The loss of word final /n / after / ə / and after a long vowel or diphthong:

7.22 Regional Differences

Although the same phonemic system obtains throughout the German-speaking section of eastern Pennsylvania, there are some regional differences in the incidence of shared phonemes. Lehigh County (Allentown) and Lancaster County (Lancaster)—northerly and southerly parts of the original German settlement area—exhibit such differences as the following:

The Lehigh variants are clearly Rhine Frankish, the Lancaster variants just as clearly Alemannic.

The relatively few morphological differences between Lehigh and Lancaster usage have corresponding Frankish and Alemannic European source:

Similarly, the diminutive suffix /-xə, -xər / (cp. SG -chen) of Lehigh comes from Rhine Frankish, the /-li, -lin / (cp. SG -lein) of Lancaster from Alemannic.

Figure 36 exhibits the areal dissemination of some phonological and morphological variants for which the Sprachatlas provides the European background, as shown in Figure 37.

Lexical variants in PG have a similar regional pattern, as shown in Figure 38. However, the dividing lines follow the valley of the Schuykill River in Berks County rather than the northern boundary of Lancaster County. Whether the Lancaster regionalisms are predominantly of Alemannic origin is an open question, since neither the Sprachatlas [Wrede-Mitzka 1926- ] nor the Wortatlas [Mitzka- Schmitt 195Iff.] furnish relevant evidence. The following words, which are largely confined to Lancaster County, are presumably Alemannic: /ēxarli / “squirrel,” /fed / “lard,” /harabšd / “autumn,” /kiwal / “pail” [Reed-Seifert: Maps 84, 70, 71, 72].

FIGURE 36: Pennsylvania German: Some Morphological and Phonological Variants

1. “(we) do”: Lehigh / dūnə / ≠ Lancaster /dīnə / [Reed-Seifert: Map 54]

2. The prefix of the past participle before the résonants / m, n, l, r, w /: Le. /gə- / ≠ La. /g- / [ibid.: Map 61]

3. The diminutive suffix (plural): Le. /-xar / ≠ La. /-lin / [ibid.: Map 90]

4. The pronoun of the second person plural: Le. / īr / ≠ La. / dīr / [ibid.: Map 62]

Cities: A(llentown, H(arrisburg, L(ancaster, Philadelphia.

From C. E. Reed and L. W. Seifert, A Linguistic Atlas of Pennsylvania German.

FIGURE 37: Pennsylvania German: Frankish and Alemannic Variants Underlying the Variants

1. Fr. dun ≠ Al. din ~ dian ~ den ~ dean [Reed Seifert: Map 54a]

2. Prefix of the past participle before the résonants: Fr. gə- ≠ Al. g- [ibid.: Map 61a]

3. Diminutive suffix: Fr. -cher ≠ Al. -lin [ibid.: Map 90a]

4. Pronoun of the second person plural: Fr. ir ~ ër ≠ Al. dir ~ der [ibid.: Map 62a]

Cities: Frankfurt, K(arlsruhe, KL = Kaiserslautern, M(annheim, S(trassburg, SG = Stuttgart.

From C. E. Reed and L. W. Seifert.

7.23 Sociocultural Background

In two centuries of increasingly intimate contacts with speakers of English and a century of fairly general bilingualism, English words and idioms modeled on English have become established in Pennsylvania German. Their currency varies from place to place and from person to person, but some are in fairly general use. Writers of PG verse, anecdotes, and comedies (since ca. 1860) may tend to avoid Anglicisms (except for humorous effects), but twentieth-century writers like C. F. lobst and L. A. Moll freely use such everyday English words as breakfast, supper, parlor, fence, shop, store, election, jury, and exclamatory expressions like anyhow, good-bye, never mind, sure, well. They also employ “handy” English idioms recast entirely in German vocabulary, as the following: dead to the world, feel proud, goodlooking, get away with it, and: How are you? He’ll get over it. I stood my ground. Blends are not infrequent as /šprig-ēg / “spring harrow,” /bär-stub / “bar room,” /uf gadresd / “dressed up,” and /du bisd nox sori / “you’ll be sorry,” /ix hab mai maind uf gamaxd / “I’ve made up my mind.”

FIGURE 38: Pennsylvania German: Some Lexical Variants

1. North /šogl / (SG Schaukel) ≠ South / wīg / (SG Wiege) “cradle [Reed-Seifert 1954: Map 82]

2. N /ludsr / ≠ S /ladárn / “lantern” [ibid.: Map 77]

3. N /blafd / ≠ S /gaudsd / “barks, of a dog” [ibid.: Map 79]

4. N /šworn / ≠ S / wis / (SG Wiese) “meadow” [ibid.: Map 80]

5. N /šēb / ≠ S /garab / (SG Garbe) “sheaf” [ibid.: Map 76]

Cities: A(llentown, H(arrisburg, Lancaster, Philadelphia.

From C. E. Reed and L. W. Seifert.

It is of some importance to note that English elements taken into Pennsylvania German are adapted to the native phonological, morphological, and syntactic systems, which have remained remarkably stable since colonial times. Bilingual speakers (as most Pennsylvania Germans are at the present time) may of course pronounce a word like taxes in the English manner or switch from German to English in the middle of a sentence. But this practice does not “mix” the structural features of the two languages.

The English of bilinguals in eastern Pennsylvania may show some German influence in pronunciation, as a monophthongal articulation of the syllables of rain and bone, or the unvoicing of stops and fricatives in rob, leg, save, rise. Some German expressions also survive in their English and a few of them have even been adopted by English monolinguals of Pennsylvania, among them saddle horse “nearhorse,” thick-milk “curdled milk,” ponhaws “scrapple,” and smearcase “cottage cheese” [Kurath 1949: Figures 23, 24]. These Germanisms are rapidly fading out in areas in which German is no longer spoken to any extent [Kurath 1945].

In dealing with Pennsylvania German we are in the enviable position of having reliable linguistic evidence and ample information on the sociocultural setting in which this spoken language became established and survived through several centuries as an enclave in English-speaking America.

Linguistic evidence is provided by voluminous writings in the dialect since the middle of the nineteenth century [H. H. Reichard 1918; E. F. Robacker 1943], We have a dictionary of PG with more than 16,000 entries [Lambert 1924]. We know a great deal about the phonological and morphological structure of the language, owing to a field survey of the PG heartland of eastern Pennsylvania [C. E. Reed 1949; Reed-Seifert 1954]. Regional differences in vocabulary have also been investigated [Seifert 1946; Reed-Seifert 1954; Buffington 1948]. For the European background the Sprachatlas provides information and more is forthcoming through the publication of Rheinpfälzisches Wörterbuch, edited by E. Christmann.

The history of the people that speak this language has been traced in great detail, chiefly in the voluminous publications of the Pennsylvania German Society (1891 ff.) and the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society (1936ff.). Only the most essential facts will be mentioned here.

Shortly after the founding of William Perm’s Quaker colony on the Delaware (1680), German Protestants (Lutherans, Reformed) and Sectarians (Dunkers, Mennonites, Moravians) settled in the rich farmland of the Piedmont as far west as the Blue Mountains, an area extending for 100 miles from the valley of the Delaware (Easton, Bethlehem, Allentown) to the valley of the Susquehanna (Lancaster, York). On Perm’s invitation, they left their homes along the middle course of the Rhine (the Palatinate and Hesse-Darmstadt) to escape religious persecution and oppressive manorial services. Along with them came Sectarians from Elsace, Baden, and Switzerland. By 1750 they were fully established as a well-integrated cultural community, differing in many ways from their English speaking neighbors to the east and to the west.

Although preserving a sentimental attachment to the remote European homelands from which they had fled, they soon had little in common with them because of the revolutionary changes in their lives. As Americans they participated fully in the War for Independence and wholeheartedly supported the Union in the Civil War.

In their daily life the Pennsylvania Germans preserved much of the folk culture they had brought with them, from farming methods and home industries to social gatherings and religious practices. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), the famous Philadelphia physician and statesman, described their lives admirably in his Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania [1910]. Last but not least, they clung to their spoken language, essentially a Rhine Frankish dialect with some admixtures of Alemannic in parts of the area. This German dialect, popularly known as Pennsylvania Dutch, is still widely current today.

Those who spoke the Pennsylvania German dialect at home, in dealing with their neighbors, and in doing business in the regional market towns were not unfamiliar with Standard German, which was regularly used in church services and read to them from Luther’s Bible well into the nineteenth century. Many of them learned High German in grammar schools and academies and read it in the regional German newspapers. But Standard German was a language apart from their normal medium of communication and had little influence upon it. When words were taken into their spoken language, they were adapted to it in sounds and in grammatical forms.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century the Pennsylvania German dialect was not reduced to writing. By ca. 1860 it came to be used in nostalgic verse, later in humorous sketches, still later in translations of English and German poetry. Those who employed it as a literary language were, of course, not the common people, but college-trained churchmen, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and newspaper editors of Pennsylvania German descent, all of them native speakers of the dialect.

7.3 Afrikaans

7.31 The Vowel System

Relying upon evidence furnished by the Linguistic Atlas of North and South Netherland [1939ff.], G. G. Kloeke undertook to pinpoint the sources of certain features of the Afrikaans vowel system in his book entitled Herkomst en Groei van het Afrikaans [1950]. As editor of the Atlas he had access to a large body of localized dialect data gathered by him and other scholars in the Netherlands and in the Netherlandish (Flemish) section of Belgium from the 1920’s onward [see E. Blancquaert 1948: esp. 37–55, the questionnaire].

Kloeke points out the following characteristic features of Afrikaans that are confined to the western section of the Netherlands:

(1) The lack of palatal mutation before PGc /i, j /, as exemplified in groen (cp. E green, G grün) and soeken (cp. E seek); in hoor (cp. E hear, G hören) and skoon (cp. G schön); in naast (cp. E next, G nächst) and swaar (cp. G schwer).

(2) The unconditioned (“spontaneous”) fronting of / o /, from PGc /u- /, to /ȫ/ (written eu), as in neut “nut” (cp. OE hnutu G nuss), seun “son” (cp. OE sunu, G sohn). The corresponding Standard Netherlandish forms noot, zoon are at variance with the older folk usage of the western Netherlands from which the variants of Afrikaans are derived. It is of interest to note that, in agreement with Standard Dutch, Afrikaans has “unfronted” / ō / in koning “king,” vogel “bird,” and woon “reside.” The complicated background of this situation is dealt with in some detail by Kloeke [85–100, esp. 98–99] and by Vereecken [1938, esp. 60–64 and Maps 2, 3, 5]. This problem makes it clear that in the attempt to relate traits of a colonial dialect to the dialect of its homeland, changes that occur in the source dialect after the settlement must not be overlooked.

In Figure 39 the areal dissemination of a third feature shared by Afrikaans with the western Netherlands is also delimited, the diphthongal syllabic /öü / as in huis “house,” which Kloeke discussed in masterly fashion in an earlier publication [1927]. Kloeke’s findings regarding this feature are dealt with by L. Bloomifield in his Language [1933: 329-31].

Kloeke undertakes to narrow down the homeland of Afrikaans to the province of South Holland and the adjoining district of North Holland—the area in which Rotterdam, the Hague, Leiden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam are situated. This is done by means of specific areal and diachronie linguistic evidence. Among the features that Afrikaans shares primarily or only with the province of South Holland are the following: (1) the merging of WGc /ä / and lengthened WGc /a- / in long /ä /, as in schaap “sheep” and water “water” [Kloeke 56-59], whereas North Holland has /ë ≠ ä / as in skeep ≠ waater; (2) the diminutive suffix with the characteristic vowel / i /, spelled ie [135-38].

The close connections of Afrikaans with the dialects of the western Netherlands would seem to imply that the majority of the early settlers of Capetown and its environs came from that area. But that expectation turns out to be unfounded. Hollanders and Zeelanders never made up more than one fourth of the total population. Kloeke assumes, for apparently good reasons, that a close-knit minority from the province of South Holland (Rotterdam) soon constituted an elite whose usage was adopted by Netherlanders speaking other dialects and by the motley crew of North Germans, French Huguenots, and others. The slow growth of Capetown, established in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company as a port of call and a supply station along the route to the East Indies, facilitated this development. After half a century the white population of Capetown was still under 1,500!

FIGURE 39: Western Features of Netherlandish

1. Eastern limit of /ȫ/ < / ō- / (PGc /u- f) in zeug “sow” (cp. OE sugu) [Kloeke 1950: 95].

2. Eastern limit of /u / from unpalatalized / 5 / (PGc / ō / in zoeken “seek” (cp. OE sēcean) [ibid.: 55],

3. Eastern and southwestern limits of the diphthong /öü / from /ü / in huis “house” (cp. OE hūs) [ibid.: 48].

Cities: A(msterdam, R(otterdam.

Another important factor in establishing the western phonological type of Netherlandish in South Africa was its closeness to literary Netherlandish, which after the Spanish conquest of Brabant (1585) had come more and more under the influence of Holland (Amsterdam). Used in religious services and read in the Statenbijbel (translated 1625-35) by devout Protestants, literary usage both supported and supplemented the western features of Afrikaans.

The English conquest of South Africa during the Napoleonic wars encouraged the use of Afrikaans in daily life; and the “Boers” who emigrated (1830- ) from the Cape of Good Hope to settle the Orange Free State and the Transvaal have clung to it steadfastly.

Evidence for the characteristic features of Afrikaans is decidedly limited until the latter part of the nineteenth century and consists mainly of deviations from Standard Dutch in locally written documents. When it came to be one of the official languages of the South African Union (1910) it was already highly, though not wholly, standardized. Descriptions of this spoken colloquial language began to appear in the twentieth century, soon followed by prescriptions aimed at making written usage more uniform.

Kloeke’s primary concern is with the problem of establishing the sources of distinctive phonological features of Afrikaans by tracing them to folk dialects of the western Netherlands. In support of the phonological evidence for western or “coastal” origin, he adduces the phonological shape of the diminutive suffix and such western dialect words as aker “acorn” [171], hiel “heel” [149], and wiel “wheel” [150], of which the last two are also current in Standard Netherlandish. Morphological features of Afrikaans are referred to only in passing.

7.32 Simplification of the Consonant

When we look at Afrikaans as a colonial language we find that it differs rather strikingly from such other transplanted languages as American English and American Spanish. The latter preserve not only the vocabulary and the essential features of the phonemic system of their European source language, but also the morphological system, whereas the phonological and the morphological systems of Afrikaans suffer rather radical changes, as briefly outlined below.

The basic vocabulary of Afrikaans is predominantly Dutch. There are, of course, new coinages and semantic extensions of old words to unfamiliar things, and some words are imported from contact languages (Hottentot, Portuguese, etc.).

The vowel system is little changed, but the lexical incidence of phonemes shared with Standard Dutch often deviates owing to existing differences in the imported Dutch dialects or to unsettled usage in earlier Standard Dutch. These are the phonological features used by Kloeke [1950] in tracing features of Afrikaans to the provinces of South and North Holland.

There are two notable changes in the system of consonants and in phonotactics.

(1) The voiced fricatives /v, z, gV, contrasting in Standard Dutch with voiceless /f, s, x /, as initially in vin “fin” ≠ fijn “fine,” zuiver “neat” ≠ suizen “whistle” and medially in razen “rave” ≠ wassen “grow,” hagel “hail ≠ lachen “laugh,” are merged with /f, s, x /. This simplification apparently came about in contact with languages that lack this contrast, probably facilitated by the fact that Dutch lacks this contrast in final position (where only /f, s, x / occur) and in most of the consonant clusters.

(2) In all final consonant clusters consisting of an obstruent and /t /, the /t / is lost, as in hoof (SDu. hoofd) “head,” we s (SDu. west) “west,” lig (SDu. licht) “light,” naak (SDu. naakt) “naked.”

7.33 Simplification of the Verb

As a result of the phonological simplification of such final clusters ending in /t /, the inflectional /-t / of the third person singular present and of the preterit and past participle of weak verbs was lost in many cases. With the loss of final unstressed / 9 / and / an / in other verb forms, the verb became largely uninflected. A few examples culled from texts in T. H. le Roux, Afrikaanse Taalstudies [1945: 150-54], will serve to illustrate this revolutionary simplifi־ cation of the verb forms in Afrikaans.

The uninflected (“unmarked”) verb form is used aiter any subject, nominal or pronominal, singular or plural. It is not a tense form. With few exceptions, its source is the base morpheme of the Dutch present tense and/or infinitive, as shown in the following examples: bied (< SDu. bieden) “offer,” haal (< halen) “fetch,” hef (< heffen) “heave, raise,” loop (< lopen) “run,” styg (< stijgen) “climb,” sweef (< zweven) “hover,” vaar (< varen) “fare, ride,” gaan (< gaan) “go,” sien (< zien) “see.”

The phrase consisting of uninflected het “have” and the past participle of the verb (with prefix ge״, unless the verb has an unstressed prefix, such as ver״) refers to the past. Examples: het gedra “wore, has worn,” het geval “fell,” het gewoon “dwelled, resided,” het geglo “believed,” het gebring “brought,” het gedink “thought,” het verbind “bound (them)together,” het vertel “told.” It should be emphasized that the base morpheme of the past participle is identical with the unmarked verb.

Verb phrases containing the infinitive are kan wees “can be,” sal maak “shall make,” wil skryf “will write,” te loop “to run.”

The passive phrase consists of is or word and the past participle: is los gesny “is ~ was cut away,” word los gelaat “is ~ was let go.”

The loss of contrastive voiced fricatives and of final /t / after obstruents must surely be attributed to contacts with speakers of other languages, since there is no parallel in the dialects of the Netherlands. That the elimination of ablaut variation in the strong verb, presumably following the loss of inflectional / -t /, resulted from the same sociocultural situation in the Cape Colony can hardly be doubted.

It is reasonable to assume that this phonologically and morphologically simplified colloquial Dutch came into being in Capetown at an early date as a medium of communication between speakers of a variety of Dutch dialects and speakers of other languages including Low German, Scandinavian, Portuguese, and—last but not least— Hottentot, the language of the indigenous population with whom some of the early settlers intermarried and who furnished most of the domestic servants. The need for such a medium, the basis of modern Afrikaans, persisted, since Dutch settlers continued to be in the minority, what with the later influx of Bantus, Hindus, and East Indians.

With the trek of the Boers (1830- ) into the high plains of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal to escape British domination, this creolized colloquial Dutch spread throughout the present domain of the South African Republic and became one of the official languages of the Union of South Africa in 1910.

7.4 Gullah

7.41 Introduction

Gullah, also called Geechee, is a Creole language spoken by Negroes along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. It is based on English but exhibits marked morphological and phonological features derived from languages spoken along the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. This language has been investigated by Lorenzo D. Turner, a Negro scholar, who succeeded in gaining the confidence of a people highly distrustful of all outsiders. In many months of fieldwork he recorded their usage by means of a modified version of the worksheets of the Linguistic Atlas of the Eastern United States and recorded their spontaneous emotional speech on phonograph records. Some of his findings are presented in his book on Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect [1949], on which the following discussion is based.

The vocabulary of Gullah is predominantly English. The spontaneous monologs of eight speakers in six different places, transcribed by Turner [260-89] from his phonograph records, contain hardly half a dozen items of African origin in a corpus of about 1,300 words.

The fact that Turner [190–204] discovered some 200 words of African origin, freely used by speakers of Gullah among themselves, is not in conflict with this observation. These Africanisms include terms for the fauna of their American environment, for foodstuffs, for utensils, for religious practices and beliefs, for members of the family, and for parts of the body of man and animal. In addition there are emotionally tinged adjectives and verbs, and the numerals from 1 to 19. It is highly significant that about a dozen of these African words acquired currency outside the present Gullah area, chiefly in the Lower South: buckra “white man,” cooter “box turtle,” goober “peanut,” gumbo “okra,” hoodoo ~ voodoo, chigger, juke (-joint, -box), okra, pinder “peanut,” shout “religious ring dance,” yam “sweet potato.”

The structure of the subject phrase, the predicate phrase, and the sentence is essentially English:

/ dat ol man gwain kAs am, yu no /

“That old man is going to curse them, you know.”

/ dεm pipl wat go dε hafə tə bai ɒl dεm tig /

“The people that go there have to buy all these things.”

The only recurring syntactic feature that deviates from English is the equational sentence without the copula:

/ai satisfai / “I’m satisfied”

/de se wi tu ol / “They say we are too old.”

7.42 Morphological Simplification

On the other hand, the head of the subject phrase (the noun) and the head of the predicate phrase (the verb) are predominantly uninfleeted. This usage is clearly carried over from West African languages, which lack the categories of number and case in the noun and of number, person, and tense in the verb.

A few examples will illustrate this striking “African” feature of Gullah. (1) Nouns: /tu kret / “two crates,” /ɒl dεm tiη / “all these things,” / in gɒd han / “in God’s hand,” /dI mɒsə həus / “the master’s house.” (2) Verbs: /i gi mi grits / “She gave me grits.” /gɒd sew mi / “God saved me.” /di rustə də kro / “The rooster was crowing.” /ai ha fa wpk on mai han / “I had to walk on my hands.”

Inflected noun and verb forms appear only sporadically. They are outnumbered by uninflected forms about six to one in Turner’s texts.

7.43 Simplification of the Phonemic System

The phonemic system of Gullah shows some clear influence of the African substratum, especially in the vowels.

Most English consonants have fairly close counterparts in West African languages, but the fricatives / θ, ð / and contrastive /v ≠ w / are lacking. Hence /θ, ð / are replaced by /t, d / so that thin, then are homophonous with tin, den, respectively. The fricatives /v / and / w / are merged either in a bilabial fricative or in / w /, so that vest and west sound alike. These adaptations result in the loss of three consonants. There are also some purely phonic changes, as the replacement of the assibilated plosives of chin and gin by plain palatals.

For the English high and mid vowels, both front and back, some of the African languages spoken along the Gulf of Guinea have fairly close counterparts, but none of them seems to have more than one low vowel. In this phonic range, the four vowels of English are reduced to two in Gullah: (1) front / æ / and central / ɑ / are merged in a low front /a /, so that hat and heart are homophonous, i.e. / hat /; (2) low back/ ɒ/ and raised low back / ɔ / are merged, so that cot and caught sound alike, i.e. / kɒt /.

None of the African languages spoken along the Gulf of Guinea seems to have any mid central vowels, whereas English has two, as in hut / hΛt / and hurt / h3t /. These are merged in Gullah, so that hut and hurt are homophonous, i.e. /hΛt /.

These adaptations result in the loss of three English vowel phonemes in Gullah and the addition of one vowel to the African system.

The background of this simplification of low and central vowels appears with clarity from the vowel system of African languages spoken along the Gulf of Guinea [Westermann and Ward 1933: Ewe 158, Yoruba 166, Fante 172, Bambara and Malinke 181], the home of many, perhaps the majority of the slaves.

7.44 Sociocultural Background

Gullah came into use on the plantations of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, an area extending some 250 miles from the tidal inlet of the Peedee River (Georgetown) in South Carolina to the inlet of the Altamaha in Georgia. This lowland area, including the so-called Sea Islands (St. James, South Carolina, to St. Simon, Georgia), was admirably suited for the cultivation of rice, since the many rivers flowing into the Atlantic provided the fresh water for periodically flooding the rice fields. On the other hand, the cultivation of rice as a colonial cash crop demanded a large investment of capital in readying the land and a considerable labor force for tending the crop. The answer was the plantation system, which dominated the economy of coastal South Carolina from the very beginning.

The labor force was imported from Africa through the agency of the Royal African Company, “which had the charter for all the trade in slaves on the African Coast” [Petty 1943: 19]. By 1720, Negro slaves outnumbered the white population in the Charleston area as a whole, though not in the city itself [Petty: 25]. When the first federal census was taken (1790), Negro slaves greatly outnumbered the whites on the rice plantations of South Carolina [Petty: 69].

The social organization of the rice plantation, as also that of the indigo plantation, was such that a special medium of communication was imperative for the conduct of the day-by-day operations. The white master and his family, the overseer, and perhaps some white craftsmen, lived apart from the Negro field hands, who had their own “quarters.” And yet, the master or overseer had to direct the work of the Negroes. On the other hand, the slaves spoke mutually unintelligible African languages and were in need of a language to communicate among themselves, both at work and in their quarters. Under these circumstances the simplified pidgin English developed in the slave trade was adopted on the plantations.

Among Negroes it has been handed down by word of mouth to this day, especially on the Sea Islands along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia.