![]() He also found Gullahs living in remote seaside settlements who could recite songs and story fragments and do simple counting in the Mende, Vai, and Fulani languages of West Africa. Turner identified over 300 loanwords from various languages of Africa in Gullah and almost 4,000 African personal names used by Gullah people. Turner found that Gullah is strongly influenced by African languages in its phonology, vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and semantics. In the 1930s and 1940s, the linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner did a seminal study of the language based on field research in rural communities in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Songs and fragments of stories were traced to the Mende and Vai people, and simple counting in the Guinea/Sierra Leone dialect of the Fula people was also observed. Linguists observe that 25% of the Gullah language's vocabulary originated from Sierra Leone. The Gullahs’ English-based creole language is strikingly similar to Sierra Leone Krio of West Africa and contains such identical expressions as bigyai (" greedy"), pantap ("on top of"), ohltu ("both"), tif (" steal"), yeys (" ear"), and swit ("delicious"). Some of the African loanwords include: cootuh (" turtle"), oonuh ("you "), nyam ("eat"), buckruh ("white man"), pojo (" heron"), swonguh ("proud") and benne (" sesame"). The vocabulary of Gullah comes primarily from English, but there are numerous Africanisms that exist in their language for which scholars have yet to produce detailed etymologies. ![]() The Gullah people have several words of Niger-Congo and Bantu origin in their language that have survived to the present day, despite over four hundred years of slavery when African Americans were forced to speak English. This theory of Gullah's origins and development follows the monogenetic theory of creole development and the domestic origin hypothesis of English-based creoles. It seems to have been prevalent in British coastal slave trading centers such as James Island, Bunce Island, Elmina Castle, Cape Coast Castle and Anomabu. Guinea Coast Creole English was one of many languages spoken along the West African coast in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries as a language of trade between Europeans and Africans and among multilingual Africans.
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