I was just browsing around Wikipedia, and found articles about the Gullah (or Geechee) people of South Carolina and Georgia, and their languange. As I read through the articles about the language, I was struck by how similar it was to Bajan.

I mean, I knew about the Barbados/South Carolina connection and I have heard that the Gullah way of speech resembles the Barbados nation language, both in verbiage and accent, but I didn’t realise how close the two were. I’ve been reading a few stories and fables in Gullah and I could understand them perfectly. Listening to this “lesson in Gullah”, there were lots of expressions I recognised — “befo’ dayclean”, “put mout’ pon me”, “hice a tune”, and “study yuh head” (or in its more recent variation, “study it!”). (The accent, though, is to my ear more like a Bahamian accent than a Barbadian one.)

Many early scholars made the mistake of viewing the Gullah language as “broken English,” because they failed to recognize the strong underlying influence of African languages. But linguists today view Gullah, and other creoles, as full and complete languages with their own systematic grammatical structures.”

Bajan too was once widely decried as “bad” and “broken” English; that’s not so much the case now. Discussion among educators and academics these days seems to centre not so much on how to train children not to speak Bajan, but on how to make them “bilingual”, so to speak — fluent in both Bajan and (standard) English, and aware of when to switch codes. I’m far from informed enough to enter into any debate about whether Bajan is a language or just a dialect—someone once said that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”—but I think that the wider acceptance and respect of Bajan is a good thing (though I know folk who’d disagree). And having read a bit about Gullah, I am reminded that something as commonplace as the way we talk is, even without our conscious knowledge, powerfully denotive of our national African heritage.

1007 days ago