The earliest Gullah/aave texts

Abstract

comments and the full text of the stories). 2 The Story-Teller was evidently a genuine "man of words" (Abrahams, 1983), a true raconteur who could artistically embellish a simple traditional account (perhaps further embellished by the transcriber) in a variety of ways. That he commanded a certain range of Gullah is evident from particular signature features in the texts, but the absence of other typical Gullah features and 1 I am grateful to Hyeson Park for assistance in the initial research for this paper. I especially wish to thank Minjoo Kim for examining the Scudder papers in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. I should like to thank Michael Montgomery and one anonymous reviewer for reading the first draft and making helpful comments. A second anonymous reviewer also read the first and revised drafts.2 Five additional tales were published the following year in the magazine (Vol. 3, March, 1869: 116-118), with no further editorial comment, and a final story attributed to a different speaker the next year (Vol. IV, April, 1870: 163). These will not be discussed here, but will form the subject of another paper. No further information is given about the speaker from whom the stories were elicited, nor is the identity of the transcriber actually revealed, but it seems most likely to have been Horace Scudder, as editor of the magazine, since the stories are not credited to any other source; however, no corroborating evidence was found in the Scudder papers. It would be difficult to imagine, as suggested by the second anonymous reviewer, that the stories could have been literary inventions by Scudder. All are well-attested in later independent versions, and there were no previously published versions to serve as sources.

Assessing the Authenticity of Joel Chandler Harris's Use of Gullah

“…conclusion Despite harris's limited firsthand familiarity with Gullah, the evidence is overwhelming that phonologically, grammatically, and lexically, he made a significant and pioneering effort to capture genuine Gullah usage in the text analyzed here, as comparisons with the modern work of Turner, Mufwene, hancock, Rickford, holm, Weldon, and others, the literary texts of Jones and Gonzales, and the earlier folktale texts analyzed in Troike(2003), consistently demonstrate. While there is some variation within the speech represented in this tale, it unsurprisingly does not approximate the distribution in actual speech documented in Turner's texts or by more recent researchers such as Weldon.…”

Minority Community Resilience and Cultural Heritage Preservation: A Case Study of the Gullah Geechee Community

“…In addition to traditional qualitative and quantitative research methods, some studies used more innovative approaches to study the Gullah community. These approaches included using the Afro-centric technique of implementing community justice instead of state-promoted justice strategies in communities of color in the United States [25]; ethnography for studying social and behavioral changes of Gullah community over time, e.g., sense of belonging [37], dynamic linguistic behavior [38], designing culturally sensitive interventions [39], incorporating migration, acculturation, and geographical isolation to explore patterns of cultural preservation [40], collaboration with the community advisory board to guide research design [39], and applying differential gene analysis to better understand health diseases [41].…”