Creole Languages

Topic: Gullah History
“Come by Here” was collected in several places in 1926, sixty-one years after the end of the American Civil War.  More versions were collected in the early 1930s.  Many today, who try to imagine the inner lives of slaves, assume that all spirituals were created before 1860, and that ones like “Come by Here” somehow survived unchanged until Lynn Rohrbough published “Kum Ba Yah” in 1955.

It would be a mistake to dismiss such speculations as fanciful, for it is likely “Come by Here” retained elements of African and slave experiences, albeit not in an obvious form.  The question is how far back does one go to reconstruct the history of a song and its tradition.

Charles Joyner notes one problem with attempts to recover the slave past is that many individuals begin with assumptions about slave life, like the idea spirituals stopped with the Civil War, and look for evidence to support their hypotheses.  He wonders if it would not be better to study the facts and then draw one’s conclusions. [1]

This “look at all the facts” model risks expending effort on too many things before one determines which are the most important.  However, the validity of a reconstruction of the past is not judged by a cost-benefit analysis that values the solution that took the least effort and shortest time.

Thus, one must begin at the beginning and not stop with Emancipation. [2]  Then, and only then, can one suggest when a phenomenon, like a song, first emerged.

Of course, one’s rummaging through the past is delimited by known facts and a few assumptions.  The most important fact is that the seminal versions of “Come by Here,” which were learned from African Americans, were found along the southeastern coast of the United States.

A regional language developed along the coast that is called Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Georgia.  The first hypothesis drawn from the locations of early versions of “Come by Here,” then it that “Come by Here” is a Gullah song, and, in fact, the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals explicitly was collecting songs to preserve examples of the Gullah language when it published a version in 1931. [3]

Gullah is a creole language that has been extensively studied.  Theories about its origins are based on the diverse vocabulary collected by Lorenzo Dow Turner in the early 1930s, [4] and on African elements in its syntax and pronunciation.  Tracing its history is often a proxy for reconstructing the history of the slave culture that developed in the lowlands and on the sea islands.  Joyner goes so far as to argue “creolization has a special importance in the effort to comprehend the transformation of African culture into Afro-American culture.” [5]

Unfortunately, I have not found a definition of creole languages that is not colored by the author’s theories about their origin. [6]  However, from the various descriptions a few traits are recognized.

First, a creole language is a new combination of elements from two or more existing languages.  Thus, it is not necessarily a branch in a linguistic family tree.  From the view of logic, it is more like the union of two discrete sets, than a subset of one or the other.

Second, it arises at a point of cultural contact where individuals from different linguistic backgrounds must communicate.

Third, it is the primary or only language of the speakers.  Thus, it is not an occupational language spoken when individuals are in particular contexts.  The most common terms for these languages are “pidgin” and “trade.”

Fourth, it is a complete language, with its own grammar and vocabulary.

Fifth, a creole language is not static; it changes in the same ways culture change and for the same reasons.

End Notes
1.  Charles Joyner.  Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.  xvi–xvii.

2.  Or, as the King told the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, “begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” [11]  But then, the author, Lewis Carroll, was a mathematician interested in linear algebra and symbolic logic. [12]

3.  For more on the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, see the post for 6 January 2019.

4.  Lorenzo Dow Turner.  Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect.  Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002 edition.  Katherine Wylie Mille and Michael B. Montgomery.  “Introduction.”

5.  Joyner.  xxii.

6.  For instance, Wikipedia begins its discussion of “Creole language” by stating it is a “stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one [word 17] within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language.”  The first seventeen words are a definition, but the rest is hypothesis.  And those first words also contains an assumption about the process of creation, or worse a value judgement, in the word “simplifying.”

7.  Lewis Carroll.  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  London: Macmillan, 1866.  Chapter 12, “Alice’s Evidence.”

12.  “Lewis Carroll.”  Wikipedia website.  His real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.