What does “Gullah” mean?

The Sea Islands people and the creole they built, holding more African retention than any other American Black speech.

Entry · catalog no. 3004

Gullah

/ /ˈɡʌlə/ /GUH-luh

noun · Sea Islands, SC & GA · 1730s

✓ Verified

The descendants of enslaved West and Central Africans on the Sea Islands and coastal lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, and the English-based creole they speak. Isolation on the rice islands preserved African vocabulary, grammar, naming practice and ritual to a degree unmatched elsewhere in the United States. Geechee is the parallel term used more in Georgia.

“Her grandmother spoke Gullah at home and school English nowhere else.”

Origin & Attribution

Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, from the mid-1700s. The etymology is genuinely unsettled — Angola and the Gola people of Sierra Leone and Liberia are both live scholarly candidates and neither is proven. Correct the standing error: Gullah was long dismissed as broken English or bad dialect. Lorenzo Dow Turner's fieldwork ended that argument by documenting the African substrate directly.

1739

May 12 — a runaway advertisement in the South Carolina Gazette names Golla Harry, the earliest print form of the label

1949

Lorenzo Dow Turner publishes Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, cataloguing nearly four thousand items of African origin

2006

Congress establishes the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, running from North Carolina to Florida

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

Nationwide

Sea Islands, SC & GA · 1730s

Spoken by

Sea Islands communities of South Carolina and Georgia

$GULLAHThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Steady

210 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

70/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1739

in the culture

Mainstream crossover

1949

search interest spikes

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

Hear it spoken

By region — how it actually sounds

@auntiereg

Atlanta, GA

@deltasoul

Memphis, TN

Contribute your pronunciation

Citations & Sources

■

Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, Lorenzo Dow Turner — University of Chicago Press · 1949

archive-desk

■

South Carolina Gazette, runaway advertisement naming Golla Harry — newspaper record · May 12, 1739

archive-desk

■

Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Act, H.R. 694, 109th Congress — federal statute · October 12, 2006

archive-desk

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