Geechees
Gullah
- Global speakers: 250,000
- Glottocode: gull1241
- ISO 639-3: gul
Gullah, a creole language with roots in English and various West and Central African languages, is spoken by Gullah-Geechee people predominately along the Southeast coast of the US, specifically the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. Many probably began arriving in New York with the Great Migration of African-Americans from those states in the first half of the 20th century, which also saw increasing displacement from the Sea Islands. In the late 1970s, CUNY linguist William A. Stewart documented the language with the help of New York's Gullah-speaking community, estimated to be 1000 strong at the time. Prof. Stewart found Gullah-Geechee people hesitant to call their native tongue a proper language, and one goal of his work was to counter this sense of shame, common to speakers of oral languages, by validating Gullah's status as a language. A significant community of Gullah speakers lived within the African-American community in Bed-Stuy at the time, with others in Harlem.
Sites
NYC neighborhoods or towns in the metro region where the language community has a significant site, marked by a point on the map: