Preservation of Minority Languages in English Speaking Areasby Muhammed Abdullah al-Ahari (1995)

In this brief paper I will detail some methods used to preserve the Creole Gullah, Scots English, and the Gaelic languages Cornish, Manx, Irish Gaelic, and Welsh.

Gullah and Geeche CreolesGullah (called Geechee on the mainland of South Carolina and south of the Savannah

River) is a dialect of English spoken mainly by the descendants of slaves living on the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Along the southeastern coast of the United States there is a narrow strip of land which is known to linguists and dialect geographers as the Gullah Area. This region, which includes the Sea Islands along the coast, extends roughly from Jacksonville, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, and inland for about one hundred miles. Living in this area are African-American people who are descendants of the tribesmen brought to the New World during the time of the Slave Trade. These people still speak variations of the original Creole language known as Gullah.

According to Geraty (1991), this language has mostly English derived vocabulary but a West African syntax, morphology, orthography, and grammar. This dialect was once spoken by at least 150,000 individuals, but after the freeing of slaves and public education being made available, Gullah became a slowly dying language. However, linguists such as Turner (1947), Gonzales (1922), and Geraty (1991, 1997) the language has been recorded in written form and on audio tapes.

Today, mainly due to mainland education of Gullah children, bridges, and television the speakers of Gullah tend to be elderly. Some individuals have tried to preserve Gullah as a culture and a viable language in spite of this. In Beaufort, South Carolina a Ourstory and Heritage Conference has been held every year since 1986, the Bible has been translated into Gullah, recipe and children’s books, poetry, and linguistic papers have all been written on Gullah. Problems still remain that keep this movement from spreading the language: Gullah is presently only taught in adult education classes at the College of Charleston and by correspondence at the University of Minnesota, no textbooks are available to teach it in elementary schools, and until recently the Gullahs were separated from other English derived Creole speakers (such as those in Guyana, Sierra Leone, the Virgin Islands, Barbados, Jamaica, and Liberia). These contacts are now being made and perhaps the Gullahs will eventually develop language programs and schools so that their language can be promulgated.

For years Gullah was seen as a baby talk language and inferior to English. It has only recently become a written language and the system for spelling is still pretty much an individual expression of the writer. Geraty (1991) used a system similar to the one used by Joel Chandler Harris in recording his Briar Rabbit and Tar Baby stories. This system has the defect of making the only differences between Gullah and so-called standard English seem to be word order and pronunciation. This is far from the truth. Gullah uses word differently than English. A simple example can be seen in the phrase: “E is done fa phat.” [She is fat.] Here we see fa being used to mean going to or in a condition of. In English “for” is rarely used this way. Such grammatical items are lost in the system Geraty chose to write her Gullah in.

Geraty (1997) tells us that, “Gullah is not poor, or broken English, nor is it a dialect of any other language, or Black English. Gullah possesses every element necessary for it to qualify

as a language in its own right. It has its own grammar, phonological systems, idiomatic expressions, and an extensive vocabulary. Since this language was never intended to be written, there are no hard and fast rules governing its orthography. However, Ambrose Elliot Gonzales during the 1920s wrote the Black Border series, and at the time established a synchronic orthography which represents the sounds of spoken Gullah as perfectly as they can be written. No scholar has been able to improve on Ambrose Gonzales’ written representation of the rich, soft sounds that fall so easily from the Gullah tongue.”

These descriptions of Gullah are apt, but by Geraty relying only on Gonzales and his Black Border stories, she forgets the underlying African structure of Gullah. This is shown in Turner (1947) and in the recent collections of essays Africanisms in American Culture (1991). There we see a Guyanan (Von Sertima) travel to the Sea Islands and to Sierra Leone and hear the same language spoken in both places (Krio in Sierra Leone). Gullah seems like it is surviving more as a tourist and linguistic curiosity that as a viable language. Perhaps the Gullah can take cues from the Gaelic speakers in Manx, Cornwall, and Scotland. In all three places their languages had practically died but were revived through the hard work of linguists, poets, and folklorists.

The Preservation of Gaelic LanguagesYoung (1995) informs us that, Gaelic is a language branch of the Indo-European Family

and is very distinct from the Germanic branch that English came from. Some Gaelic branches have died such as Lowland Scots Gaelic and Galician. Galician has become a Romance language and Scots Lowland has become a distinct dialect of English. Scots English is spoken almost everywhere in Scotland and is a second language to around 80,000 Gaelic speaking Scots in the Scottish Highlands and coastal islands. Since 1878, Scots English was proscribed in Scottish schools in favor of British English. However, in the 1950s a movement to teach Scots English revived it. Gaelic Scots is slowly dying and teachers have a hard time to find work. According to MacKinnon (1977) only three schools in Scotland have programs to teach Gaelic Scots to future teachers. According to the web pages on the WWW, the situation hasn’t improved much since then. Scots Gaelic is spoken by less than 2% of Scots and the overall number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland is declining even when it is taught in school.

The Isle of Manx is a Crown Dependency and until the mid-18th century, Manx was the main language of the island. British English quickly replaced it as the favored language. In fact, 18th century lexiconists of Manx wrote apologies at the beginning of their dictionaries to excuse themselves from collecting the vocabularies of a dying, worthless language. In 1899 the trend began to the reversed with the formation of the Yn Cheshaght Ghailchagh [The Manx Gaelic Society] and the published dictionaries, readers, and a newspaper in Manx. Collection of audio recordings of Manx speakers was also undertaken. In 1974 when the last native speaker of Manx died, the language did not die with him as a result. From the Manx Home Page (1997) we find that over 2000 speakers of Manx now exist and that legislation has recently been passed to force it to be taught in elementary school. Perhaps in the future it will be taught in a Manx language university if the plans of Manx nationalists work.

Cornish had an every more disastrous fall. Its last native speaker died in 1891 (long before the invention of the tape recorder). Linguists came to its rescue also and today around 2000 persons can read, write, and understand some degree of Cornish. Of these perhaps 200 are truly fluent according to the Cornish in Australia Home Page. Modern Cornish is a resultant of the three dialects of Cornish being blended into a common dialect. Part of Cornish success is a

result of adult education classes. In Australia almost thirty-five individuals have learned enough Cornish to read a third grade reader and three or four can communicate at a higher level. In 1996 a Cornish Dictionary was published and legislation to teach Cornish in elementary schools in Cornwall was passed. At present Cornwall has no university but Cornish is taught at the University of Exeter. Sometime early in the next century a university will be established at Trereife near Penzance, Cornwall to teach University level course-work in the Cornish Language.

Future Prospects of Minority Languages in English Speaking AreasCan Gullah, Cornish, Scots Gaelic and Manx survive into the next century? The answer

is certainly they can. What we need to ask is what can be done to insure that they grow and become viable languages and dialects instead of dying ones. From the above, it appears that newspapers, radio programs, readers, and adult language classes all help to preserve some level of fluency but the programs that worked the best were those that started all the elementary school level and continued throughout the lifetime of the student. It is unlikely that Gullah speakers will establish a Gullah University but radio programs and children’s books are currently being done and Gullah is dying less slowly because of them. Scots English appears to be viable but the Scots can not stop the work they have done if they wish their dialect to survive. The Gullah can perhaps take a cue from them. Don’t give-up; a losing battle is better than no battle at all.

Bibliography:Cornish in Australia Home Page (1995).Geraty, Virginia Mixson (1992). Bittle en’ T’ing’: Gullah Cooking with Maum Chrish’.

Orangeburg, S.C.: Sandlapper Pub., Inc. Geraty, Virginia Mixson (1997). Maum Chrish’ Chaa’stun. [WWW Home Page].Gonzales, Ambrose E. (1922). The Black Border. Columbia, S.C.Holloway, Joseph E. (Ed.) (1991). Africanisms in American Culture. Bloomington, In:

Indiana UP.MacKinnon, Kenneth (1977). Language, Education, and Social Processes in a Gaelic

Community. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.MacKinnon, Kenneth (1988). A Century on the Census: Gaelic in 20th Century Focus.

The Manx Gaelic Society Home Page (1997).Mending Up the Rags: the Return of Manx Gaelic in the Isle of Man (1993) Planet: the

Welsh Internationalist, No. 101.Turner, Lorenzo D. (1947). Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. University of Chicago.Young, Clive. (1995). The Scots Haunbuik. [WWW. Home Page.]