‘We had lighter tongues’: Making and mediating Gullah/Geechee personhood in the South Carolina Lowcountry

Smalls, Krystal A.

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2011.05.009

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…For each publication, we analyzed nine research questions that were formulated in terms of our research objectives: (1) In which year was the publication published? (2) What is the format of the publication? (3) What is the name of the journal?…”

Section: Data Collection and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Gullah cultural heritage is described as both tangible and intangible, including topics such as fishing culture (e.g., [22]), basket-making traditions (e.g., [5,23]), folk telling (e.g., [24][25][26]), conflict resolution (e.g., [25]), the marketplace (e.g., [27]), and cultural aspects of pregnancy (e.g., [28]). Language studies mainly focused on Gullah language distinctiveness, tracing the roots of this rich language and the current threats to its survival (e.g., [2,[29][30][31]). Most of the social science publications employed a qualitative research method (n = 59, 89%), while few used mixed (n = 5, 8%) or quantitative methods (n = 2, 3%).…”

Section: General Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Gullah Geechee community continued to inhabit and farm these coastal plains and Sea Islands after slavery was abolished by the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865 [1]. Until the 1950s, when bridges were built to connect the Sea Islands to the mainland, the islands were more difficult to access, which resulted in the development of a language, identity, and way of life that was unique to the Gullah community [2]. It is estimated that fewer than 500,000 people speak the Gullah language today [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2020

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The Gullah Geechee community of the south-eastern United States endures today as a minority group with a significant cultural heritage. However, little research has been conducted to explore this community's resilience in the face of climate change and other environmental impacts. The database Web of Science was searched and 109 publications on the Gullah Geechee community were identified. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we analyzed the publications to identify patterns and primary research themes related to the Gullah Geechee community's resilience. Findings revealed that Gullah Geechee's cultural heritage is vulnerable to climatic and societal changes, but can also be a source for enhancing community resilience and promoting more sustainable community-led heritage and tourism developments. A framework is proposed for building community resilience in the context of minority and/or marginalized communities (e.g., Gullah Geechee). This study highlights the urgent need to not only better understand and incorporate a community's economic dimensions and losses in various decision-and policy-making processes but also their cultural and social dimensions and losses. This systematic analysis can help inform both heritage preservation and community-led tourism practices and policies related to the Gullah Geechee community, as well as help direct new research efforts focusing on minority and/or marginalized community resilience.

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Section: Data Collection and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: General Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2020

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“…The finding that contradictory forces can occur together and proceed through dialectical relation in language revitalization more broadly is echoed in McEwan‐Fujita's (2011) analysis of denigrating versus redemptive discourses about Gaelic in Scotland from the 18th to 20th centuries. Likewise, Smalls (2012) looks at how two competing institutional ideologies of Gullah language in the Carolinas have historically phased into multiple tracks for the revitalization of Gullah selfhood.…”

Section: Indigeneity and The Artifactualization Of Vanishing Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology: A Centenary Review of 2011

Ball

2012

American Anthropologist

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I review scholarship in linguistic anthropology produced in 2011 with attention to the continuing influence of Franz Boas' program for the anthropology of language laid out in his 1911 "Introduction" to the Handbook of American Indian Languages. Although the aims of linguistics and cultural anthropology have changed, many of the tenets of the Boas plan remain central to the subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology. The scope of linguistic anthropological inquiry today includes more than language as denotational code, covering practices of signification and communication in their social and cultural contexts. This expansion has brought new perspectives to the questions pursued by Boas and his students, and this review considers the current place of topics such as indigenouslanguage change, language and race, linguistic relativity, and secondary rationalization alongside approaches to performativity, intertextuality, circulation, and semiotic mediation with an eye to the Americanist legacy of the subdiscipline. [Franz Boas, intertextuality, relativity, ritual performativity, race].

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“…This is only further complicated by Gullah Geechee's relationship to covert and overt prestige, where the language has been historically marginalized by outsiders and acts as symbol of resilient identity for its community (Cooper 2017), but also diachronically fractally recursive within the community as an 'inferior' way of speaking in terms of social mobility and opportunity (Mufwene 1993). Contemporary attitudes towards the language from both within and outside the community have pointed towards a cultural and linguistic 'renaissance', where the language is appreciated in more visible intercommunity contexts and as an emblem of authenticated community belonging (Hamilton 2012;Smalls 2012); however, the language is still constricted in many ways by hegemonic and raciolinguistic (Rosa and Flores 2017) norms of 'appropriateness', where its value is curated by outsider perceptions of what it 'should' sound like, how, when, and where it 'should' be used.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

What Mr. Simmons said: Stylization, pitch, and the voicing of others on the Gullah Geechee cultural heritage tour

McCullough

2023

Preprint

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This article discusses the use of stylized voicing, specifically falsetto phonation, in Gullah Geechee during a cultural heritage tour in Charleston, South Carolina. Gullah Geechee, a minority creole language spoken by descendants of formerly enslaved persons in the American Southeastern coastal Lowcountry, is analyzed in the study using participant observation and sociophonetic data collection. The research finds that the stylized pitch-shifting is a productive component of the guide’s ethnolinguistic repertoire, used for multiple indexical functions, including constructing authenticity and performing stylized double-voicing. The data shows the complex social meaning of this feature related to speech genres, performance, perceptions of authenticity and authority, and the ethnolinguistic repertoire of a minority language commodified for outsider consumption. The study also links Gullah Geechee prosodic indexicality with its related variety, African American English.

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‘We had lighter tongues’: Making and mediating Gullah/Geechee personhood in the South Carolina Lowcountry

Cited by 7 publications

References 42 publications

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

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

Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology: A Centenary Review of 2011

What Mr. Simmons said: Stylization, pitch, and the voicing of others on the Gullah Geechee cultural heritage tour

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