~Gullah: Sea Island Creole~



	Gullah: Sea Island Creole

				Nouns Verbs Pronouns Tense Word Order Gender Glossary Speaking Gullah

			WORD ORDER

Home Content Factsheet Development of Gullah Learning Gullah Black English Sea Island Culture Photos Reference		Reference has been made to the fact that the sentences of Gullah has many characteristics that are not found in the English sentence. These often result in a word order that appears strange to one hearing Gullah for the first time. For example, in Gullah, as already noted, a verb frequently takes the place of an English conjunction, participle, preposition, or adverb with the result that two or more verbs may fall together in a sentence without any other word or words interventing. Moreover, the common practice of the Gullahs of using a group of words as the equivalent in cultivated English of a noun, a verb, and adverb, or some other part of speech may result in quite a different word order from that of the English sentence. Likewise, their frequent failure to use articles and, in certain constructions, prepositions, pronouns, or other parts of speech that would be required in English constributes greatly to the strangeness of the word order of their sentences. When the Gullah speaker places the adjective immediately after the noun, it is not always the verbal adjective that he is using; it is sometimes the attributive adjective: e.g. rol roun 'roll round', i.e. 'round roll, biscuit'; de klin brod 'day clean broad', i.e. 'broad daylight': proimas wod 'primary ward', i.e. 'ward primary', etc. In Gullah the pronoun and noun used in the predicate frequently are place immediately after the subject without the verb to be: hu hi? 'Who is he?'; hu dat? 'Who is that?'; wot it? 'What is it?', etc. Among the Gullahs also the practice of opening a sentence with its subject or object and of repeating this subject or object by the use of a personal pronoun is so common as to warrant mention here, though such word order is frequently used for emphasis by speakers of cultivated English. Finally, in interrogative sentences the Gullah speaker usually places the subject before the verb just as he does in declarative sentences, and in both questions and statements he regularly omits the auxiliary do. In many instances the question can be distinguished from the statement by the intonation, but not always. In cultivated English when questions requiring yes or no for an answer involve the element of surprise, the word order is usually that of the declarative sentence, and there is a rising tone on the last stressed syllable: e.g. you are ill? The same word order and intonation are used in English when one does not understand a statement and asks for a repetition of it: e.g. Did you say you were ill? In Gullah, however, a question requiring yes or no for an answer usually has the word order of the declarative sentence whether or not the element of surprise is present, and the tone on the last stressed syllable is not always a rising one. It is frequently a level or even falling tone.

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