Harvard students will now be able to learn Gullah, the Charleston City Paper reports.
Gullah, a language that blends Central and West African vocabulary and syntax with English, was developed by slaves living in Georgia and South Carolina, in a region known as the Lowcountry.
The hybrid language allowed slaves from various African locales to communicate with one another, and eventually also with the few whites who oversaw their unpaid labor.
It has survived in the Lowcountry region for centuries, and is still spoken by people like Sunn m’Cheaux, who will teach the Harvard course.
m’Cheaux told the City Paper that he got the job in a serendipitous fashion.
An artist, activist and entertainer, m’Cheaux didn’t go to college, but is friends with many academics. One of these friends, a graduate student at Harvard’s African Language Program, called him up to ask if m’Cheaux would be willing to sit down with the program’s head, Doctor John Mugane.
m’Cheaux agreed to the meeting, and spent time telling Mugane about Gullah. Mugane asked a lot of questions about the language, and before m’Cheaux knew it, he was giving the professor an impromptu Gullah lesson.
After picking up some Gullah basics, Mugane said that he was impressed by m’Cheaux’s teaching skills.
“He starts talking about getting my information and taking a picture for the website, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Wait a minute … did I just get hired?’” m’Cheaux said.
He did get hired, because Mugane feels that Gullah is an important language that needs to be both passed on and studied with academic rigor.
“To engage in intellectual and professional work in the Gullah community, we deem it necessary — even critical — that scholars be literate in Gullah,” Mugane said.
m’Cheaux believes sharing his knowledge of the language “is an extension” of his “social activism and commentary,” and hopes his students will learn “how to use literal and figurative language to communicate with people and teach people how to make it their own.”
One difficulty m’Cheaux expects to struggle with is the fact that Gullah is an oral, not a written language. Although there are written works that have been published in Gullah, such as a Gullah Bible, there are no established standards for spelling or even grammar.
Because of this, m’Cheaux says that Gullah is a language that requires abstract thought on the part of its speakers. He says the language is full of “figurative terms, not necessarily literal terms.”
An example of this is the Gullah words for infant and toddler, “han’ baby” and “knee baby,” respectively.
Although a little hand baby sounds terrifying, once you look at the term poetically, m’Cheaux says, “It makes total sense.” A hand baby is one you can hold in your hand; a knee baby is heavy enough that you need a knee or shoulder to help you support it.
m’Cheaux is excited to share his knowledge with Harvard’s students. And if you aren’t luckily enough to be among their number but still want to learn a little Gullah from m’Cheaux, you’re in luck — he’s recorded a short lesson as an ad for his class, which you can watch below:
