The status of Gullah and Bahamian Creole English (BahCE) within the Atlantic English creoles and their historical relationship with African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have long been a matter of discussion. It was assumed that Gullah and BahCE are ‘sister’ varieties sharing an immediate ancestor in the eighteenth-century creole English spoken on plantations in the American South. We present historical and linguistic data, including a statistical analysis of 253 phonological, lexical, and grammatical features found in eight Atlantic English creoles, to show that Gullah and BahCE are indeed closely related — so closely in fact that BahCE must be considered a ‘diaspora variety’ not of AAVE but of Gullah.
Deuber, Dagmar, Stephanie Hackert, Eva Canan Hänsel, Alexander Laube, Mahyar Hejrani & Catherine Laliberté
2022. The Norm Orientation of English in the Caribbean. American Speech 97:3 ► pp. 265 ff.
Hackert, Stephanie
2008. Counting and coding the past: Circumscribing the variable context in quantitative analyses of past inflection. Language Variation and Change 20:1 ► pp. 127 ff.
Hackert, Stephanie
2015. Pseudotitles in Bahamian English. Journal of English Linguistics 43:2 ► pp. 143 ff.
2009. Southern Bahamian: Transported African American Vernacular English or Transported Gullah?. The International Journal of Bahamian Studies 15 ► pp. 12 ff.
2022. Recent Grammatical Change in Postcolonial Englishes: A Real-time Study of Genitive Variation in Caribbean and Indian News Writing. Journal of English Linguistics 50:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Laube, Alexander
2023. Variation in the imperfective in Bahamian English. World Englishes 42:1 ► pp. 27 ff.
2010. Corpus Linguistic Studies of Standard Bahamian English: A Comparative Study of Newspaper Usage. The International Journal of Bahamian Studies 16 ► pp. 51 ff.
Roberge, Paul T.
2020. Germanic Contact Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics, ► pp. 833 ff.
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