GULLAH, the name of a tribe of negroes brought from the west coast of Africa to the slave States of Georgia and South Carolina in the early 18th century, and to the dialect spoken by them and by their lingual descendants to-day along the coast of these States and on the sea islands nearby. Whatever their origin, the Gullah negroes were a potent force on the coast plantations of South Carolina, where, isolated in large numbers in the rice and cotton fields, "they seized upon the peasant English used by some of the early settlers and the white servants of the wealthy colon ists, wrapped their clumsy tongues about it . . . and enriched with certain expressive African words it issued through their flat noses and thick lips in so workable a form that it . . . became in time the accepted negro speech of the lower districts of South Carolina and Georgia." The salient characteristics of "Gullah," which cannot be read without a glossary, are the use of "who" for "a" and "er"; of one gender for three as "e" for he, she, it; "um" for him, her, it and them; "Uh shum" for "I saw him," "I have seen them," and the total disregard of singular and plural numbers. Perhaps the truth of the statement that Gullah is the worst negro English in the United States can be exemplified best by the quota tion used by Mr. Bennett in the Literary Review for Dec. 9, 1922 : A negro in protesting to a white hunter against taking a new position on a deer run says, "No Shuh Shuh ! Ef 'e duh dey, de dee duh no dey-dey, of 'e no dey, de dee duh dey-dey" (No Sir, if you go there, the deer will not go there, if you don't go, the deer will).
For Gullah at its best in the quaint simile, wit, and philosophy of its users and for a glossary, see Ambrose E. Gonzales, The Black Border, Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast (Charleston, S.C., 1922) .