Join CLEAR (Contact Linguistics: Exploration, Analysis and Research) this Fall 2026 as we welcome speakers from across the country to explore language contact, cognition, and creole studies. Explore the schedule below for speaker names, university affiliations, presentation dates, and event details.
Simanique Moody (Brooklyn College, CUNY) will present research entitled: “Examining Language Variation and Change in Gullah Geechee Communities in Georgia”
Abstract:
Gullah Geechee is an endangered English-lexifier creole language that developed along the South Atlantic coast of the United States in the early to mid-18th century. While most linguistic and anthropological studies center on communities in South Carolina, Gullah Geechee language and culture also emerged in southeast North Carolina, coastal Georgia, and northeast Florida. Georgia, in particular, has a significant population of Gullah Geechee speakers, yet apart from Turner’s seminal study in 1949, scant formal linguistic research exists on varieties of Gullah Geechee spoken there (but see Klein 2015 for the Georgia Sea Islands).
As a result, little is known about the extent to which varieties of Gullah Geechee spoken in Georgia differ linguistically from varieties spoken in South Carolina, and even less is known about the possible changes these varieties are undergoing as a result of increased contact with English. Mufwene (1997/2007: 121) highlights the need “to determine whether Georgia Gullah should be considered an extension of South Carolina Gullah,” and Weldon and Moody (2015: 174) note that studies on less well-documented varieties of Gullah Geechee could help reveal “the degree to which linguistic uniformity exists across communities.” Weldon and Moody also underscore the importance of “assess[ing] the linguistic consequences of sustained contact between Gullah and other [African American Language] varieties” (p. 175).
In this talk, I will outline a proposal to examine variation and change in Gullah Geechee communities in Georgia with the goal of highlighting the important implications this research has for a) the development of Gullah Geechee outside of South Carolina, b) its relationship to dialects of American English, particularly African American English, and c) processes of decreolization and language shift in communities of African descent in the United States. I will also provide an update on the status of Georgia communities surveyed by Turner nearly a century ago in order to present a more accurate account of where Gullah Geechee communities in Georgia can be found.
Wesley Lincoln (University of Pennsylvania)
Rebecca Arkell (University of Göttingen)
Sandra Evans (The University of the West Indies)
Nele Arnold & Tonjes Veenstra (Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin)
Joeri Vinke (University of Graz)
Miguel Gutiérrez Maté, (Bielefeld University)
Jillian Melchor & Eeva Sippola (University of Helsinki)
Invited Speaker: Lise Dobrin (University of Virginia)
ROUND TABLE
Claire de Mareschal (Université de Strasbourg)
Corrine Foko Mokam & Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam)
Aymeric Daval-Markussen (Aarhus University)