Gullah Geechee style-shifting as mediation in intercommunity performance contexts

Abstract

For Gullah Geechee, an English-lexified creole language spoken along the coast of the southeastern United States (Hancock, 1980; Opala, 1987), inter-community performance events are characterized by an enregistered ethnolinguistic repertoire (Benor, 2010) and shaped by outsider ideologies. This creates two intra-performance styles: a more acrolectal register approaching the language norms of other local varieties and a curated variety that combines basilectal features and stylization (Coupland, 2001) for the purposes of mediating interactions with outsiders. The current study explores the relationship between these two distinct styles of Gullah Geechee performance register (Brown, 2005; Smith, 1999), and the ability of speakers to mediate within their ethnolinguistic repertoire to produce distinct voices for intercommunity purposes.

McCullough, John K. 2023. Gullah Geechee style-shifting as mediation in intercommunity performance contexts. UGA Working Papers in Linguistics 6, 237-251. The Linguistics Society at UGA: Athens, GA.