Charleston, Dyva, and 22poopoo

Ok. The documentary got my attention again in Episode five. Not hating on the Scott Irish but Black American English was really interesting. It really centered around Charleston as the place where it came to be the Black English we know today.

Black American English is said to have come from Charleston. It has a name that sounds like Gollum but sounds more like Gullug but out of fear of spelling it incorrectly and my grade going down, I have opted for mimicking the sound. It is not precise to say that Black American English came from Charleston but it can be said that this is where it originated. Here, the African American community remained undisturbed until one of the World Wars and were able to preserve their very African way of speaking. It is hard to understand but you can see how it has changes since Gollum/Gulug is a dyeing language. It still sounded really interesting and they say rusty when they talk about crab, which is just cool.

Charleston was the main place in America where they were sold into slavery. Here Pidgin English became the creole English used in plantations. Both master and slave spoke the same way and things remained very similar in the plantations until after the First World War.  In part three we see how a woman speaks with a heavy accent similar to that of the plantation era. It is hard to understand and I found it interesting that she used the word “totes” for “carrying”.  The word is from West Africa and she just simply slipped it into her talk. I was not the only one that enjoyed her way of talking as 22poopoo commented: I love that woman’s voice.

Southern dialect for both the white and the black people was influenced by creole English.  As part four shows how the polo player lived, we see how his accent is mixed with gullug and Charleston English. Southern Belles even though they were considered part of the aristocracy, had a very creole English because they were never sent away to learn “good English”. I believe though that not all whites lived the lifestyles shown in the documentary that kind of generalizes the idea that all whites lived this way. There had to be some more down to earth whites who probably had more of a black American accent because they weren’t up there with the aristocracy. They might not be an expert but  cyberdyva agrees with me when she says: They ignore the fact that most whites in the south DID NOT live this lavish lifestyle. LOl!! They lived lives more closely resembling working blacks of the south and they co-mingled pretty closely with blacks in the south. The "aristocracy" of the south created nothing notable.