## Introduction  
In a 1946 publication, Melville Herskovits, eminent anthropologist, ranked the 'Gulla Islands' as having the most 'New World Africanisms' among people of African descent in the United States and the Virgin Islands. Today, the descendants of enslaved Africans who laboured on rice, indigo, Sea Island cotton and naval stores plantations, located on the islands and coastal plains along the Atlantic shores - measuring 30 to 40 miles into the interior and stretching from South Carolina to the St John's River in Florida - are called 'Gullah Geechee'. 'Gullah' primarily refers to African-Americans in coastal South Carolina and 'Geechee' refers specifically to the African-American inhabitants of coastal Georgia. Gullah Geechee are also the names given to the English-based Creole languages spoken by the descendants of enslaved Africans in these regions (Figure 1).  
Theories abound on the origins of the Gullah Geechee. Before the twentieth century, Gullah was tied to African origins in one of two Western African subregions. A runaway slave advertisement for an enslaved man, 'Golla Harry,' is one of the earliest appearances of Gullah in print.John Bennett, the artist and writer who made Charleston his home, 'placed the Gullahs among the Liberian group of tribes', the Gola. Ambrose Gonzales considered Gullah to be a 'corruption of Angola'. He cited the court proceedings of the Denmark Vesey slave insurrections  
![img-8.jpeg](img_ref_9)  
Figure i. Map of the "Lowcountry"