3,000 words and hundreds of 'basket names' from Gullah Geechee to West and western Central African languages and recording texts in the Mende language, spoken in Sierra Leone, which were passed down by Gullah-speakers. Turner pioneered the study of Western African substrate languages as important to the formation of Gullah and other African-American Vernacular English varieties. He found Western African languages were one of several influences on Gullah. Thus, Gullah Geechee language is a Creole language, not an African language, ${ }^{2}$ forged from Western African and European elements (Mufwene, 2001, p. 95). Despite a few interventions by historians, such as by Margaret Washington Creel and Philip Morgan (Creel, 1989; Morgan, 2009), Charles Joyner and Ras Michael Brown, ${ }^{3}$ the overall Gullah Geechee literature is relatively ahistorical. A fresh historical perspective on the historical development of Gullah Geechee language, culture and communities is long overdue.  
Gullah Geechee and the meanings that these terms hold today cannot be projected backwards in time before the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the meaning of 'Gullah' was contested. Despite 'Gullah' appearing in print media in the nineteenth century, the masses of Africans enslaved in the Lowcountry did not think of themselves as one group of people. Nor did the enslaved masses or their descendants identify themselves as 'Gullah' or 'Geechee'. Those who did, like 'Gullah Jack', did not infuse the term with the same meaning as we do today. This conundrum raises the question of how historians conceptualize folks who were enslaved on plantations in the SC, GA, and FL Lowcountry and how a historian can reconstruct their history. A new term, 'Lowcountry Creole' will be used to describe blacks in the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.