Commentary by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
When groups of people who speak different languages come together, they sometimes inadvertently create a new ones. Groups speaking completely different tongues combine bits of their native tongues into a mixing pot so everyone can communicate easily. Linguists call these impromptu tongues “contact languages” – and they can extend well beyond the pidgin and creole that many of us have heard of. Tutnese was a creole used by African-Americans during the antebellum period. The Tutnese creole created by enslaved African Americans was mostly lost to the annals of times, until recently.
The origin stories of every contact language varies. Some are created peaceful when groups of people meet to trade and need a new lingua franca for commerce. Swahili for example is the lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region, as well as Eastern and Southern Africa (Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Malawi, Somalia, Zambia, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and the Comoros islands), with 20% of the Swahili vocabulary derived from loan words mostly from Arabic. Swahili developed from the thousands of years of trade between the East Africa and Arabic worlds (see Black Kos, Week In Review — The Arab slave trade in Africa). But other contact languages were born of tragedy and violence – like Haitian Creole, Gullah Geechee, Jamaican Patois and many other lingua franca that arose from the Atlantic slave trade. Through out the New World African peoples combined several tongues with English creating new everyday languages used among the captive slave populations.
Jamaican patois was my mother tongue, so I’ve always been interested in the creolization of language. So although I’ve long been familiar with the Gullah Geechee of the coastal Carolinas I was surprised to learn that their actually was actually a more wide spread African American creole spoken among the captive slave population of the United States — Tutnese.
Although Gullah the language spoken in the Lowcountry region (both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands)of the states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina maybe more famous and better preserved. Tut was far more widespread in the antebellum South. The Gullah people speak an English-based creole language containing many African loanwords and influenced by African languages in grammar and sentence structure. Because of a period of relative isolation from whites while working on large plantations in rural areas, the Gullah Africans, developed a creole culture that has preserved much of their African linguistic and cultural heritage. Tut had a different origon, as it was developed by African Americans who had constant contacts with Whites.
Tutnese was invented and used in the American South, to teach spelling and conceal what was being said by blacks, at a time when literacy among slaves was forbidden. Tut is still taught in some African American families and communities as a way of communal and historical bonding. Tutnese was traditionally used by African Americans in the presence of slave holders and later police ("pupolulisus" or "pizolizice"). There was also a version used in some parts of the US called Yuckish or Yukkish, which uses more or less the same language constructs.
For those of us who grew up reading such works as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou , may remember Angelou learning Tutnese as a child in the first volume of the autobiographical series. Angelou described “Tut” as a “complicated language used by enslaved Africans”. She and her friend Louise "spent tedious hours teaching ourselves the Tut language. You (yack oh you) know (kack nug oh wug) what (wack hash a tut). Since all the other children spoke Pig Latin, we were superior because Tut was hard to speak and even harder to understand”. But recently Tut has enter the why-didn’t-we-learn-about-this-in-history-class status in online forums as African Americans have been rediscovering the lost dialect spoken by their enslaved ancestors.
Tut was used extensively in the 18th century to communicate covertly in front of slave masters. In Tut, every letter in the English alphabet becomes a distinct sound. The words sound distinctively English, but require each letter of the English alphabet to have its own unique sound. For example, according to author Gloria McIlwain in the American Speech Journal, the letter i becomes “ay” and the letter h becomes “hash.” McIlwain writes “it’s how enslaved people in the South taught one another to read and write during a time when literacy was illegal”.
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Ernest Thompson Seton mentioned it in his book Two Little Savages. Yan, the hero of the book, learns it and tries to teach it to his friends Sam and Giles, but the other boys are not interested. In 1995, author Gloria McIlwain, published a guide on Tut. McIlwain wrote in an article in American Speech Journal, “I was told by my aunt that her father (who could read and write English) had referred to TUT Language as a 'disguised language' that could have got him killed; thus, as a grown man he refused to speak it.” Mcllwain’s guide had been one of the few known documents about the language. The name Tut, according to McIlwain may have originated from the word "talk."
According to NBC News, African Americans are learning Tut and sharing videos, guides, and notes for speaking the language across different online platforms. Tut speakers are teaching others through Google Classroom and Discord. Instagram pages have shared guides on writing and reading the Tut alphabet.
It is unsurprising that Tut or Tutnese was lost over the centuries; it’s unfortunately the fate that many contact languages meet over time. But some want to keep the reemergence of the language under wraps. Social media pages dedicated to teaching Tutnese have surfaced asking for the learning space to be exclusive to descendants of slavery, and the fear that Black people will have another cultural or social identifier coopted is a justified fear.
For a number of African Americans, learning Tut has built a connection to their ancestors and community. However, with the resurgence of Tut, some say the language should remain underground. Though there are no restrictions one learning any language, some feel only African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the U.S. and former colonies should speak Tut. When some Tut speakers on Facebook have shared the Tut alphabet, other commenters have called for the post to be taken down. “This should not be public. It’s [only] for AFRICAN AMERICANS,” some commenters have written.
In a story for BBC, Nala H. Lee, a linguist at the National University of Singapore, says that when people judge contact languages, “People think of them as being less good or not real languages.” But African Americans are ready to reclaim the voices of their ancestors one syllable at a time. Tutnese the creole created by enslaved African Americans is slowly being reborn.
Sources
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Meet legendary Hollywood producer, director, and animator Leo Sullivan and his wife Ethelyn O. Stewart Sullivan who have been working together for 60 years to uplift and inform Black families through animated interactive content. Their brand is called Afrokids® and pairs many digital properties including AfroKids.com and AfroKids.TV. Recently, they were honored by the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “Operation Push” with a “Legacy Award” for their outstanding lifetime achievements.
The couple realized early on that in this fast-paced world families need a place that is both educational and entertaining with positive images and role models where Black children can see themselves in a positive way. “Our message is just as relevant today, as it was in the ’60s,” says Leo.
To get their message across, the couple developed the Afrokids® brand with the mission of building Black children’s self-esteem and cultural awareness so that they can better learn from life lessons; respect others and themselves, and take responsibility for their own actions.
Having a history of producing educational and entertaining films, Leo and Ethelyn used their skills to provide the interactive website, Afrokids.tv, produce a streaming channel, Afrokids® TV Channel (on streaming platforms Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV) and to publish an app (Afrokids.tv) in the Apple App Store and on Google Play.
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The current dispute over two Democratic proposals to address the racial homeownership gap is a great example of this phenomenon.
What are the two proposals?
The first plan is the Decent Affordable Safe Housing (DASH) For All Act introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Wyden’s plan would create a refundable $15,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers to use toward the down payment on a home. The other bill comes from Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) His Downpayment Toward Equity Act of 2021, would create a new program that offers up to $25,000 to first-generation homebuyers.
Both sound like good plans, but Wyden’s DASH Act would actually increase housing inequality, while Warnock’s plan would help reduce racial housing disparities.
Is it because Warnock’s plan offers more money?
Nope. It’s because Wyden’s plan is one of those “race-neutral” ideas we talked about earlier, while Warnock’s bill actually addresses racial housing disparities, as Politico reports:
One of the thorniest parts of the debate is whether all first-time homebuyers should be eligible for government aid or if it should be further targeted at first-generation buyers, whose parents do not own a home.
Wyden’s proposed $15,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers aligns with an important plank of the housing plan that Biden touted on the campaign trail. But Wyden is facing opposition from affordable housing advocates who say it could push up home prices and fail to benefit people who truly can’t afford a down payment. They say relying on a tax credit would also be less effective than offering direct payments to homebuyers, as proposed by Waters and Warnock.
“Those who really need the help will have a hard time buying a home without having that help at the time of closing, but the IRS is ill-suited to work with lenders and borrowers quickly enough to make that happen through a tax credit,” said Jim Parrott, former economic adviser to the Obama White House. “So this tax credit is likely to help only those who already could have put down the needed down payment buy a more expensive house, not expand access to homeownership.”
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The attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative joins Vox Conversations to discuss the newly expanded Legacy Museum, the conservative crusade against critical thinking, and why working to end racism isn’t enough. Vox: Bryan Stevenson on tracing the legacy of American enslavement to modern-day mass incarceration
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I think generally in the United States, we’ve done a very poor job of creating cultural spaces that help us understand who we are and how we’ve gotten where we are. And I went to Johannesburg in South Africa, and I saw the Apartheid Museum there, and it was powerful to me to see that that nation had created an institution that helped people understand the pain and the suffering and the anguish that apartheid created.
You can’t go 200 meters in Berlin without seeing markers and monuments to honor the victims of the Holocaust. There’s a Holocaust memorial in the center of the city. And because of that reckoning, there’s just a different relationship to history in that country than you see in this country. There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Germany. It would be unconscionable for people to try to romanticize that period, because there’s been this reckoning.
In the United States, we haven’t done that. There are no museums that talk honestly in a detailed way about the legacy of slavery. [Author’s note: Except, I’d argue, the Legacy Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.] We have the opposite. We actually create plantations that romanticize that antebellum era.
And so, I do believe that we need to create spaces that more honestly address this history. We began that process in 2018, and I was very encouraged by the level of interest that the memorial generated in the first museum, but we felt like we needed to expand it because there was so much more to say. There’s no place in America where you can have an honest exploration of the transatlantic slave trade. We haven’t talked about the violence of slavery, the details around lynching, the anguish and resistance to civil rights, and certainly nothing that’s getting to this contemporary moment of over-incarceration.
And I do think that part of our problem is that we have been so silent, in cultural spaces, about the importance of historical examination and memorialization. We believe the memorialization in America. We have a 9/11 memorial, less than a decade after that incident, so it’s not that we don’t recognize the power of these institutions. We just haven’t created them when it comes to looking at the legacy of slavery and lynching and racial injustice.
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Passed down through the generations, whispered at bedtimes and raucously retold by elders, folktales have long been a mainstay of African cultural heritage.
Now some of those tales – perhaps the one about a scheming hyena or a snake with seven heads – are to gain fresh global recognition as a new competition aims to find the next generation of film-makers from sub-Saharan Africa. Unesco has teamed up with streaming giant Netflix to find and fund six short films “reimagining” folktales that will premiere in 2022.
“We want to find the bravest, wittiest, and most surprising retellings of some of Africa’s most-loved folktales and share them with entertainment fans around the world in over 190 countries,” the UN cultural body and production company said in a joint statement.
Winners of the competition, which opens on Thursday, will be trained and mentored by industry professionals and given a production grant of $75,000 (£55,000) through a local company. Entrants must be citizens and residents of a country in sub-Saharan Africa and be aged 18-35.
Ernesto Ottone, Unesco’s assistant director-general for culture, said the organisation had approached Netflix as it carried out the first complete mapping of the continent’s film and audiovisual industries. That report, released last week, found the creative industries were currently grossly underserved but could quadruple their revenue and create an extra 20m jobs.
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