Patricia Causey Nichols makes it easy to anthropomorphize language in Voices of Our Ancestors: Language Contact in Early South Carolina. In her well-researched and lucid account, languages are born, develop, mature, and grow. Sometimes languages encounter other languages, which can result in changes to either or both. Languages can merge and diverge, conquer or be conquered, and they can die, never to be heard again. Nichols reminds us that the history of language is necessarily the history of people, and patterns of change and continuity in the lives of people and their communities affect the languages they speak and hear as well. She takes the reader on a deep but highly readable excursion through seventeenth-century South Carolina that effortlessly blends insights from history and sociology, as well as linguistics. Nichols’s thoughtful analysis demonstrates how the European conquest of North America catalyzed both the invention of racial categories and change in and development of languages. The racial categories invented by colonists, she asserts, then stimulated the development of new, racialized identities to replace older, “tribal” ones. New languages and dialects created by South Carolinians helped create, sustain, and transmit those identities. Voices of Our Ancestors is an effective book that manages to document and explain the effects of decades of profound changes on people, places, communities, and languages without getting mired in excessive historical detail or cumbersome theory.

A main contribution of Nichols’s work is to shine a spotlight on the role that European aggression played in a sociological and political transition in the minds of Natives, colonists, and African people “[f]rom tribes to race.” European settlers, she claims, long had seen themselves as members of groupings such as Scots, Welsh, or Castilian much more than they possessed national identities such as “British” or “Spanish,” let alone racial identities such as “White” or “European.” Similarly, the indigenous Carolinians sorted themselves and others into a diverse variety of tribal and kinship groups, from the extensive and organized Cofitachequi chiefdom to many smaller Page 210 →and less centralized bands such as the Edisto or Stono. Enslaved Africans were brought to South Carolina first by the Spanish, then later in large numbers by English settlers. Many were brought from rice-growing regions in West Africa, others were brought from the Niger River delta area, and yet more were brought from Angola and even more distant parts of Africa where they possessed well-established tribal identities such as Yoruba, Wolof, Ewe, and others. Those traditional groupings would suffer threats to their centripetal force in colonial South Carolina.

The dislocations and tensions caused by European settlement spurred the development first of racial categories and later, identities. Within existing groups, European expansion facilitated the blurring of long-held differences in religion, culture, lifestyle, and language. Around Charleston and Georgetown, Native Carolinians were pushed south and west, where increased contact with existing tribes eroded long-standing differences. Outnumbered by both the indigenous population and the African-descended population they imported, European colonizers found reason to elide their own differences in identity, culture, habits, and faith, whereas the English language provided a convenient lingua franca to link the European settlers of Carolina. Similarly, African people were torn from their own rich webs of culture and imported with little regard to any consideration other than economic. In the Carolinas, enslaved Africans were compelled to make what connections they could among themselves, simultaneously trying to preserve and pass on their own identities while absorbing influences from other Africans, Native Carolinians, and their European enslavers. Differences in physical appearance, usually ascribed by white settlers, reinforced the emerging groupings and contributed to the development of new, racialized identities.

Voices of Our Ancestors is ultimately a book about language, particularly speech patterns in the English spoken in eastern South Carolina. To that end, Nichols charts three particular linguistic developments: the variety of English often called “Gullah” or “Geechee” by African Americans, the English spoken by the Lumbee Indians residing along the border of North and South Carolina, and a “southern” dialect common to the broader region. Similarities far outweigh differences, she tells us, although native Carolinians are able to parse subtle differences that reveal variation on the basis of ethnicity, region (low or upcountry), and class. Here, Nichols blends historical research with her own extensive fieldwork, demonstrating how patterns of migration and contact influenced the development of the three dialects, all eventually informing the English spoken in various parts of eastern South Carolina today. The development of the Gullah–Geechee language receives Page 211 →particular attention, with emphasis on the degree to which the speech of South Carolina’s early inhabitants exerts a continuing influence on the current population.

Nichols tells us that, “Like politics, all language is local.” South Carolina’s linguistic history reflects influences from the array of cultures and languages that streamed into South Carolina from the 1500s onward. Contact between and among Native, European, and African/African-American people blurred boundaries that previously divided the various “tribes,” whereas perceived visible differences facilitated the drawing of new, racial lines between groups. However, constrained by geography, South Carolinians developed a common culture and way of speaking that is representative of its unique history and development. Voices of Our Ancestors: Language Contact in Early South Carolina effectively blends primary source information with extensive fieldwork to highlight the relationships between movement, contact, and communication. Written for a professional audience, but readily accessible to the public, Nichols’s book is worthwhile both as a readable and lucid history of early migration into South Carolina and also as an effective primer on language development and change. I recommend it for undergraduate courses in linguistics, history, and South Carolina studies, and to the interested public.

Richard A. Almeida, Francis Marion University