Lit Linguistics: The Language of The Cookout

Lorenzo Dow Turner was teaching at South Carolina State College in 1929 when he heard a strange sort of English some passing students were speaking. He asked them about it. They told him they were speaking Gullah, a specific creole they grew up speaking on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Fascinated, he and his 100lb tape recorder started up research into Sea Island Creole that ultimately exposed an incredible discovery. Creole wasn’t “broken English from undereducated descendants of slavery,” but rather, a full dialect of English enhanced by the native pronunciation, grammatical rules, and stylistic tendencies of multiple established West African languages. The miracle was that it had somehow survived the multiple, brutal native language obliteration attempts visited upon these stolen people.

Since then, official and respectful recognition of the miracle of African-based English dialects has been slow going, especially in publishing spaces.

That’s why The Cookout: Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora is so special.

Throughout our planning process, we committed ourselves to keeping true to the way we speak when we tell our own stories. Our authors submitted tales to us that let the voices of their characters sing out in pidgin, in creole or kreyol, and in the stateside dialects of Black Vernacular English/AAVE/Ebonics. (Linguistics are still debating on the name of that one, recognized as a language in 1996 by the Oakland Unified School Board, despite vicious pushback then and since.)

This anthology is storytelling you can taste, percussive with familiar rhythms and following paths on metaphorical maps we know by heart, words soaked in history and meaning so intrinsic it defies correction to “proper” English. We worked closely with our authors, asked questions and learned a lot, respected every STET, and preserved the spirit and body of the tales.

This will be a collection unlike any other, and we are excited to share it with you!

If you’d like to learn more about our linguistic histories, let us know!