Harvard instructor Sunn M'Cheaux teaching Gullah to Ivy League students

by Alissa Holmes
Fri, March 29th 2024

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) — From The Lowcountry to The Ivy Leagues! This Gullah Connections story shares how the Gullah language is breaking barriers in higher education and the man behind it all, Sunn M'Cheaux, a Harvard University Instructor.

"As long as we think that linguistic rules don’t apply to us and we're just making it up as we go or its just baby talk, we'll always look down on our language," M'Cheaux said.

M'cheaux has been teaching Gullah to students at Harvard for seven years. It's a task that many questioned, but this Charleston native took on the task with pride.

"Up to that point many people were saying that the language was 'un-teachable,'" he remarked.

So how do you teach a language that doesn't have many instructional materials to students far away from the culture and people who passed it down for centuries?

"It's like when you're trying to communicate with a child that's new into the world, doesn’t have a vocabulary, they don’t know everything that they would need to know to have your frame of reference to every individual word," M'Cheaux explained.

He says it starts with community.

"So, you 'teach' in a sense by creating a context. Like a community or social context so that I know what you mean when you say that thing without you having to explain," he continued.

For example:

"If I say 'a dog got four legs, but can’t walk but one way,' what I'm communicating there is, a dog has four legs, but can only walk in one direction. So, no matter how many options you may have, at some point you're going to have to pick one and coordinate all of those efforts into making that one thing happen," M'Cheaux said.

Gullah is mixture of English and a number of different African languages. Created by enslaved Africans in the Lowcountry and other areas of the Gullah Geechee Corridor.

"They had to figure out the language in a hurry, under duress, and in that sense still preserving a piece of who you were before you got there, but also finding something new because all of them didn’t speak the same language," he explained.

M'Cheaux says absent of formal training books, Gullah has the same linguistic principles.

"'Ad gon' is going to be your past tense. 'Da go' is going to be your continuous. 'A go' is going to be your present. And if you are going to do something, what would it be? 'Dat's wha dey ga do!' The 'ga' is going to be your future."

M'Cheaux is making sure the journey of the language is going past the grounds of Harvard. He uses social media to take his lessons worldwide and the Holy City with him.

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