India, April 17 -- Growing up in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, Tia Clark came of age surrounded by the cadences of her heritage-the Geechee language, an English-based creole born of West African dialects and preserved by descendants of the transatlantic slave trade.

"All my family, everybody, that's what we sound like," Clark told Travel + Leisure. But her mom wouldn't let her speak it. "People said, 'if you speak Geechee, you're ignorant,'" Clark recalls, a stigma her mother hoped to shield her from.

It wasn't until an unexplained illness at age 37 that it came back into focus. Following a doctor's orders to overhaul her lifestyle and diet, she took up crabbing at a cousin's suggestion. It was more than exercise: she returned to...