HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

American Indian English or Native American English is a diverse collection of English dialects spoken by many American Indians and
Alaska Natives Alaska Natives (also known as Alaskan Natives, Native Alaskans, Indigenous Alaskans, Aboriginal Alaskans or First Alaskans) are the indigenous peoples of Alaska and include Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and a num ...
, notwithstanding indigenous languages also spoken in the United States, of which only a few are in daily use. For the sake of comparison, this article focuses on similarities across varieties of American Indian English that unite it in contrast to a "typical" English variety with standard grammar and a
General American General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans. In the United States it is often perceived as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or so ...
accent.


Pronunciation


Vowels

The phonemic contrasts between
front vowel A front vowel is a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages, its defining characteristic being that the highest point of the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would otherw ...
s in standard English are not always maintained in American Indian dialects. For example, Navajo English may have , , or mergers (see lexical sets to have these capitalized keywords defined), particularly word-medially.
Isleta Pueblo of Isleta ( tix, Shiewhibak , kjq, Dîiw'a'ane ; nv, Naatoohó ) is an unincorporated community and Tanoan pueblo in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, United States, originally established in the . The Southern Tiwa name of the pue ...
English maintains these contrasts, though according to different patterns than standard English. In fact, in the English of all Colorado River Indians (namely, Mohave, Hopi, and Navajo), front vowels tend to shift, often one degree lower than standard English vowels. Old speakers of Lumbee English share the vowel, and some other pronunciation and vocabulary features, in common with Outer Banks English, as well as some grammatical features in common with African-American Vernacular English.


Consonants

Th-stopping ''Th''-stopping is the realization of the dental fricatives as stops—either dental or alveolar—which occurs in several dialects of English. In some accents, such as of Indian English and middle- or upper-class Irish English, th ...
is common in
Cheyenne The Cheyenne ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Their Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian language family. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized nations: the Southern Cheyenne, who are enr ...
and
Tsimshian The Tsimshian (; tsi, Ts’msyan or Tsm'syen) are an Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Their communities are mostly in coastal British Columbia in Terrace and Prince Rupert, and Metlakatla, Alaska on Annette Island, the only r ...
English, and certainly many other varieties of Native American English: replacing initial and with and , respectively. Cheyenne and Navajo English, among others, follow General American patterns of glottal replacement of ''t'', plus both ''t''- and ''d''-glottalization at the ends of syllables. The result is ''Brad fed the wet cat'' sounding like ''Bra' fe' the we' ca.


Pitch, intonation, and stress

Features of prosody substantially contribute to differences between American Indian and General American accents. For example, even within the Colorado River Indian English, there are differing rules for stress placement on words. However, these dialects do have similar intonation patterns, markedly different from
General American General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans. In the United States it is often perceived as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or so ...
: a lower level of pitch fluctuation and an absence of a rising intonation in questions. This is commonly stereotyped in American popular culture as a monotone, subdued, or emotionless sound quality. A 2016 study of various English-speaking indigenous North Americans ( Slaveys, Standing Rock Lakotas, and diverse Indian students at
Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...
) found that they all used uniquely shared prosodic features for occasional emphasis, irony, or playfulness in casual peer interactions, yet rarely in formal interactions. The prosodic choices are presumably a way for these speakers to index (tap into) a shared "Native" identity. The documented sounds of this "Pan-Indian" identity include: higher pitch on post-stressed syllables (rather than stressed syllables); use of high-rising, mid, or high-falling (rather than simple falling) intonation at the ends of sentences;
vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word ...
ening at the ends of sentences; and syllable timing (instead of stress timing).Newmark, Kalina; Walker, Nacole; Stanford, James (2017). " 'The Rez Accent Knows No Borders': Native American Ethnic Identity Expressed through English Prosody". ''Language in Society 45'' (5): 633–64.


Grammar

American Indian English shows enormous heterogeneity in terms of grammatical structures. As a whole, it characteristically uses plural and possessive markers less than standard English (for example, ''one of the dog is here''). Navajo, Northern Ute, and many other varieties of Indian English may simply never use plural markers for nouns. Lack of other verb markers is commonly reported in Indian speech too, like an absence of standard English's "-ed" or "-s" endings for verb tense. Verbs like ''be'', ''have'', and ''get'' are also widely deleted, and some varieties of American Indian English adds plural markers to mass nouns: thus, ''furnitures'', ''homeworks'', ''foods'', etc. In general, verb constructions within American Indian English are distinctive and even vary wildly from tribe to tribe. "Errors" of
grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
in
pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...
(she, her, him, etc.) occur in some American Indian English, for example, greatly documented in Mohave and Cheyenne English. Mohave and Ute English even delete implied pronouns altogether, as in ''I didn't know where you were, was too busy to look, waited for you at school, but weren't there.'').


See also

*
Aboriginal English in Canada Indigenous English, also known as First Nations English, refers to varieties of English used by the Indigenous peoples of Canada. They are outwardly similar to standard Canadian English from the perspective of a non-Canadian. However, they di ...
*
Australian Aboriginal English Australian Aboriginal English (AAE or AbE) is a dialect of English used by a large section of the Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander) population. It is made up of a number of varieties which developed differ ...
*
American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States and in most circumstances ...


References


Works cited

* {{authority control Dialects of English Native American culture American English