American Indian English
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American Indian English or Native American English is a diverse collection of
English dialects Dialects are linguistic varieties that may differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling and grammar. For the classification of varieties of English only in terms of pronunciation, see regional accents of English. Overview Dialects can be defi ...
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 numbe ...
, notwithstanding
indigenous languages An indigenous language, or autochthonous language, is a language that is native to a region and spoken by indigenous peoples. This language is from a linguistically distinct community that originated in the area. Indigenous languages are not neces ...
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 Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object th ...
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 contrast Phonemic contrast refers to a minimal phonetic difference, that is, small differences in speech sounds, that makes a difference in how the sound is perceived by listeners, and can therefore lead to different mental lexical entries for words. Fo ...
s 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 Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspect ...
(see
lexical set A lexical set is a group of words that all fall under a single category based on a single shared phonological feature. A phoneme is a basic unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another. Most commonly, following the work ...
s 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 pueblo ...
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 Lower may refer to: *Lower (surname) *Lower Township, New Jersey *Lower Receiver (firearms) *Lower Wick Lower Wick is a small hamlet located in the county of Gloucestershire, England. It is situated about five miles south west of Dursley, eight ...
than standard English vowels. Old speakers of
Lumbee The Lumbee are a Native American people primarily centered in Robeson, Hoke, Cumberland and Scotland counties in North Carolina. They also live in surrounding states and Baltimore, Maryland. The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is a state-recog ...
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 African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, ), also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term), is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban ...
.


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, they ...
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 enroll ...
and
Tsimshian The Tsimshian (; tsi, Ts’msyan or Tsm'syen) are an Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Their communities are mostly in coastal British Columbia in Terrace, British Columbia, Terr ...
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 The culture of the United States of America is primarily of Western, and European origin, yet its influences includes the cultures of Asian American, African American, Latin American, and Native American peoples and their cultures. The U ...
as a monotone, subdued, or emotionless sound quality. A 2016 study of various English-speaking indigenous North Americans (
Slavey The Slavey (also Slave and South Slavey) are a First Nations indigenous peoples of the Dene group, indigenous to the Great Slave Lake region, in Canada's Northwest Territories, and extending into northeastern British Columbia and northwestern ...
s,
Standing Rock The Standing Rock Reservation ( lkt, Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ) lies across the border between North and South Dakota in the United States, and is inhabited by ethnic "Hunkpapa and Sihasapa bands of Lakota Oyate and the Ihunktuwona and Pabaksa ...
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 A ...
) 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, f ...
ening at the ends of sentences; and
syllable timing Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Rhythm is an aspect of prosody, others being intonation, stress, and tempo of speech. Three alternative ways in which a language can divide time are postula ...
(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 In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, ...
. Verbs like ''be'', ''have'', and ''get'' are also widely deleted, and some varieties of American Indian English adds plural markers to
mass nouns In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elemen ...
: 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 nouns ...
in
pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (list of glossing abbreviations, 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 part of speech, parts o ...
(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 diff ...
*
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 variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lan ...


References


Works cited

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