American Indian English
American Indian English | |
---|---|
Region | Indian Country |
Native speakers | 9,666,058 (2020 census)[1][2] |
| |
Early forms | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | – |
Glottolog | None |
Population of Native Americans by country according to the 2020 United States census. Areas populated by Indigenous peoples are considered "Indian Country." |
American Indian English or Native American English is a diverse collection of
Pronunciation
Vowels
The
Old speakers of Lumbee English share the PRICE 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.[6]
Consonants
Th-stopping is common in Cheyenne and Tsimshian English, and certainly many other varieties of Native American English: replacing initial /θ/ and /ð/ with /t/ and /d/, respectively.[7] 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'.[8]
Pitch, intonation, and stress
Features of
A 2016 study of various English-speaking indigenous North Americans (Slavey, Standing Rock Lakotas, and diverse Indian students at Dartmouth College) 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 lengthening at the ends of sentences; and syllable timing (instead of stress timing).[10]
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 dogs is here). Navajo,
See also
- Aboriginal English in Canada
- Australian Aboriginal English
- American English
References
- ^ "Overview of 2020 AIAN Redistricting Data: 2020" (PDF). Retrieved January 16, 2022.
- ^ "Race and Ethnicity in the United States: 2010 Census and 2020 Census". Retrieved January 16, 2022.
- ^ Leap 1993, p. 44.
- ^ Leap 1993, p. 45.
- ^ Leap 1993, p. 46.
- ^ Wolfram, Walt (2006). American voices: how dialects differ from coast to coast. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. p. 247.
- ^ Leap 1993, p. 48–49.
- ^ a b Leap 1993, p. 50
- ^ Leap 1993, p. 52.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Leap 1993, p. 55.
- ^ Leap 1993, pp. 62–4, 70.
- ^ Leap 1993, p. 59.
- ^ Leap 1993, p. 60.
Works cited
- ISBN 9780874804164.