American Indian English or Native American English is a diverse collection of

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spoken by many American Indians and

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, 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 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 approximately as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction th ...

s in standard English are not always maintained in American Indian dialects of English. For example, Navajo English may have , , or

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, particularly word-medially. Isleta English maintains these contrasts, though according to different patterns than standard English. In the English of all Colorado River Indians (namely, Mohave,

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, 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 African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical, voc ...

Consonants

Th-stopping is common in Cheyenne and

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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 English of Colorado River Indians, there are differing rules for stress placement on words. However, these dialects do have similar intonation patterns, markedly different from General American: 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 ( Slavey, Standing Rock Lakotas, and diverse Indian students at

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College ( ) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the America ...

) 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 or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...

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 dogs 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 add 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.

Grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...

pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( glossed ) 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 con ...

(she, her, him, etc.) does not always align with the natural gender of a

referent A referent ( ) is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence ''Mary saw me'', the referent of the word ''Mary'' is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken o ...

, particularly at the ends of sentences, in some American Indian English. For example, this is 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.''

References

Works cited

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