‘The rez accent knows no borders’: Native American ethnic identity expressed through English prosody

Abstract

In many Native American and Canadian First Nations communities, indigenous languages are important for the linguistic construction of ethnic identity. But because many younger speakers have limited access to their heritage languages, English may have an even more important role in identity construction than Native languages do. Prior literature shows distinctive local English features in particular tribes. Our study builds on this knowledge but takes a wider perspective: We hypothesize that certain features are shared across much larger distances, particularly prosody. Native cultural insiders (the first two co-authors) had a central role in this project. Our recordings of seventy-five speakers in three deliberately diverse locations (Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, North/South Dakota; Northwest Territories, Canada; and diverse tribes represented at Dartmouth College) show that speakers are heteroglossically performing prosodic features to index Native ethnic identity. They have taken a ‘foreign’ language (English) and enregistered these prosodic features, creatively producing and reproducing a shared ethnic identity across great distances. (Native Americans, prosody, ethnicity, ethnic identity, English, dialects)*

Quotation in earlier and contemporary Australian Aboriginal English

“…This position is also in line with Newmark, Walker, and Stanford's (2016:655) findings of similarity across disparate North American Indigenous Englishes.…”

L1 Influence and Task effects in the realization of sentence types by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals

“…Second, it is necessary to compare the performance of Inuktitut-English bilinguals with monolingual English speakers of the same geographical area to identify the characteristics of the input to which bilinguals were exposed. Third, we may also want to explore the possibility suggested by [27], that bilingual Native American and Canadian First Nations speakers maintain their prosodic features to signal ethnicity. Finally, to achieve a better understanding of the interplay between syntactic and prosodic typological differences, it is important to analyze additional structures, such as the realization of corrective focus.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2017: It Could Be Otherwise

“…Such perspectives can support the important social functions of what might be considered token uses of endangered languages (a practice attested to in several other publications focusing on Indigenous‐language revitalization this year, e.g., Newmark et al. ; Saft ).…”

“…A significant number of publications this year describe Indigenous approaches to sustaining and revitalizing language practices endangered by legacies of settler colonialism, many with attention to how the epistemological and ontological logics for so doing differed from those made dominant by those same legacies (e.g., Ahlers ; Berk ; Dlaske ; Feliciano‐Santos ; Graber ; Newmark, Walker, and Stanford ; Saft ; the “Collaborative Linguistic Anthropology Matters: To Native American Communities” [3‐1190] panel at the 2017 AAA meeting). For example, Ahlers (, 49) notes how linguists’ assessments of a speaker's competence in an endangered language often focus on the speaker's ability to produce morphological paradigms closely mapped to a “prototypical paradigm” characterized by “few if any irregularities.” However, in a discussion of morphological irregularities in a corpus elicited from Kawaiisu elders, Ahlers notes that though linguists interpreted this variance as resulting from “disruption of intergenerational transmission of linguistic knowledge” that had “hindered the acquisition of this paradigm,” the elders themselves “conceptualize[d] the selection among alternative forms” as a “critical ground for the expression of individual identity and style” (50).…”