1 Introduction

American Indian English (hereafter AIE) is best described as a constellation of several varieties of English rather than a single variety. Because the indigenous peoples of North America are not an undifferentiated, monolithic group, it only follows that the English they speak is also not a singular variety. But there is a relationship among various varieties of AIE, both linguistically and socially, and it is this relationship that I focus on in this chapter. AIE is spoken throughout the United States and Canada primarily by people of indigenous heritage, and the speakers may number as many as four million.¹ However, the exact delineation of who is and who isn't American Indian² is not merely a social matter or based on a box checked on the census, but rather, it is a long-fought political issue. As Louise Erdrich (Chippewa) writes in her novel The Round House:

For the purposes of this chapter, I leave the question of authenticity in abeyance. But the tension described by Erdrich is an important part of AIE use, as discussed in the conclusion.

The entertainment industry has painted a picture of the English spoken by Native Americans that shares little resemblance with AIE. Barbra Meek (Reference Meek2006) termed these representations as “Hollywood Injun English” and includes such stereotypes as “How!” as a greeting, “heap” as an intensifier, as well as subtler features such as lack of contractions and a slow pace that suggests a lack of English fluency.³ “Hollywood Injun English” is not the topic of this chapter, but it is important to acknowledge its place in the popular consciousness and differentiate between this fiction and the facts of AIE.

The academic study of language in Native American communities has a long tradition. However, the study of AIE does not, hence its inclusion in a book on under-studied varieties of English. Rather, the focus of linguistic scholarship has been on the documentation and analysis of indigenous languages (e.g. Boas Reference Boas1911; Sapir Reference Sapir1933; Whorf Reference Whorf, Spier, Hallowell and Newman1941; Mithun Reference Mithun1999), the vast majority of which have either become extinct or are now facing extinction (Hinton Reference Hinton1999; Whalen and Simons Reference Whalen and Simons2012). This focus leads to the erasure of American Indians who do not speak a language other than English, as well as the English they do speak. Nonetheless, sociolinguists have long called for more research on AIE, even if these calls have not been heeded. Roger Shuy wrote in Reference Shuy and Shuy1964: “At the heart of the communication problem of the American Indian is this question: in what way, if any, is the English of the American Indian different from that of non-Indians of the same relative social status and geographical environment?” (52) This chapter is a summation of some of the answers to Shuy's question, as well as a further call to action for more research.

Most varieties of AIE share some features that separate AIE from other varieties of English. While many features, such as TH-stopping and copula deletion, are common among nonstandard varieties of English, features such as a small pitch range, insertions of glottal stops, and the variable loss of the distinction between masculine and feminine in the third-person pronouns (he/she, him/her, his/hers) are rarely found in other varieties of English.

In what follows, I first demonstrate the status of AIE as a lesser-known variety of English, as well as how AIE came about both as a variety and as a code of indigenous identity. The challenge of my chapter is to provide a unified description of these disparate varieties. To this end, I bring together the various strands of research on AIE, showing commonalities among different varieties of AIE as well as differences. Finally, I show the need for greater research on AIE and general avenues of possible future research.

2 Sociolinguistic history and current status of American Indian English

To understand AIE in its present form, it is important to understand the history of colonization (and post-colonization) in the US and Canada. The history of American Indians begins long before English was spoken in the Americas. Before 1492 and the onset of major European colonization, it is estimated that almost 300 languages were spoken from over fifty language families, though this estimation is most likely low due to the extinction of languages before they could be documented (Mithun Reference Mithun1999: 1). The reduction of linguistic diversity began almost immediately due to the destruction of entire tribes through the introduction of disease and as a consequence of warfare. Thus, many languages were lost due to the death of all of their speakers, while others were lost when the remnants of tribes joined together to create new communities (Maynor Lowery Reference Maynor Lowry2010). In at least one case, the Lumbee of North Carolina, English became the language of the newly formed tribe (Dannenberg Reference Dannenberg2002; Wolfram and Dannenberg Reference Wolfram and Dannenberg1999). It is estimated that there are only 209 indigenous languages extant in the United States and Canada, all of which are endangered to a greater or lesser extent (Whalen and Simons Reference Whalen and Simons2012: 161–8). Twenty-two languages have become extinct just since 1950 (Whalen and Simons Reference Whalen and Simons2012: 160).

For the most part, English has replaced these languages in indigenous communities. There are exceptions, of course, like the Yaqui of Arizona who use Spanish (e.g. Dozier Reference Dozier1956; Trujillo Reference Trujillo and Reyhner1997) or the Métis of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and North Dakota who speak Michif, a mixed language of French and Cree (e.g. Bakker and Papen Reference Bakker, Papen and Thomason1997). Many other tribes adopted a creole language, though few are still in use. Those creoles include Chinook Jargon spoken from southern Alaska to Northern California (e.g. Silverstein Reference Silverstein1972; Mithun Reference Mithun1999: 587–9); Delaware Pidgin in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania (e.g. Goddard Reference Goddard and Thomason1997; Mithun Reference Mithun1999: 590–2); and Mobilian Jargon from Florida to Texas to Illinois (e.g. Drechsel Reference Drechsel1983; Mithun Reference Mithun1999: 603–5).

As stated above, not all of the heritage languages are extinct, and these extant languages are spoken by multilingual speakers (though there are a very few monolingual speakers of heritage languages among the elderly in some few communities) in communities across the US and Canada, and there are still children whose first language is not English but the heritage language (as has been my experience with the Navajo in Arizona and the Eastern Cherokee in North Carolina), though, like monolingual speakers, they are not numerous. Speakers of indigenous languages in the US and Canada number around 230,000 (Whalen and Simons Reference Whalen and Simons2012).

In some communities, AIE is the only “Indian-related language tradition” that speakers have access to, since it is the only one that is left; in cases like this, fluency in AIE is an important social skill, its features having acquired heightened social significance (Leap Reference Leap1993: 3, emphasis in the original). But not all speakers of AIE are mono-dialectal; many speak a more standard variety of English as well, and the use of one variety or the other is often a political decision (Leap Reference Leap1993: 4).

The reasons behind this language shift are many, and differ from community to community, thus a brief summation of the history of contact between Native Americans and Europeans (specifically the English⁴ and the English-speaking descendants) north of the Rio Grande is in order. Prior to contact, there were between two and eighteen million people in what is now Canada and the United States (Calloway Reference Calloway2004: 13). Then, Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in 1492 (the English did not set up their first permanent settlement, Jamestown, until 1607). Disease, enslavement, and the destruction of communities (and the languages they spoke) started more or less immediately upon landing. Diseases were especially pernicious in that epidemics would often decimate populations well in advance of European settlement, both giving the impression that the land was “virgin” and free for the taking, and destroying languages (and other cultural components) before they could be documented. Wars between the indigenous peoples and the colonizers were also common well into the nineteenth century. Disease, while not in epidemic proportions, still plagues indigenous communities.

After 1776, Indian affairs became the burden of the newly formed US government, which assigned this task to the War Department, though it moved to the Departments of the Interior in 1849. Today, the department in charge of Indian policy is the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The wars and epidemics continued, and the US government signed several treaties with different tribes. American Indians were not US citizens but instead existed in a no-man's land between sovereign nations and regular citizens; they finally became full citizens in 1924. These treaties became important later to determine who counts as American Indian for government purposes, as explained above.

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, allowing for the forced relocation of the eastern tribes to “Indian Territory” in the west. Most notable of these removals was the Trail of Tears in 1838, where approximately 4,000 Cherokees died on a forced march to present-day Oklahoma from the Carolinas and Georgia. The reservation system that is still in existence in the United States started in the 1850s. The reservation system was always seen as suboptimal by the federal government, for whom the ultimate goal was the “civilization” (i.e. assimilation) of Native Americans. In keeping with this goal, in 1877, Congress appropriated the first funds to create schools for Native American children (Calloway Reference Calloway2004: 345). “Like the children of European immigrants, Indian children were expected to jettison their old ways and language and become English-speaking ‘Americans’” (Calloway Reference Calloway2004: 344). Boarding schools were typically placed far from the home reservations of the children, who were (often forcibly) removed from their families. In 1887, an English-only policy was instituted (Fear Reference Fear1980: 14), and speaking a heritage language was grounds for (often corporal) punishment. Most boarding schools separated children from the same tribe as a strategy to force children's use of English. This language education was part of a larger plan of transformation to “remake them as individual citizens, not tribal members” (Calloway Reference Calloway2004: 347). The boarding schools had an impact on Native American language far outside their walls: graduates of such institutions feared teaching their children anything other than English lest these children would have to endure the same humiliation and torture that their parents had endured.

The federal government did much more in the interest of “civilizing” the “savages,” though many of the government officials in charge of Indian policy were convinced they were doing what was best for a beleaguered people. In 1887, in order to show Native Americans in the US the importance of private ownership of land, the Allotment Act was passed, which divided many reservations into parcels of land that the American Indian “owners” could retain or, in many cases, sell to non-Indians. In 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act was passed that set up self-governing bodies on many reservations. Soon after, however, Indian policy in the US turned toward the termination of reservations and the special status of American Indians. To this end, the Indian Claims Commission was set up in 1946 to buy back land from tribes, and in 1956, a system of relocation was set up to move Native Americans from rural reservations to urban centers. There is an ironic consequence of the policies discussed thus far: the goal of the termination and relocation policies, along with the English-only boarding schools, had been to end the “Indian problem” through assimilation. But instead of individuals’ ties to Indian identity being weakened, a panethnic identity was created by these pressures, and the population of people claiming American Indian heritage grew rather than shrank (Lopez and Espiritu Reference Lopez and Espiritu1990; Nagel Reference Nagel1996; Nagel and Snipp Reference Nagel and Snipp1993). In 1968, the Indian Civil Rights Act was passed, and in 1975, Richard Nixon declared that the federal government would now have a policy of self-determination, allowing tribes to do what they think is best for themselves, with certain restrictions based on the fact that they are not sovereign nations but part of the United States.

The Canadian government's history with aboriginal peoples followed a similar trajectory (see Dickason Reference Dickason and Newbigging2006), with most likely similar results as far as their use of English is concerned. Waves of epidemics and wars swept through the First Nations upon contact (and for hundreds of years), decimating much of the indigenous population. Much of the initial contact was made by French fur traders in search of beaver pelts, rather than by English-speaking settlers moving west in search of land as was the case in the US. A policy of assimilation gained momentum in the nineteenth century, mostly based around what is called the Indian Act, passed in 1876. Reserves were created for First Nations to live on, and then they were broken apart for individual allotments. The Indian Act created Indian residential schools to speed the acquisition of civilization, and used force to push an English-only environment. Policies of denying religious and linguistic freedom, as well as rights to use of land for hunting were maintained into the twentieth century; aboriginal peoples were not given the right to vote until 1956. In the 1969, the Minister of Indian Affairs suggested the abolition of the Indian Act and thus the special status held by First Nations, but the relevant legislation has never been passed. Since then, First Nations have been continuing the struggle for civil rights and representation in the government.

The history of contact in the United States and Canada, as well as the sorts of policies the governments of the two countries enacted, had a large impact on language use in Native American communities. Most obvious is the extinction, or near extinction, of the diverse languages spoken before 1492. The adoption of English may seem a straightforward reaction to the events discussed above, but not all American Indians have become monolingual English speakers, and those who are English speakers do not necessarily speak a standard version of American or Canadian English. The assimilation that these policies were meant to accomplish has not been successful, and, in the last few decades, has been replaced by pro-multicultural policies and attitudes in the general public. This lack of assimilation allowed for the creation of separate varieties of English, ones that often replaced heritage languages as a locus for speakers to express American Indian identity.

AIE fits most of the criteria of a lesser-known variety (LKVE) of English as put forth by Schreier et al. (Reference Schreier, Trudgill, Schneider and Williams2010: 4) in their introduction. AIE is most definitely “a variety that is lesser known, at least to the outside world” (Schreier et al. Reference Schreier, Trudgill, Schneider and Williams2010: 4) since much of present-day American Indian culture is not understood or known to non-Indians; further, AIE “has not received much attention in the literature” (Schreier et al. Reference Schreier, Trudgill, Schneider and Williams2010: 4), especially in the last two decades, happening to coincide with the publication of American Indian English by William Leap in Reference Leap1993. Before that date, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the vast majority of the work was done by a small number of scholars: Leap, H. Guillermo Bartelt, and Susan Penfield Jasper. Of these three scholars, only Bartelt continues to work on AIE.

AIE fits many of the more specific criteria of an LKVE as well. AIE is the first language of most of its speakers, and sometimes the only code they know. AIE is considered its own variety, separate from those spoken by non-Indians, the variety spoken in school, and other varieties spoken by AIE speakers (Leap Reference Leap1993). AIE is spoken by people in “stable communities,” many of these communities being several hundred if not thousands of years old. AIE is spoken by minorities, American Indians and First Nations being some of the most marginalized people, both socially and geographically, in the US and Canada. They are among the poorest people, they are ethnically separate, and for generations they have mostly lived in reservations or reserves far outside population centers. They have also resisted outsiders’ attempts to assimilate them into the mainstream, such as allotment, termination, and relocation. AIE was not really “transmitted by settler communities or adopted by newly-formed social groups” (Schreier et al. Reference Schreier, Trudgill, Schneider and Williams2010: 4) in that many varieties are not directly derived from British English during colonial times but have more of a connection with American and Canadian English. Though there is some controversy over the exact genesis of AIE, no one would deny that language contact had a hand in its formation. AIE is also an important identity marker for many of its speakers. It is the only Native American-related code available to them because of the lack of an indigenous language in the community either through the eradication or slow depletion of the language. AIE is also a way for American Indians to identify each other, and some even claim they can tell what tribe someone is from based on their English. AIE is not, however, endangered. I argue that as long as American Indians exist, there will be AIE. I do so for two reasons. First, the isolation described above, especially the geographic isolation, promotes the existence of a separate code for American Indians. Second, since the rise of the Red Power movement in the 1960s/70s, Native American identity has earned cachet, and so any identity markers associated with it will most likely be maintained.

While AIE is a lesser-known variety of English, some studies of AIE in the US (but none, to my knowledge, in Canada) have been done, but much of the work that was done was based on data gathered in the 1960s and 1970s. The goal of much of this work was to ascertain the provenance of these features, be it interference from the indigenous language (e.g. Wolfram Reference Wolfram, Giles, Robinson and Smith1980), influence from other nonstandard varieties (e.g. Dillard Reference Dillard1972), fossilized features of second language learning (e.g. Leap Reference Leap1974), or remnants from a past English-lexifier creole or pidgin (e.g. Craig Reference Craig1991). Further, most of the research was funded by institutions, like the National Institute of Education in the case of Wolfram, Christian, Leap, and Potter (Reference Wolfram, Christian, Leap and Potter1979), that were primarily concerned with the educational application of linguistic research.

3 Features of the variety

Because AIE is not one variety of English but instead several varieties united by the ethnic character of its speakers, many features are unique to specific varieties. The focus of the present study is not features such as these but rather the large set of features that are shared among at least some varieties of AIE. Scholars have noted that there are several commonalities that run through most, if not all, varieties of AIE (Wolfram Reference Wolfram, Giles, Robinson and Smith1980; Leap Reference Leap, Bartelt, Penfield Jasper and Hoffer1982; Craig Reference Craig1991). Wolfram (Reference Wolfram, Giles, Robinson and Smith1980: 387) suggests that the common features, like those discussed below, “may unite American Indian English in opposition to other non-mainstream varieties of English.” The fact that many features are shared among varieties raises questions about the origins of these features. The causes of these similarities have been considered, though no definitive conclusion has been reached. Some believe that there was once a creole spoken by American Indians, possibly learned from escaped slaves, and that these features are the result of decreolization (Craig Reference Craig1991; Dillard Reference Dillard1972). Others believe that a common source of English – boarding and residential schools – explains these shared features (Harvey Reference Harvey and Bills1974; Spicer Reference Spicer1967; cf. Malancon and Malancon Reference Malancon, Malancon and Leap1977). Many of these features are also common in the English spoken by second language learners and thus may be the result of fossilization of such features. Finally, some of these features fall into what Chambers (Reference Chambers and Kortman2004) refers to as “vernacular universals,” where these features are common throughout most nonstandard varieties of English, a point made about AIE by Leap (Reference Leap and Leap1977c). Of the features discussed below, Chambers theorizes that consonant cluster reduction, subject–verb nonconcord, negative concord, and null copula are vernacular universals (2004: 129). However, Leap warns, “Even if two Indian English varieties appear to share certain surface-level features in common, we cannot automatically assume…that similar constructions are governed by similar underlying causes” (1982: 3).

This is not to say that all of the features discussed below are shared by non-Indians. As Leap sums it up: “in some cases, their linguistic details are quite similar to those found in the English of their non-Indian neighbors, coworkers, and classmates. More commonly, Indian English shows extensive influence from the speakers’ ancestral (or ‘native’) language tradition(s) or from other language sources and differs accordingly from non-Indian notions of ‘standard’ grammar and ‘appropriate’ speech” (Leap Reference Leap1993: 1). Varieties of AIE vary on how much they resemble non-Indian varieties; some are quite similar to those spoken by non-Indian neighbors, others heavily influenced by non-English language traditions.

I start by looking at phonological patterns in AIE, then moving onto morphosyntax, perhaps the best-studied aspect of these varieties. I then briefly discuss some of the issues of the lexicon, and finish up with a discussion of some pragmatic features of AIE.

4 Conclusion

As long as American Indians exist as a separate social entity, AIE will exist in some form. The reservation system in the US and the reserves in Canada will also lead to the survival of AIE, since it is well attested that isolation, either social or geographical, is a major factor in the creation and maintenance of dialects (Labov and Harris Reference Labov, Harris and Sankoff1986). And because it will continue to exist, more research is needed on AIE. I suggest that further work on AIE should take a particular path: new data on more communities, especially in the growing urban communities, with a focus beyond documentation to issues of identity work and changes in ethnicity. Past research was mostly conducted in the 1970s, in the western part of the United States, with an eye towards educational applications and questions of genesis and documentation.

Because most of the research that has been presented in this study dates back several decades, new research is needed to see how varieties of AIE have changed over time, during decades of changing demographics and attitudes towards Native Americans. Linguistic science has also progressed significantly since the 1970s, especially in field recording and acoustic phonetics. Present-day work on AIE can use tools such as these to better understand the workings of AIE, getting more precise data on the phonological features and a larger corpus in which to look at morphosyntactic features.

Further, the majority of the work on AIE has focused on the western half of the United States: e.g. Lakota, Navajo, Isletan, Mohave. This concentration is problematic because many Native American contact situations in the eastern United States are significantly different from those in the west. Eastern tribes were in contact with English speakers long before those in the west. Further, eastern tribes were decimated early by disease and war; they lack treaties signed between them and the United States government and thus often cannot claim the special status of many western tribes; they adopted English early on and lost their indigenous languages early, too. These differences can perhaps lead to the reliance on and adoption of cultural markers, such as linguistic features, to lay claim to an authentic American Indian identity (Coggshall Reference Coggshall2008). Further, little work has been done on Canadian aboriginal peoples (Ball et al. Reference Ball, Bernhardt and Deby2006; Ball and Bernhardt Reference Ball and Bernhardt2008), who have yet a different history with regard to colonization and the English language. Not only do these communities of AIE speakers have different histories, the English speakers around them today can have an effect on AIE. Language contact is a major force in language change and new dialect formation, and studying contact situations that have been in effect for various lengths of time enables a better understanding of the linguistic and social facts of contact.

Another important area of concern is the large and growing population of American Indians living off reservations and other rural enclaves, mainly in urban centers throughout North America. In fact, in the US, more than half of all people of indigenous descent live in cities. Urban Indian culture differs greatly from that found on reservations and elsewhere (e.g. Lobo and Peters Reference Lobo and Peters2001). So far, only one small study on urban Indians has been published; Bartelt (Reference Bartelt1993) looked at a speech at a powwow in Los Angeles. Perhaps the most important factor is that urban communities not only include people from many tribes but also people of many other ethnicities. This change in environment may lead to ethnic change. American Indian ethnicity has undergone extensive reorganization since the 1970s (Nagel Reference Nagel1996), most strikingly in the advent of a pan-Indian identity for many Native Americans, particularly in urban centers (Lopez and Espiritu Reference Lopez and Espiritu1990).

These changes in demographics and ethnicity suggest that there may be repercussions in AIE. Recent studies (Coggshall Reference Coggshall2008; Rowicka Reference Rowicka2005) suggest that the strict compartmentalization by tribe (as described above in Section 3) may be deteriorating, and that certain features appear to be spreading from one variety of AIE to another (see Leap Reference Leap, Bartelt, Penfield Jasper and Hoffer1982, Reference Leap1993). This change may be a result of panethnicity (Lopez and Espiritu Reference Lopez and Espiritu1990), where the scope of identity expands to include a larger “Indian” identity on top of a tribal-level identity. As the scope of identity changes, the language used to express this identity may change as well, leading to a convergence of different varieties of AIE. Leap (Reference Leap1993), on the other hand, has stated categorically that there is no general AIE variety and that there will never be one. Only further research can answer this question.