Stability and change in native American Indian English
the case of Lumbee English in North Carolina
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18309/ranpoll.v52iesp.1586Keywords:
Native American English, Tri-ethnic language contact, Oppositional identity, Remnant variety, Language accommodationAbstract
This description considers the English variety of the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina, the largest group of Native American Indians east of the Mississippi River. They lost their ancestral language generations ago, and have lived in a relatively stable, tri-ethnic, isolated rural context for several generations with African Americans and European Americans. We examine two prominent morphosyntactic structures, the use of perfective I’m in I’m been there and the remorphologization of was and were based on polarity (e. g. It weren’t me, and they was here) and one less-salient phonetic process, the fronting of the boot vowel. The morphosyntactic structures indicate traits of a regionalized remnant variety that set the Lumbee apart from their cohort varieties. The phonetic trait, however, shows changes over recent generations as the Lumbee move from an alignment with African Americans to one with European Americans. We explain the realignment of the phonetic trait away from African American Language in terms of an oppositional identity, in which the Lumbee maintain their distinctiveness as an ethnolinguistic group that is neither African American nor European American, but especially not African American.
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