AIPE

[Emanuel J. Drechsel]

Dear Dave, Sally, and all:

Over the years as I dealt with Mobilian Jargon and other Native American
contact media, I have indeed come to question the status of American Indian
Pidgin English (AIPE) as a true pidgin. I have presented it instead as a
broken English or "an amalgam of partial native-language replacements
(including English relexifications of Native American speech), stereotypical
presentations, and superimposed hypercorrections by Europeans, who took
considerable freedom in documenting Native American speech and perhaps even
drew on widely attested forms of non-Indian Pidgin English as models." Some
telling evidence for the use of AIPE as a literary medium comes from a quote
on Catawba, a native language of southeastern North America, or a medium
based on it: "We have endeavored to put into the Indian-English, as more
suitable to the subject, and more accessible to the reader, that dialogue
which was spoken in the most musical Catawba." (W. Gilmore Simms, _The
Wigwam and the Cabin_ (New York: W.J. Widdleton, 1856 [revised edition], p.
391). I surmise that the authors of documents with AIPE have taken such
poetic license again and again. For further details, see pp. 1222-5 of my
article that David cites below and that appeared in the _Atlas of Languages
of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas_,
edited by Stephen A. Wurm, Peter Mühlhäusler, and Darrell T. Tryon (Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 1996). Much of the same discussion also appears on pp.
23-28 of my book _Mobilian Jargon: Linguistic and Sociohistorical Aspects of
a Native American Pidgin_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
    Such a conclusion is not surprising when one considers the great variety
of Native American languages and contact media based on them that existed in
North America through the 19th century and into the 20th. It is worth
recalling that English as either a contact medium or national language did
not come dominate in North America until the second half of the 19th
century, if not even later. In this light, it appears increasingly unlikely
that until the 20th century, there existed a single, fairly uniform
English-based pidgin spoken by Native Americans from the East Coast to the
West Coast. Yet I draw on another case for analogous argument, the Hawaiian
Islands: Long hailed by creolists as a bastion of English pidgin-creole
speaking since shortly after contact with James Cook in 1778, the Hawaiian
Islands actually did not become so until the late 19th century or the early
20th century. What instead dominated as interethnic medium throughout almost
the entire 19th century was a Hawaiian-based pidgin, which came to be
relexified more and more by English only around the turn of the century
after the American take-over of the Islands. For further documentation, see
Julian M. Roberts, "Pidgin Hawaiian: a Sociohistorical Study" in _Journal of
Pidgin and Creole Languages_ 10: 1-56, 1995.
    With these findings comes an important methodological conclusions: Let's
not project back what applied in recent history into early colonial periods,
when in spite of obvious differences in power the colonizers did not always
dominate native peoples, but the latter played a central role in the
foreigners' survival overseas and often maintained the upper hand much
longer than conventional history teaches us.

Aloha, Manny


----- Original Message -----
From: David Robertson <drobert at TINCAN.TINCAN.ORG>
To: <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: 12 March 1999 22:32
Subject: "American Indian Pidgin English"


> Ayaq-ayaq,
>
> Reading Drechsel ("North American contact languages of the contiguous
> United States", 1996), it would appear that AIPE is not easily established
> as an entity subject to investigation.
>
> In other words, it's difficult to speak of AIPE...though one feels there's
> something there...well, I must sign off.  More later.
>
> Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: Sally Thomason <thomason at UMICH.EDU>
To: <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: 13 March 2000 03:47
Subject: Re: "American Indian Pidgin English"

> David and all,
>
>    I haven't seen thta particular article (or book?) of
> Drechsel's, but if he says that, he's mistaken.  AIPE has
> been the subject of a number of scholarly papers, some of
> them very good.  It's true that the number of grammatical
> features that cam be definitely established for AIPE
> (American Indian Pidgin English) is relatively small -- the
> documentation of the pidgin isn't super -- but there's enough
> data to show what some of the grammar was like.  The
> transitive suffix -em that we were talking about earlier is
> perhaps the most interesting feature, since it's both systematic
> in the AIPE documents and very different from English grammar.
>
>   -- Sally


----- Original Message -----
From: David Robertson <drobert at TINCAN.TINCAN.ORG>
To: <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: 14 March 1999 06:13
Subject: Re: "American Indian Pidgin English"

> Lhush san,
>
> >From the same article by Emanuel Drechsel [pg. 1223]:
>
> "What appears as Pidgin English in AIPE actually was an amalgam
> of partial native-language replacements (including English relexi-
> fications of Native American speech), stereotypical presentations,
> and superimposed hypercorrections by Europeans, who took consider-
> able freedom in documenting Native American speech and perhaps
> even drew on widely attested forms of non-Indian Pidgin English
> as models.  By all indications, AIPE was not a genuine pidgin,
> but a 'broken' English that had literally been put into the
> Indians' mouth[s] and that recalls the modern analogy of Indian
> parts in Western novels, comic strips, and movies.  These have
> frequently distorted Native American speech for the purpose of
> rendering it intelligible to their audience...."
>
> --By the way, one point in the above quotation touches on an idea I've
> seen considered in private discussions:  Did those who had traveled
> extensively by sea, to places like West Africa, the Caribbean, China, and
> Polynesia, bring an understanding of a perceived widespread Pidgin English
> to the Northwest, and attempt to use it with Indian people?  That is one
> way of accounting for alternants (in _Kamloops Wawa_) such as "baibai" for
> "alki", "katchem" for "tlap", "washem" for "mamuk wash".--
>
> Drechsel does offer cites for several investigations of AIPE:
>
> Flanigan, Beverly Olson 1981, i.e. "American Indian English in history and
> literature: the evolution of a pidgin from reality to stereotype."
> Doctoral diss., Indiana U., Bloomington.
>
> Brandt, Elizabeth & Christopher MacCrate 1982, i.e. "Make like seem heep
> Injin': pidginization in the southwest."  _Ethnohistory_ 29:201-220.
>
> Leap, William L. 1977, i.e. "The study of American Indian English:  an
> introduction to the issues" in William L. Leap (ed.), Studies in
> Southwestern Indian English.  San Antonio:  Trinity U. Press, 3-20.
>
> ---- 1982, i.e. "The study of Indian English in the U.S. Southwest:
> retrospect and prospect" in Florence Barkin, Elizabeth Brandt, and Jacob
> Ornstein-Galicia (eds.), Bilingualism and language contact:  Spanish,
> English, and Native American languages.  New York:  Teachers College
> Press, 101-119.

> Bartelt, Guillermo, Susan Penfield-Jasper, & Bates Hoffer 1982, i.e.
> Essays in Native American English" San Antonio:  Trinity U. Press.
>
>
> LhaXayEm,
> Dave



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