Native American English accent

[Mike Salovesh]

Since I've only heard the English of a non-random collection of U.S.
Indians, I can't comment directly . . .  but I'm quite familiar with a
parallel phenomenon.

There are, quite literally, millions of people in Mexico and Guatemala
whose first language is one of a myriad of Mesoamerican languages and
dialects.  In Guatemala, something on the order of half the population
consists of native speakers of over 20 different languages of the Mayan
family.  Immediately adjacent areas of Mexico provide a home for another
ten or so in the Mayan family.  Moving west and north, there are at
least a dozen languages of other families, each of which has a hundred
thousand native speakers or more.  There are many languages with smaller
numbers of native speakers in central and northern Mexico.

Some Mesoamerican language families have time depths for separations
between languages that reach back three thousand years or more.  Despite
my recent comment that mutual comprehensibility may be a function of
values and attitudes rather than overlapping linguistic features, I
can't imagine anyone concluding that the Nahuatl of Central Mexico can
be understood by any monolingual speaker of any living Mayan language.
There are scores of languages in Mesoamerica that have to be seen as
mutually incomprehensible.

More and more native speakers of Mesoamerican languages are getting
fully competent in Spanish as a second language.

Native speakers of Mesoamerican languages speak varieties of Spanish
that sound highly similar, even when the Mesoamerican languages in
volved are mutually incomprehensible.  I haven't made a formal study,
but here are a few features I hear in the Spanish spoken by Indians
whose first language is Mesoamerican:

1) Distinctive supersegmental tone patterns  that are quite different
from those of native Spanish speakers.

A lot of Mayan languages probably had phonemic tones 500 years ago.  As
far as I know, only one contemporary dialect of a modern Mayan language
has phonemic tone: the Tzotzil of San Bartolomé de los Llanos. An
analysis of the structure of that dialect's phonemic tones is part of a
doctoral dissertation of Harvey B. Sarles in the latter half of the
1960s.  I don't recall any good demonstration that tones are phonemic in
any other Mesoamerican language.  Nonetheless, the supersegmental tone
patterns in the Spanish spoken by native speakers of widely different
Mesoamerican languages show remarkable similarities.

2) Widespread shifts in the allomorphic range of some phonemes and
substitution of sound combinations not normal in standard Spanish.
Since I haven't done a formal study, I'm not sure which features are
restricted to native speakers of a single language or family of
languages, and which ones characterize all dialects of Spanish spoken by
Mesoamerican Indians.  I am sure that there is a distinctive,
pan-Mesoamerican variety of Spanish spoken by many whose first language
was a member of one of the families of Mesoamerican languages. I don't
know all the rules which specify how this dialect differs systematically
from standard Spanish. Instead of trying to describe all the rules, I'll
take one example.

Consider the sentence written as "donde está" in standard Spanish.  The
sentence will sound like the way Indians in several parts of Mesoamerica
pronounce it if modified according to these rules:

A) Substitute glottal stop for word-initial /d/.
B) Elide final syllable for words ending in /n/ plus (front?) voiced
stops.
C) Change word-initial combinations of /es-/ or /is-/ plus C (any
consonant) to word-initial /s-/ plus C. cluster. (Standard Spanish does
not have word-initial clusters of that sort. They are common in the
Spanish of native speakers of Mesoamerican languages.)
D) Subsitute "sh" for /s/ at the beginning of consonant clusters

The end product is /'onnshta/.  I have heard it from Nahuatl speakers in
Guerrero, Zapotec speakers in Oaxaca, Tzotil and Tzeltal speakers in
Chiapas, Quekchi speakers in Guatemala, and elsewhere.

All this preliminary, impressionistic, and, in all probability,
inaccurate in much of its detail.  As far as I know, there is not yet
any detailed study of "Indian Spanish" as such.

- mike salovesh                    <salovesh at niu.edu>
PEACE !!!