Native American English accent

[Anne Lambert]

My stepdaughter, who spent much of her childhood on a Sioux reservation in
South Dakota, used to have a faintly Canadian accent (Raising).  When I
questioned her, she said this was common in the Sioux speech there and
might be the result of Canadian teacher and missionary presence.  This kind
of influence could be found in other Native American groups as well,
couldn't it?

Mike Salovesh wrote:

> 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 !!!