English Prosody and Native American Ethnic Identity

Across the continent, many Native American and Canadian First Nations people are linguistically constructing a shared ethnic identity through English dialect features. Although many tribes and regions have their own localized English features (e.g., Leap 1993, Bowie et al. 2013, Dannenberg and Wolfram 1998, Coggshall 2008), we suggest that certain features may be shared across much wider distances, particularly prosodic features. Our study is based on cultural insiders’ research, analysis, and interpretation of data recorded in Native communities on Standing Rock Reservation, Northwest Territories, Canada, and among the Native community at Dartmouth (Hanover, New Hampshire). By investigating speakers from diverse tribes and regions, we find evidence that Native identity is indexed to English prosodic features: contour pitch accent (L*+H), high-rising, mid, or high-falling terminals, lengthened utterance-final syllables, and syllable timing. In this way, modern Native Americans are using English, a foreign language, to construct a shared ethnic identity across vast distances

The Prosodic Rhythm of Two Varieties of Native American English

Varieties of Native American English, especially those spoken by groups east of the Mississippi River, have been relatively underrepresented in the description of ethnolinguistic variation in American English, and almost completely disregarded in terms of prosody, arguably one of one of the most striking features of some ethnolinguistic varieties. This paper examines one aspect of prosody, rhythm, using the Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) as applied previously to British and Singapore English (Low, Grabe, & Nolan 2001), African American and Southern English (Thomas & Carter 2006), and Hispanic English (Carter 2005). PVI, which normalizes for overall speaking rate, compares adjacent syllables, where a greater difference corresponds with a more stress-timed language and a smaller difference corresponds with a more syllable-timed language. The analysis focuses on Eastern Cherokee English as spoken in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Lumbee English as spoken in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina. Though both groups are primarily rural, their backgrounds vary. The Eastern Cherokee are a federally recognized tribe with knowledge of their ancestral language but small numbers (about 6,000). They are the only ethnic minority of note in their region surrounded by European Americans. The Lumbee, on the other hand, have much larger numbers (over 46,000), making them approximately equal in number to their African American and European American cohorts; they are also the largest tribe east of the Mississippi. The Lumbee have no current ancestral language, as they are most likely the result of an ethnogenic mix of several tribes decimated by disease and war after the arrival of Europeans. In fact, they were discovered in the 1730s speaking English. They are federally recognized without entitlements, placing them in an indeterminate position with respect to their status. Previous studies of these two groups (Anderson 1999, Coggshall 2006, Schilling-Estes 2000, Wolfram & Dannenberg 1999) have shown that, while the Eastern Cherokee differ little from their non-Indian cohorts in vowel quality and syntax, the Lumbee do differ from their non-Indian cohorts. The rhythm data, however, show a different pattern. Eastern Cherokee English is much more syllable-timed than European Americans, but Lumbee English does not differ from either their European or African American cohorts\u27 English, though there is a slight shift towards more syllable-timing in the younger speakers. The pattern among the Eastern Cherokee is most likely the result of a substrate influence from Cherokee passed down to the monolingual English generations. On the other hand, have not had a native speaker of the Lumbee language or languages for many generations and, indeed, we do not know the nature of the prosodic structure of such languages. Thus, the prosodic rhythm of Lumbee English is unsurprising. This initial inquiry into suprasegmental aspects of varieties of Native American English suggests that prosodic rhythm may be a locus of a pan-Native American English ethnolinguistic variety, much like the glottal stop as proposed by Rowicka (2005). The detailed comparison of these varieties further offers an enhanced understanding of issues such as substrate influence and dialect contact

Post-focal compression as a prosodic cue for focus perception in Hindi

Focus in Hindi is prosodically marked by means of post-focal compression (PFC) and the present study examines whether PFC is a prosodic cue that is functionally used by listeners to perceive the focus. In a production study with 30 native Hindi speakers uttering six different ambiguous contrastive ellipsis structures PFC occurred after the focused indirect object, thought not after a focused direct object. These structures served as input for a forced-choice sentence-completion experiment, in which 18 listeners listened to sentence fragments of the matrix clause and were asked to decide which of the two possible objects contrasts (direct object or indirect object) would correctly complete the sentence. Results show that if PFC was absent listeners were unable to choose the intended sentence completion. If PFC was present correct sentence completion judgements increased significantly. Thus PFC is a cue for focus perception in Hindi. Based on the functional load of the pitch register in Hindi, we argue that pitch register represents a further intonational category to consider, at least for languages like Hindi

Post-focus compression in Brahvi and Balochi

Previous research has shown that post-focus compression (PFC) - the reduction of pitch range and intensity after a focused word in an utterance, is a robust means of marking focus, but it is present only in some languages. The presence of PFC appears to follow language family lines. The present study is a further exploration of the distribution of PFC by investigating Brahvi, a Dravidian language, and Balochi, an Indo-Iranian language. Balochi is predicted to show PFC given its presence in other Iranian languages. Dravidian languages have not been studied for prosodic focus before and they are not related to any languages with PFC. We recorded twenty native speakers from each language producing declarative sentences in different focus conditions. Acoustic analyses showed that, in both languages, post-focus f 0 and other correlates were significantly reduced relative to baseline neutral-focus sentences, but post-focus lowering of f 0, and intensity was greater in magnitude in Balochi than in Brahvi. The Balochi results confirm our prediction, while the Brahvi results offer the first evidence of PFC in a Dravidian language. The finding of PFC in a Dravidian language is relevant to a postulated origin of PFC, which is related to the controversial Nostratic Macrofamily hypothesis

On Syllable-Timed Rhythm and Stress-Timed Rhythm in World Englishes : Revisited

This paper draws attention to the tendency for stress-timed rhythm to be replaced by syllable-timed rhythm in a large number of new varieties of English. After a brief introduction to these different types ofrhythm, we investigate a number of varieties of English that have shifted in this respect: Standard Nigerian English, New Zealand English, South African Black English, Hong Kong English and other varieties. The main reason for the changes in these varieties seems to be the influence of neighbouring or coexisting languages,while the change is started or catalysed, we suspect, by the general unmarked status of syllable rhythm as compared to stress rhythm, as borne out by language acquisition. Our study shows that (i) prosodic features are susceptible to borrowing just like lexical items, segmental phonology, morphosyntactic constructions orsemantic distinctions and (ii) it is possible and desirable to make distinctions with respect to markedness in the realm of prosod