Doctoral Dissertation Research: The English of American Indians in New York City

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This dissertation project will investigate the English spoken by American Indians in the New York City dialect area to better understand their creation of a pan-Indian ethnolinguistic identity. More generally, this project uses technological and methodological innovations to explore the relationship between language and different levels of identity, particularly as expressed through socially salient phonetic variation. The research will take the study of American Indian English (AIE) out of rural isolation and into the city, where over half of all American Indians live today. Previous scholarship, mostly based on fieldwork from the 1970s in rural communities, claimed that each tribe had a particular version of American Indian English, and borrowing between varieties did not occur. More recent scholarship on similar communities challenges these conclusions. The proposed study will add new evidence to better understand this debate. Because urban Indians are more likely to identify as a single panethnic group, the hypothesis is that they are developing pan-Indian English features, as opposed to the tribe-specific features found in past studies of rural Indian communities. The more integrated that speakers are in the panethnic network, the more likely they are to use the same features of American Indian English. At the same time, those speakers with a strong attachment to their New York identity are expected to use New York City English features to a greater extent. Twenty-five adult speakers who are integrated into the New York City American Indian social network will be interviewed. The phonological features to be examined using instrumental sociophonetic analysis include one traditional feature of New York City English, namely the raising and in-gliding of the vowel in "caught", and two features suggested to be spreading among varieties of AIE: a distinctive prosodic rhythm, and the replacement of the voiceless oral stops /p, t, k/ with glottal stops.