American Indian English

Vowels The phonemic contrasts between front vowels in standard English are not always maintained in American Indian dialects of English. For example, Navajo English may have Lexical set|, , or mergers, particularly word-medially. Isleta English maintains these contrasts, though according to different patterns than standard English. In the English of all Colorado River Indians (namely, Mohave, Hopi, and Navajo), front vowels tend to shift, often one degree lower than standard English vowels. Old speakers of Lumbee English share the vowel, and some other pronunciation and vocabulary features, in common with Outer Banks English, as well as some grammatical features in common with Appalachian English and African-American Vernacular English. Consonants Th-stopping is common in Cheyenne and Tsimshian English, and certainly many other varieties of Native American English: replacing initial and with and , respectively. Cheyenne and Navajo English, among others, follow General American patterns of glottal replacement of t, plus both t- and d-glottalization at the ends of syllables. The result is Brad fed the wet cat sounding like ''Bra' fe' the we' ca'''. Pitch, intonation, and stress Features of prosody substantially contribute to differences between American Indian and General American accents. ==Grammar==

American Indian English shows enormous heterogeneity in terms of grammatical structures. As a whole, it characteristically uses plural and possessive markers less than standard English (for example, one of the dogs is here). Navajo, Northern Ute, and many other varieties of Indian English may simply never use plural markers for nouns. Lack of other verb markers is commonly reported in Indian speech too, like an absence of standard English's "-ed" or "-s" endings for verb tense. Verbs like be, have, and get are also widely deleted, and some varieties of American Indian English add plural markers to mass nouns: thus, furnitures, homeworks, foods, etc. In general, verb constructions within American Indian English are distinctive and even vary wildly from tribe to tribe. Grammatical gender in pronouns (she, her, him, etc.) does not always align with the natural gender of a referent, particularly at the ends of sentences, in some American Indian English. For example, this is greatly documented in Mohave and Cheyenne English. Mohave and Ute English even delete implied pronouns altogether, as in ''I didn't know where you were, was too busy to look, waited for you at school, but weren't there.'' ==See also==