American Indian English Research Articles

Does race impact speech perception? An account of accented speech in two different multilingual locales

Upon hearing someone’s speech, a listener can access information such as the speaker’s age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, an open question is whether living in different locales modulates how listeners use these factors to assess speakers’ speech. Here, an audio-visual test was used to measure whether listeners’ accentedness judgments and intelligibility (i.e., speech perception) can be modulated depending on racial information in faces that they see. American, British, and Indian English were used as three different English varieties of speech. These speech samples were presented with either a white female face or a South Asian female face. Two experiments were completed in two locales: Gainesville, Florida (USA) and Montreal, Quebec (Canada). Overall, Montreal listeners were more accurate in their transcription of sentences (i.e., intelligibility) compared to Gainesville listeners. Moreover, Gainesville listeners’ ability to transcribe the same spoken sentences decreased for all varieties when listening to speech paired with South Asian faces. However, seeing a white or a South Asian face did not impact speech intelligibility for the same spoken sentences for Montreal listeners. Finally, listeners’ accentedness judgments increased for American English and Indian English when the visual information changed from a white face to a South Asian face in Gainesville, but not in Montreal. These findings suggest that visual cues for race impact speech perception to a greater degree in locales with greater ecological diversity.

Now You See Me, Now You Mishear Me: Raciolinguistic accounts of speech perception in different English varieties

ABSTRACT Listeners can access information about a speaker such as age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background upon hearing their speech. However, it is still not clear if listeners use these factors to assess speakers’ speech. Here, an audio-visual (matched-guise) test is used to measure whether listeners’ accentedness judgments can be modulated depending on the type of face that they see. American and Indian English were used as different English varieties and presented with either a White female face or a South Asian female face. Results show that listeners’ accentedness judgments increased for Indian English compared to American English. Importantly, the increase in accentedness judgments was also observed when both American English and Indian English were presented with a South Asian face compared to a White face. These findings suggest that linguistic evaluations are modulated by non-linguistic factors and that speech perception is socially gated.

Attitudes Towards Exogenous and Endogenous Uses of English: Ugandan’s Judgements of English Structures in Varieties of English

Uganda is a former British protectorate, where English has contributed to the country’s linguistic ecology since 1894, when the British established a protectorate over the area of the Buganda kingdom. Over time, Ugandan English has developed as a nativised second language variety, spoken by Uganda’s indigenous population. At the same time, due to migrations, globalisation and the influence of international media and the Internet, its speakers have increasingly been in contact with varieties other than British English: American English, Indian English, Kenyan English, and Nigerian English may all influence Ugandan English. This paper looks at how Ugandan English can be conceptualised as a variety shaped by other varieties. It reports on the results of acceptability tests carried out with 184 informants in the North, the Central and the West of Uganda and discusses how speakers assess individual grammatical structures used in Ugandan English and in those varieties they are potentially in contact with.

The Effects of Communication Media and Culture on Deception Detection Accuracy

As the world “gets smaller” and more people engage in cross-cultural communications, their ability to successfully separate truth from deception can be critically important. Yet it is challenging. While deceptive communication has been studied for decades, some areas are not well understood. In particular, two areas that could benefit from further research concern the effects of cultural differences and communication media on deception and its detection. Building on developments in theories of deception and its detection, we examine the question: How do differences in culture between senders and receivers affect deception detection, especially where the deceptive communication occurs across different media? To address this question, stimulus materials from recorded interviews were created featuring participants from the United States, Spain, and India. Three stimulus sets were created, one each in American English, Spanish, and Indian English, and each consisting of 32 interview snippets. Half of the snippets were honest and half were dishonest. Each snippet represented one of four media: full audio-visual, video only, audio only, and text only. Veracity judges were also recruited from the same three countries as the interview participants, to independently observe and evaluate the communication both within their culture and across other cultures. Evidence was found that different combinations of cultural and media effects affected the accuracy of deception detection.

The Meaning of Written English: A Place to Dream as One Pleases

I examine Rey Chow's assertion that the process of racialization parallels the challenge of coming to terms with language. In 2011, Anthony Webster coedited the American Indian Culture and Research Journal special issue “American Indian Languages in Unexpected Places” and called for an extension of his work on Blackhorse Mitchell's novel Miracle Hill: The Story of a Navajo Boy. My argument looks at writing as a matter of choices the writer makes (following William L. Leap's work in American Indian English) and the requirements expected of readers. Moving away from the error analyses and ethnographic readings that afflict racialized readings, I place Webster's work on Navajo poetics and intimate grammars into conversation with postcolonial theory and language revitalization work concerned with similar questions: what does it mean to write, and what does it mean to write in English? I argue that Mitchell resists the subjugation required of a colonial education through his refusal to write like a native speaker. He figures writing as a place to dream as one pleases; writing is the miracle on Miracle Hill. Readers can locate his choices throughout the text, particularly in his poem, “The Drifting Lonely Seed,” his chapter on creative writing, and his speech at his grandmother's graveside.

Phonological consideration of World Englishes in interpreter training: pedagogical suggestions based on an experimental study of consecutive interpretation

ABSTRACTThe present study explores incorporation of World Englishes in graduate-level interpreter training courses by investigating the impact of different English varieties on student interpreters’ consecutive interpreting (CI) processes. With the spread of English around the world, non-native speakers of English are increasing rapidly and their unique features distinct from those of native speakers may cause interpreting problems. Reflecting the diversity of unique features across different varieties, the study applies the concept of World Englishes, which can be classified into three circles: the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle. The study takes American English, Indian English (INE) and Chinese English (CHE) to represent each circle. An interpreting experiment was conducted on student interpreters to understand which specific phonological features of World Englishes cause difficulties in students’ performances of CI. The result reveals that unique features of INE and CHE affect the CI performance of student interpreters. In light of the findings, the present study offers suggestions for including elements of World Englishes in interpreter training courses.

Our Stolen Grandmother: The Entanglement of Slavery and Colonization in Anna Lee Walters's <em>Ghost Singer</em>

Our Stolen GrandmotherThe Entanglement of Slavery and Colonization in Anna Lee Walters's Ghost Singer Reid Gómez What do we know, really? What can we know, finally? But more importantly, how do we begin to articulate these stories, their stories, this (un)knowing? These conversations take very seriously the question of the absence, or some would even say, the impediments, in the work of mourning the millions of dead in the aftermath of slavery. How do you tell a story that must be told and yet cannot be told? A number of scholars, including Saidiya Hartman, suggest that we begin by "not telling." Patricia J. Saunders, "Fugitive Dreams of iaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman" That life is complicated is a fact of great analytical importance. Patricia J. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor [End Page 70] REVISITING THE SCENE OF SUBJECTION WITHOUT REPLICATINGTHE GRAMMAR OF VIOLENCE This article has been presented as a paper at a conference, and it has been read by six peer reviewers and two editors. Every version has failed to meet readers' desires for recognizable signposts and context and a cogent argument. My work cannot get past readings tuned to error analysis. Some have suggested that I give up and go back to writing fiction, and others suggest that I find a writing mentor to assist with my obvious and grievous errors in clarity, grace, and style. Clearly, writing is very hard for me—readers say that one thing my writing says eloquently and clearly is that I struggle. I have faced the critical and creative divide for over twenty years now and have recently strained to write everyone else's paper. That paper—the one demanded from me—is impossible to write. Michelle Wright begins the Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology with a discussion about the immediate cogency provided by linear progress narratives.1 There are rules for how we present knowledge and how we can narrate ourselves and our findings. We are meant to subordinate our research, summarize and evaluate the research of others, and not violate the rules of standard American English. I will return to Wright's work throughout this piece, but I begin here to name the way a desire for linear progressive arguments shapes what is thought of as convincing, believable, relevant, and pertinent—coarsely, what is said to be good writing. I start here in partial explanation for my recent and painful struggle with the writing process. Many will say it is my skill set that limits my work at this moment, and others know it is also the content. I work on slavery and language. Wright asks us to work in an epiphenomenal now that requires us to locate ourselves in space, on land, before beginning our analytical project. I have learned most about writing in two areas of life: through my work on slavery and in my work with sixth graders. At this moment, I point out the several failures inherent in linear progress narrative techniques, failures Wright describes as the assumption of fixed origins, the establishment of cause and effect, and the linkage of linear time within a single body.2 I will return to these as they relate to my subject—the novel Ghost Singer and slavery among the Navajo—in a moment, but I point to them now to indicate the challenge I continue to face in my attempt to write this piece in a way that does not replicate the violence it describes. Reading William Leap's work on American Indian English and remembering my own teaching of Ghost Singer to sixth graders, I have found some useful frames to introduce this writing to readers. Leap cautions readers to remember that the content in such nonstandard English compositions, like my own, "require[s] familiarity with the whole [End Page 71] text, and not just individual segments." Information is "inter-related and inter-dependent."3 This describes what I experience in terms of a failure to provide context: the context I provide goes unrecognized. These same writers, whom I am proud to align myself with, hold their text together by "coordinated imagery not rhetorical...

American Indian English Language Learners: Misunderstood and under-served

AbstractEnglish Language Learners (ELLs) represent the fastest growing segment of pre-K-12 students in the United States. Currently, Montana has the highest percentage of ELLs who are American Indian/Alaska Native. Although there is tremendous linguistic diversity among students, more than 80% of ELLs in the US speak Spanish as their first language. This is not the case in Montana, where 80% of ELLs are American Indians who do not necessarily speak their heritage languages; yet, their academic English skills are inadequate to support content mastery. Students whose first language is an American Indian language and who are learning English as a second language (ESL) are easier to identify as ELLs. Students who do not speak a heritage language but have not acquired academic English proficiency are harder to identify. This unique group of ELLs had their English acquisition framed by parents/grandparents or guardians themselves who were ELLs who did not fully acquire Standard English and currently speak and m...

Perceptions of World Englishes Accents in English Phonetics Instruction of China

With the notion of World Englishes (WE) accepted in the academia, the past decade has witnessed ten studies or so conducted to scrutinize how English learners of China perceptually evaluate English varieties. Those studies, however, seldom explore the juncture between learners’ attitudes toward accent varieties of English and their expectations of English phonetics instruction. Additionally, they primarily draw quantitative data from surveys of large samples without providing in-depth viewpoints from learners themselves. This study aimed to investigate Chinese tertiary-level English learners’ attitudes toward WE accents and how they view accents situated in English phonetics instruction with cross-validated research methods including an accent recognition test, an attitudinal experiment, a questionnaire survey, and semi-structured interviews. Its participants were 64 sophomore English majors at a Chinese university; the accents examined were American English (AmE), British English (BrE), China English (ChE), Australian English, Indian English, and Korean English. Results indicate that students could recognize AmE and BrE better than other accents and that they identified with BrE most, but preferred to imitate AmE and welcome Americans as their phonetics teachers. Results also show students’ propensity for setting a native speaker norm, rather than adopting ChE as a model, at phonetics class. Based on the findings, the study concluded that nowadays teachers for English majors in China still need to adhere to the native speaker model in English phonetics instruction, and meanwhile, expose their students to various WE accents in order to facilitate their English phonetics learning and cultivate their awareness of WE.

Voice onset time in Indian English-accented speech

The purpose of this study was to determine possible differences in voice onset time (VOT) between speakers of standard American English (AE) and Indian English (IE) in a continuous speech context. The participants were 20 AE speakers, who were native to the Northeastern Pennsylvania region, and 20 IE speakers from the Indian subcontinent who had been residing in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Each subject read a phonetically balanced passage in a comfortable and natural speaking voice, and the recordings were analysed using a combination of waveform and spectrographic analyses. Results indicate that a reduced +VOT appears to characterise IE accent in comparison to AE. In addition, a difference in VOT between genders was observed in AE speakers but not in IE speakers.

Effect of linguistic background on convergence of prosodic rhythm

Speech patterns of the interlocutors become more similar to each other over the course of an interaction. These spontaneous speech adaptations, or phonetic convergence (PC), have been demonstrated for segmental features, such as vowels and voice onset times (VOT) and for suprasegmental features, such as stress. In this study, speaker adaptations to speech rhythm are examined before and after an interactive map task. Using American English and Indian English speakers, convergence was measured using the centroid of the envelope modulation spectrum (EMS + centroid, Rao & Smiljanic, 2011). This spectral measure of rhythm goes beyond considering consonantal and vocalic duration variability, as used in the traditional rhythm measures, and includes information about syllable prominence, stressed and unstressed syllable variation and distribution, and pauses and disfluencies. This research will allow us to examine whether language background has an effect on convergence of global speech properties, such as linguistic rhythm. The results of this study add to our current knowledge of features that are subject to imitation in the speech of dialogue partners.

Prosodic and segmental conversion between speakers of different dialects.

Previous work has found that speakers converge to each other’s production, as evaluated for acoustic properties of segments and in perceptual tasks [S. Fowler, J. Phonetics 25, 421–426 (1995); Pardo, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 2382–2393 (2006); Tobin, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125, 2757 (2009)]. Little is known about convergence on prosodic properties [L. Schweitzer, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 128, 2458 (2010)]. An experiment is presented that examines how interaction between native speakers of British English and American English affects segmental and prosodic properties. The synchronous speech paradigm (Cummins, ARLO, 3, 7–11 (2002); Z. Cummins Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003 (2003), pp. 777–780), where two speakers read sentences at the same time, is used. Dyads consisting of one British and one American speaker read a short story that contained four words where the two dialects differ in stress pattern and ten target words where the dialects differ in vowels. The following variables are examined: vowel formant structure, vowel duration, VOT, F0 contours, stress pattern, phrasing, and pitch accent. The goal is to investigate how speakers converge to each other’s speech, and whether segmental and prosodic properties converge to the same degree. Data for dyads consisting of speakers of American English and Indian English are currently being collected.

Language use, and language policy and planning in Hong Kong

This monograph provides an overview of the language situation in Hong Kong from a historical perspective. Hong Kong has evolved in the past 167 years from a small fishing port to an international financial centre which forms part of a financial network hailed by Time Magazine as Ny.Lon.Kong (i.e. New York-London-Hong Kong). Hong Kong has gone through changes of sovereignty twice, once in 1842 as a Chinese territory ceded to Britain after the first Opium War, and a second time in 1997 as a British colony returned to China. It is a micro polity with no natural resources except its deep harbour. Economically, Hong Kong has gradually developed from a fishing port when British settlement began in 1841, to an entrepôt during 1945–1950s, to a manufacturing hub during 1960–1970s, to an international financial centre since the 1980s. The historical, political and economic development has had a great impact on the language situation in Hong Kong. Its language community started with two separate monolingual groups: one consisting of local Chinese speaking Cantonese and other Chinese dialects, and the other composed of British colonists speaking English. Because of language spread and language shift as a result of political, economic and social changes, the monolingual group of Chinese speakers has become trilingual, speaking Cantonese, English and Putonghua, whereas the monolingual group of English speakers has expanded to include native speakers of such other English varieties as American English, Australian English, Canadian English, Indian English and Singaporean English. In addition, there is a large group of minorities composed of bilingual speakers of English and a south Asian language. Although the development of language use is a natural process, it can be influenced by the government's language policy and planning. In 1997 there was a major political change, and Hong Kong, a capitalist city that practised a free economy for 155 years, was handed back to a socialist regime in China and now functions as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC) under the ‘One Country Two Systems’ policy. Hong Kong's prospects for a changing language situation depend on its political and economic development as well as PRC's policy.

Choctawan Aesthetics, Spirituality, and Gender Relations: An Interview with LeAnne Howe

To begin sifting through the melange of humor, resistance, and intellectualism that shoots through the work of Choctaw poet, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and scholar LeAnne Howe, it is helpful to examine the author's photograph on the back cover of her collection Evidence of Red (2005), winner of the 2006 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry. Playfully smiling, Howe salutes the camera, emulating a similar move by the giant wooden Indian behind her. The wooden Indian is adorned in what appears to be a loincloth of stars and stripes and a sign that reads Cigars Cubains. Howe's choice to pose in front of the cigar store Indian, a symbol of the original trading relationship between Natives and Europeans that ultimately led to colonization, genocide, and the commodification of the American Indian image, is a joke on anyone who thinks that Native peoples are conquered, vanished, or frozen in time. Indeed, a number of Howe's Choctaw characters literally time travel in her books, creating opportunities to overcome oppressive histories with returns to homelands or reversals of defeats. Shell Shaker, Howe's first novel, was published in 2001 to critical acclaim. It received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (2002), was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award (2003), and its French translation, Equinoxes Rouges, was a finalist for France's Prix Medicis Etranger (2004). The novel moves between the eighteenth century and the present, linking eras through the actions of Shakbatina, a ceremonial shell shaker whose self-sacrifice on behalf of her daughter becomes an act that resonates across centuries to unite the Choctaw tribe, split by the 1830 removal from the Mississippi homelands to what is now Oklahoma. Poet and literary critic Ken McCullough claims, Although there has been significant scholarship on this historical in the southeast, between the arrival of DeSoto and Removal, no one has written a work of the imagination (of this magnitude) set in this period (61). Howe's work is meticulously researched, revealing the complexity of ancient trade relationships between southeastern Native peoples, the complications that ensued when European colonial powers arrived in the Americas, and the manifestation of these historical moments in the lives of contemporary Choctaw characters. Howe's second novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007), also shifts between past and present, unraveling a family mystery set against the backdrop of all-Indian baseball leagues and detailing the love affair between Choctaw pitcher Hope Little Leader and Justina Maurepas, his Black Indian lover. This relationship suggests an intersection between Native American and African American histories of oppression and displacement: the characters meet at Hampton Normal School for Blacks and Indians (present-day Hampton University), and their affair ends after terrorization by the Ku Klux Klan. As Shell Shaker works to heal the wounds of Choctaw colonization and dispersal, Miko Kings recenters the ball game known as America's pastime, illuminating its roots in Choctawan spiritual and political traditions. In addition to her fiction, poetry, and scholarly work, Howe wrote the screenplay for and narrated the ninety-minute PBS documentary Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire (2006); her play, The Mascot Opera: A Minuet, was commissioned for the 2008 production at the Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, although it was not used. Howe has been the recipient of numerous artistic awards and residencies, including the Louis D. Rubins, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University; an Artist-in-Residence grant for theatre from the Iowa Arts Council; a Regents' Distinguished Lecturer at the University of California, Riverside; and in 2006-07 she was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Howe is currently a professor of American Indian Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. …

And the Injun goes “How!”: Representations of American Indian English in white public space

This article describes linguistic features used to depict fictional American Indian speech, a style referred to as “Hollywood Injun English,” found in movies, on television, and in some literature (the focus is on the film and television varieties). Grammatically, it draws on a range of nonstandard features similar to those found in “foreigner talk” and “baby talk,” as well a formalized, ornate variety of English; all these features are used to project or evoke certain characteristics historically associated with “the White Man's Indian.” The article also exemplifies some ways in which these linguistic features are deployed in relation to particular characteristics stereotypically associated with American Indians, and shows how the correspondence between nonstandard, dysfluent speech forms and particular pejorative aspects of the fictional Indian characters subtly reproduce Native American otherness in contemporary popular American culture.I would like to thank the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the University of Michigan for their support. This manuscript has also benefited from the following individuals' comments and suggestions: Gerald Carr, Eve Danziger, Philip Deloria, Joseph Gone, Jane Hill, Judith Irvine, Webb Keane, William Leap, Bruce Mannheim, and the anonymous reviewer. For their time and effort, I am truly grateful. All errors are my own.

American Indian English

The paper provides a qualitative real-time study of ancestral language transfer in the English spoken on the Quinault Indian Nation reservation in WA, USA, in the late 1960s and nowadays. The 1960s data come from archival recordings of mainly one bilingual elder, while the recent samples were recorded in 2004. Only the former exhibit some evident phonological and morpho-syntactic transfer. The present-day speech conforms to informal General American patterns, except for one new variable, the glottal replacement of voiceless stops. The latter is not attested in the archival material and is argued to involve an innovation. A similar phenomenon has been reported in several other American Indian English (AIE) varieties. This may imply that a shared AIE substratum is developing, based on non-standard English features rather than on specific ancestral language transfer features. Leap’s (1993) assertion that no general AIE variety is on the rise may be worth re-examination.

Handbook of Dialects and Language Variation

Dialect Theory: C.M. Carver, English Dialectology and the Linguistic Atlas. J.K. Chambers, The Domain of Sociolinguistics. W. Labov, The Three Dialects of English. Regional Dialects: R.I. McDavid, Jr., V.G. McDavid, W.A. Kretzschmar, Jr., T.K. Lerud, and M. Ratliff, Inside a Linguistic Atlas. H. Kurath, The Sociocultural Background of Dialect Areas in American English. H.B. Allen, The Primary Dialect Areas of the Upper Midwest. L.M. Davis and C.L. Houck, What Determines a Dialect Area? W.A. Kretzschmar, Jr., Isoglosses and Predictive Modeling. T.S. Donahue, On Inland Northern and the Factors for Dialect Spread and Shift. R.R. Butters, Unstressed Vowels in Appalachian English. P.C. Nichols, Creoles of the USA. Social and Gender Dialects: W. Labov, The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores. A.S. Kroch, Toward a Theory of Social Dialect Variation. J.K. Chambers, The Variable as a Structural Unit. W. Wolfram, Identifying and Interpreting Variables. P. Trudgill, Accommodation between Dialects. D.R. Preston, Two Heartland Perceptions of Language Variety. R.P. Gaudio, Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men. J. Cheshire, The Relationship between Language and Sex in English. D. Tannen, The Relativity of Linguistic Strategies: Rethinking Power and Solidarity in Gender and Dominance. Ethnic Dialects, Education, and Social Issues: J. Rodby, A Polyphony of Voices: The Dialectics of Linguistic Diversity and Unity in the Twentieth-Century United States. R.W. Fasold, The Relation between Black and White Speech in the South. J. Baugh, Hypocorrection: Mistakes in Production of Vernacular African American English as a Second Dialect. M.D. Linn, Stylistic Variation in Vernacular Black English and the Teaching of College Composition. J. Penfield and J.L. Ornstein-Galicia, Speech Aspects of Chicano English. M. Hidalgo, On the Question of 'Standard' versus 'Dialect'. B. Craig, American Indian English. Historical Development and Language Change: W. Labov, Regular Sound Change in English Dialect Geography. J. Milroy, Social and Historical Linguistics. J.R. Rickford, Contemporary Source Comparison as a Critical Window on the Afro-American Linguistic Past. Index.

American Indian English. William L. Leap

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsAmerican Indian English. William L. Leap Regna DarnellRegna Darnell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by International Journal of American Linguistics Volume 62, Number 1Jan., 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/466282 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1996 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

American Indian English

American Indian English. William L. Leap. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993. 312 pp.

American Indian English

American Indian English