Mobilian Jargon Research Articles

Some fallacies of comparative Americanist linguistics in understanding Mobilian Jargon: A critique of Grant’s review

L'A. repond a une critique que fit Anthony P. Grant de son ouvrage sur le Jargon Mobilien qui est un pidgin amerindien. Il reprend les objections de Grant une a une pour les invalider. Ces objections concernent l'ordre des mots, la longueur des voyelles et le systeme vocalique du Jargon Mobilien, ainsi que l'hypothese speculative selon laquelle cette langue servait a la communication intertribale dans le Complexe Mississipien

Mobilian Jargon: Linguistic and Sociohistorical Aspects of a Native American Pidgin

The study of Native American languages has traditionally paid little attention to linguistic convergence, just as linguists focusing on language contact have often neglected Native American cases. Drawing both on fieldwork and on archival research Emanuel Drechsel presents a grammatical, sociolinguistic, and ethnohistorical study of Mobilian Jargon, a Muskogean-based American Indian pidgin of the Mississippi valley. Mobilian Jargon functioned as an interlingual medium of communication among linguistically diverse southeastern Native American groups, and in contact between these groups and non-Indians, from at least 1700 until the mid-twentieth century. It also served as a a sociolinguistic buffer, providing native peoples with some protection against outside intrusions. The linguistic and extralinguistic evidence points to a pre-Columbian origin, and a role as a lingua franca among mound-building paramount chiefdoms of the lower Mississippi valley. Because of its focus on a non-European based case, Drechsel's study questions the universality of some concepts developed in pidgin and creole linguistics. It also carries significant implications for the ethnology of Native American peoples, and for the history of North America, suggesting that Native American peoples have had a greater historical role than has been acknowledged hitherto.

Mobilian Jargon: Linguistic and Sociohistorical Aspects of a Native American Pidgin

Mobilian Jargon: Linguistic and Sociohistorical Aspects of a Native American Pidgin

Languages of the Aboriginal Southeast: An Annotated Bibliography

This is the only published bibliography devoted to the speech of the American Indians inhabiting the southeastern quadrant of the U.S. at the time of first European contact. It covers more than twenty-five languages from five language families (Algonquian, Caddoan, Iroquoian, Muskogean, Siouan), several genetically unaffiliated languages, and a trade language (Mobilian Jargon). The bibliography annotates over 1,900 published works, reviews, doctoral dissertations, and master's theses. A single index is organized by individual languages and by linguistic and related topics. The volume is intended for the use of scholars working in the core areas of linguistics, in related sociolinguistic disciplines, and in other aspects of cultural anthropology.

On Determining the Role of Chickasaw in the History and Origin of Mobilian Jargon

1. In a recent issue of IJAL, Munro (1984) addresses the question of the role of Chickasaw in the lexicon of Mobilian Jargon (henceforth MJ), a Native American pidgin also known as the Chickasaw-Choctaw trade language of the lower Mississippi Valley and adjacent areas. After comparing the MJ lexical items collected by Crawford (1978: 81-97) with recently gathered Chickasaw data of her own, Munro concludes that Chickasaw could hardly have served as a major lexical source for MJ, since those MJ forms exhibiting greater or less affinity with various possible sources within Western appear noticeably different from the corresponding Chickasaw words or phrases (Munro 1984: 440). By implication, the author thus deemphasizes, if not actually denying, any role that the Chickasaw language might have played in the origin and history of the pidgin partially named after it. In response, I wish to challenge some of Munro's inferences drawn from her comparisons of MJ and Western Muskogean lexical data and also examine some of her other observations on MJ. Most important, I question the general conclusions she has drawn from these comparisons, and in particular I disagree with her suggestion that Chickasaw-because of the alleged absence of similar modern forms in MJ-was necessarily insignificant in the formation and history of the pidgin. Beyond questions of data and interpretation, my disagreements, based on extensive field and archival research,' also address theoretical concerns. These questions arise from the perspective of a broadly defined historical linguistics that includes findings from pidgin and creole studies as well as sociolinguistics.

Algonquian Loanwords in Mobilian Jargon

Algonquian Loanwords in Mobilian Jargon

Towards an Ethnohistory of Speaking: The Case of Mobilian Jargon, an American Indian Pidgin of the Lower Mississippi Valley

Evaluation de la valeur scientifique de la documentation existant sur le Mobilian Jargon (ou langue commerciale Chickasaw-Choctaw de Louisiane), en particulier de l'Histoire de la Louisiane de A. S. Le Page du Pratz (1758).

Erratum

In Dell Hymes' review of J. E. Crawford's The Mobilian trade language (vol. 8, no. 3, December 1979), the sentence on page 470 should read: “Crawford has seen a copy and cites the paper's agreement with his conclusion that there is no evidence for Mobilian Jargon in pre-French times …” Language in Society regrets the error.