American Indian English: The Quinault Case

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.