Native American English in Oklahoma: Attitudes and vitality

Abstract

This study offers an assessment of the subjective ethnolinguistic vitality (SEV) of Native American-accented English varieties--or just Native American English (NAE)--among tribal people in Oklahoma through an investigation of the linguistic attitudes of several individual members of the NAE speech community. The mixed-methods assessment involves (a) the thematic analysis of ethnographic interviews about language variety use, (b) the aggregation of responses to a perceptual dialectological mapping task, and (c) the statistical analysis of responses to a computer-mediated SEV survey. Vitality is measured in terms of Native Americans' perceptions about several speech and ethnic community pairings. These pairings include tribal heritage languages among tribal groups, NAE among the supratribal Native American community within the state, and mainstream U.S. English (MUSE) in the broader Oklahoma mainstream.

Twenty-seven mixed-blood Native Americans from across the state ranging from eighteen to seventy-six years of age and claiming various tribal backgrounds participated in this study. Through comparative analysis of collective and individual results from the methodologies employed, NAE is shown to be a vital but domain-specific, geographically-clustered, and highly informal variety of English within its Oklahoma speech community. While comparatively less vital than MUSE, NAE is perceived by study participants as more vital than tribal heritage languages. As such, it indexes and helps to establish a common Native American ethnicity in the state. However, attitudes toward NAE entail numerous conflicts in Oklahoma's Native American community, including perceptions of it having both positive and negative aspects, as well as both authentic and inauthentic status, and of it indexing both Native American and mainstream social expectations about its users.