“The most important feature we found is the ‘contour pitch accent,’” said Dartmouth sociolinguist James Stanford, who mentored their study. Even students who did not use the rez accent were familiar with it. They found that Native American and Canadian First Nations communities speak different English dialects, but many share similar patterns of pitch, rhythm and intonation - features that linguists call prosody, the “music” of language. Their findings, “ The Rez Accent Knows No Borders: Native American Ethnic Identity Expressed Through English Prosody,” appeared in the journal Language in Society in September 2016. The Dartmouth team interviewed and recorded conversations with 75 people from tribes and Nations across North America. We knew something unique was happening and wanted to narrow it down,” Walker said. “There are other kind of studies around different groups, like African-American vernacular English or Chicano English, where linguists have noted similarities. When assigned a project studying a non-English language, she and fellow Dartmouth student Nacole Walker, a Lakota from the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota, decided to investigate the rez accent, which had never been studied before. She found this was the case even with students who had never learned their heritage languages. My grandmother chose not to pass along the language because she wanted to make it easier for her children when they went to school.”Īt Dartmouth, Newmark met Indigenous students from across North America and noticed an interesting phenomenon: Despite their different linguistic backgrounds, their English shared some distinctive features, especially when gathering socially. She learned it from her great-grandmother. “My mom can understand and speak it, but she didn't pass it on to us. “I’m a Dene person, but I don’t speak Slavey, my heritage language,” she said. Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, the ninth oldest college in the U.S., was founded in 1769 to educate Native Americans.
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