1.5.1. Native American English

Today the majority of the Indians are monolingual speakers of English. For most of them there is probably no divergence between their English and that of their non-Indian fellows of equivalent age, sex, education and social status. However, among Native Americans who live in concentrated groups (in reservations) there are also as many different kinds of American Indian English as there are American Indian language traditions. It is the result of the on-going influence of the substratum (the traditional languages) on English. Many of the special features of this English are such familiar phenomena as:

● word-final consonant cluster simplification,

e.g. west > wes’;

● uninflected “be”;

● multiple negation;

● the lack of subject-verb concord.

Although mainstream non-standard English has the same sort of “surface phenomena”, they are the products of “different grammatical systems”. For example, some traditional Indian languages require identical marking of the subject and verb. Indian English has such forms as “some peoples comes in”.