Question: C144 Native American Languages and Cultures-Study Guide #1

Silver, Shirley and Wick R. Miller. 1997. American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. (AIL, pp. 1-13, 337-349) Also AIL 15-44.

Note: This is the only true textbook devoted to the comparative topic of Native American Languages and Cultures. Many books have been devoted to the classification of American Indian languages but no others have attempted to cover both linguistic and cultural patterns. Both authors, even at the time of this book's writing, were senior Americanists who specialized in languages of Northern California (Silver), the Great Basin, and the Pueblo Southwest (Miller). Like many Americanists of their generation, these authors were trained by the linguist Mary Haas at UC-Berkeley. Most of these students were especially strong in matters of structural linguistic analysis though some like Wick Miller and William Bright, who was a contemporary at UCLA, also displayed concerns for linking languages with their societies and cultures.

Tragically, Miller died in a biking accident in Mexico just before the publication of this book.

1. What are three misconceptions regarding American Indian languages?

2. What are some of the factors that determine the vitality of specific languages?

3. How has government policy affected Native American languages?

4. Why and how is heritage language literacy important to many Native American communities?

5. Regarding Chapter 14 (337-349) I suggest you skim this so that you have at least a general sense of the distribution of the languages. Nothing more than that is required. It is useful to have some understanding of this distribution because many of the patterns we will see are not true simply for the case study at hand but also for the region or culture area in which the language and culture is located.

6. What is polysynthesis and why is it important to understand this?

7. Define basic vocabulary of linguistic structures-phonology, morphology, and syntax.

8. What is inalienable possession? Name a language that shows this feature.

9. What is "grammatical gender" and how does it differ from natural gender?

10. What are linguistic evidentials? Give an example or two.

11. What do linguists mean by "reduplication"? What is it used for?

12. What is Noun (Object) Incorporation? Is there anything like this in languages like English?

Meek, Barbra. 2006. And the Injun goes how!: Representations of American Indian English in (white) public space. Language in Society 35(1):93-128.

Note: Barbra Meek is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. working with her mentor, Professor Jane Hill. Professor Hill is famous for her research on Mexicano (Nahuatl) communities in Northern Mexico but her last major book, The Everyday Language of White Racism, shifted attention to the linguistic construction of racism in the U.S. Meek's article continues this tradition of examining how practices of representing the communication of "others" can be used to develop racist projects which defame and demean groups as categorically inferior. Barbra Meek is a scholar of Comanche descent whose dissertation research and her entire body of published work consisting of a book and many articles are on Kaska, an Athapaskan language spoken in the Canadian Yukon.

1. What is Hollywood Injun English?

2. What are some of the ways HIE differs from Standard English? Name four grammatical markers used in HIE.

3. In what ways are these different linguistic features and patterns of use reproducing negative stereotypes of Native Americans.

4. What is the significance of HIE being represented as a style of English similar to both baby talk and foreigner talk?

5. What are some of the specialized vocabulary that clearly signal use of HIE?

6. How are these images covertly racist?

Gomez deGarcia, Jule, Melissa Axelrod, and Jordan Lachler. 2009. English is the Dead Language: Native Perspectives on Bilingualism. NALI 99-122.

Note: At the time of the research and first writing of this chapter, the authors were a team consisting of a Professor of Linguistics (Axelrod) and two graduate students who have since graduated from the University of New Mexico. Because of the schools location near a large number of reservations (mostly Navajo, Apache, and various Pueblos) UNM has been a special site for a lot of research on Native American languages of the Southwest. This research combines several bodies of research on different languages because members of these communities displayed a similar pattern of hyper-valorizing their heritage languages and derogating English as "dead" language.

1. What does it mean to say that English is the dead language?

2. Is this chapter only about how Natives regard English or is it also about how they regard their own languages?

3. Do the authors think this kind of ideology is good for a Native community or bad?

4. The authors give 3 causes for the re-valorization or re-ideologization of the indigenous languages in these communities. What are they?