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*. Thank you to the Native communities who participated in this study and the many people who provided insights during this project, including Bruce Duthu, Dennis Preston, Nick Reo, Marianna Di Paolo, Naomi Nagy, Lindsay Whaley, David Peterson, Tim Pulju, the audiences at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 39 and 43, and reviewers and editors. We are thankful for support and other help from Dartmouth's Native American Studies and Native American Program, Native Americans at Dartmouth, and the Neukom Institute for Computational Science. We gratefully acknowledge the 'frybread recordings' conducted by Sydney Allard, Kayla Atcitty, Zachary Cooper, and Maggie Seawright. We received further research help from Jacob Ammon, Emily Grabowski, Emily Harwell, Abbie Kouzmanoff, Andrew Zulker, Corinne Kasper, and Diego Moreno. This project is supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1251324). Portions of this article also appear in a working paper published in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics PWPL 21.2, Selected Papers from NWAV-43.
INTRODUCTION
Due to assimiliationist policies and socioeconomic pressures, many Native American languages have been receding in favor of English (Grenoble & Whaley 1998; Hinton & Hale 2001; Austin 2008). Community programs and language-vitality research initiatives are taking valuable steps to revitalize these languages and restore heritage language identities. We applaud that important work. At the same time, this article points out that revitalization is not the whole story of language and Native ethnic identity. Across modern Native America and First Nations Canada, many speakers are using a set of shared English features to perform and construct Native sociolinguistic identity. In their study of Lumbee English, Wolfram & Dannenberg (1999:180-81) ask the following:
How does a group struggling to maintain its cultural distinctiveness create and maintain symbolic linguistic identity when it has lost its ancestral language roots? Can a dialect of the replacement language develop to fill the emblematic void of a lost ancestral language?
Studies of Lumbee and other individual tribes have demonstrated that English features can in fact be used to produce and reproduce Native identity, even in the absence of a viable heritage language (Leap 1974; Wolfram & Dannenberg 1999). Lumbee, for example, has not been spoken for about five generations, yet the tribe maintains a distinct ethnic...