Ebook: American Indian Pidgin English: Attestations and Grammatical Peculiarities

Duke University Press: American Speech, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Oct., 1955), pp. 163-171.

We are all familiar with the stereotyped broken English which writers of Western stories, comic strips, and similar literature put into the mouths of Indians: 'me heap big chief,' 'you like um fire water,' and so forth. This type of language, however far removed it may be from the usage of most present-day Indians, represents the continuation of an earlier tradition of actual speech, in which a pidginized variety of English served in the contacts between Indians and whites, from the seventeenth century onward. For this contact language, we may use the term American Indian Pidgin English (AIPE), thus indicating its relationship to other kinds of Pidgin English.'