Indigenous and Immigrant Languages in the US: Language Contact, Change, and Survival

As a settler nation, the United States is a contact zone unto itself, with a dynamic ecology of migrating, multilingual speakers of minority and minoritized languages, and emergent language varieties. This chapter examines the linguistic, social, and political policies associated with many of these communities, drawing on research that examines the real and imagined pasts and presents of language users. Acknowledging the inherently political and ideological practice of separating and naming languages, the chapter focuses on the mobilization of diverse linguistic resources, highlighting the fluidity of multilingualism in US contexts. The chapter provides a broad and, by necessity, selective overview of Indigenous and immigrant language contact, change, loss, and survival in the US. Starting with a brief history and overview of current work with respect to immigrant languages, the chapter then describes examples of current research on Indigenous languages in the US. Discussion in each section is organized around contemporary research and theory on language status, language corpus, and language acquisition. The chapter concludes with consideration of the possibilities created by multilingual speakers’ adaptive strategies to help their languages survive and thrive in the US’s aggressively monoglossic context.