English and the variety of miskito in the Pearl Lagoon watershed
Keywords:
History, Indigenous Population, Language, Linguistics, MiskitoAbstract
This article considers language innovation among the Miskitu-speaking people of the Pearl Lagoon basin and misconceptions that the variety of Miskitu spoken in this district is a «degraded» form of the language. The first section considers the historical circumstances which have conspired to isolate and distinguish the Pearl Lagoon basin variety of Miskitu from the more «standard» varieties further north. The second section hen examines locally specific loans of English nouns and verbs into Pearl Lagoon basin Miskitu, and discusses the means by which loan verbs in particular are grammatic aliased. The third and last section briefly considers the implications of this material for our understanding of language, ideologies of «language purity» and education in the region.
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