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It wasn’t just a bunch of Native Americans speaking English incorrectly. Of course, nobody put it that way, but, looking back on the documentation, there was an American Indian Pidgin English. Thus, many Native Americans, up until the 1800s, in particular, tended to communicate with the white man in pidgin English. The Origin of Native American Pidgin English

They were intent on keeping their languages and cultures-and their folk ways-and communicating with the Europeans was something that they wanted to do on a makeshift basis. However, as time went on, the whites proliferated and the Native Americans became the subordinate group.Īs we would expect, most Native Americans, until their almost complete acculturation, were not inclined to become Europeans. Initially, the Native Americans outnumbered white Europeans. The continent was populated by hundreds of different groups of Native Americans-till the Europeans came. Learn more about how culture drives language change. Tonto is always shown to be no more than two feet away from him and, somehow, he always spoke a type of pidgin. The Lone Ranger spoke, very strangely for his social status, a rather unusually pristine mainstream educated English. What was interesting was that Tonto and the Lone Ranger, by implication, were together all the time. Ugh.” That was just kind of accepted.Īnd, it wasn’t always a Bugs Bunny joke, either, because Tonto, on The Lone Ranger was depicted as speaking that way. Hollywood often shows the Native Americans talking in a certain way, which we are now all familiar with: “Big chief go that way. (Image: Benjamin West/Public domain) The Hollywood Native American Native Americans developed a pidgin English as they started to interact more with the European settlers.