Last week UChicago’s own Corinne Kasper presented her ongoing dissertation work on L2 Potawatomi. Thanks to Corinne for a great talk!

“L2 Potawatomi”

Potawatomi is an endangered Algonquian language spoken around the Great Lakes. With fewer than a dozen fluent first language speakers, whose numbers were approximately halved during the current Covid-19 pandemic (Lewis under review). To date, the majority of Potawatomi research includes data from L1 speakers only, and predominantly from data collected in the mid 1900s. Those analyses have focused on describing the grammar, determining the distribution of particular Algonquian grammatical features, and the discourse marker system of the language as used by L1 speakers (Hockett 1939, Buszard-Welcher 2003, Lockwood 2017, Lewis 2020). However, there are devoted groups of second language learners spread across the Potawatomi communities in the United States and Canada currently. This talk focuses on the constructions that L2 speakers of Potawatomi use. Broadly, this work provides a first look at how language contact and endangerment is changing the linguistic structures that L2 speakers use, with particular attention paid to agreement, independent and conjunct order use, word order, and discourse markers. L2 narrative constructions have shown little contact induced change in terms of word order, but more in the morphology, as this may be a socially salient way to mark Potawatomi-ness in speech. However, conversational data from L2 speakers appears to exhibit more English-like structures, but this varies speaker to speaker.