Mobilian Jargon

by Emanuel J. Drechsel

The study of Native American languages has traditionally paid little attention to linguistic convergence, just as linguists focusing on language contact have often neglected Native American cases. Drawing both on fieldwork and on archival research Emanuel Drechsel presents a grammatical, sociolinguistic, and ethnohistorical study of Mobilian Jargon, a Muskogean-based American Indian pidgin of the Mississippi valley. Mobilian Jargon functioned as an interlingual medium of communication among linguistically diverse southeastern Native American groups and non-Indians, from at least 1700 until the mid-twentieth century. It also served as a sociolinguistic buffer, providing native peoples with some protection against outside intrusions. The linguistic and extralinguistic evidence points to a pre-Columbian origin, and a role as a lingua franca among mound-building paramount chiefdoms of the lower Mississippi valley. Because of its focus on a non-European based case, Drechsel's study question