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Abstract
This dissertation provides the first documentation and description of naturalistic conversation data in Potawatomi. The varieties of Potawatomi analyzed come from new speakers of the language. By definition, none of these speakers possess complete heritage grammars, but they are all under the age of 50, conversationally proficient, devoted to the practice of language revitalization in the Potawatomi Confederacy, and vital participants in the Potawatomi speaking community. As such, this dissertation provides a first description of contemporary spoken Potawatomi and situates these speakers within the field of new speaker literature. This dissertation presents data on the use of the independent order morphology, conjunct order morphology, pragmatically neutral word orders, and topic and focus as well as discourse markers in order to illustrate the ways that Potawatomi speaking communities work together to maintain the language. I argue that speakers maintain traditional Potawatomi as documented in earlier literature as well as their own inherited varieties of the language in ways that strengthen the communicative prowess of the language after it underwent rapid shift in the wake of genocide, Indian Removal and displacement, the boarding school era, Indian Reorganization, and the termination era. The varieties documented here show some expected contact induced changes, but they maintain the language in a manner that suggests speakers utilize linguistic resources available to them as given in L1 input. I argue that the functions of the morphosyntactic realizations of the conjunct order are shifting, but the speakers are not changing the language in ways that are illegible to fluent speakers. The innovations in these data are reflective more of the frequency of tokens and morphosyntactic distribution rather than outright simplification of the grammar. This is the first documentation of naturalistic conversations in Potawatomi and the first large scale investigation of Potawatomi in new speaker communities. New speakers are the largest group of Potawatomi users by number, and this dissertation works to validate the language in maintenance. Importantly, I define what constitutes contemporary Potawatomi as grammatical or correct as determined by these groups of highly proficient speakers.