In some varieties of American Indian English (particularly in the Southwest United States), final voiced stops, fricatives, and affricates are devoiced. This means that words that have a final voiced obstruents in Standard American English (SAE) are pronounced with less voicing or no voicing in American Indian English. For example, Penfield (1976) shows that in Mojave, Hopi, and Navajo English, words like job (SAE 
) would be pronounced with less voicing, which Penfield represents as 
, where the superscript 
indicates that there is less voicing of the final stop than in Standard American English. Other words, such as questions (SAE 
) and has (SAE 
) are sometimes pronounced in Mojave, Hopi, and Navajo English as 
and 
, respectively.
© 2001 The Language Samples Project