This issue features a retrospective piece by Walt Wolfram marking the federal recognition of the Lumbee American Indians of North Carolina in January 2026. As Wolfram discusses, the Lumbee Tribe have been fighting for this recognition for more than a century; the insidiousness of the Euro-American settler colonial project has left open many questions about Lumbee identity, which made this recognition challenging. For example, it is unknown what the ancestral language (or languages) of the Lumbee people was; Indigenous people in Robeson County were documented speaking English as early as 1730. Since the 1990s, Wolfram and his colleagues have undertaken sociolinguistic and dialectological research with Lumbee people in Robeson County. Their research demonstrates the uniqueness of Lumbee English, “symbolic of their discrete identity as a group” (140).This piece is the first in a series of review articles that we have solicited to appear in our first year as editors. These articles, which all take a panoramic view on a particular topic of interest to our readership, come from long time, distinguished members of the American Dialect Society. We plan to have one of these articles in each of the remaining issues of this volume, and a few more next year.
Denis et al. (2026) studied this question.