This chapter explores the typologically rich but relatively understudied prosodic systems attested in North American Indian languages, many of which are either critically endangered or no longer spoken. Both word-level patterns (including stress, tone, and pitch accent) and higher-level phenomena (encompassing intonation and prosodic constituency) are considered within the broader contexts of prosodic typology and prosodic drift. Topics include segmental manifestations of metrical structure, phonetic correlates of prominence, the interaction between word-level and phrase-level prosody, morphological effects on stress, and tone–stress interactions. Drawing on a combination of phonetic and phonological data, this chapter synthesizes the relatively small number of rigorous case studies of individual languages with the considerably larger set of more cursory descriptions of North American Indian languages in order to gain an appreciation of this linguistic area’s numerous important contributions to both language description and linguistic theory.
