What We Actually Know And Don't Know
I need to be upfront about this because I've looked into it thoroughly and the topic you're asking about doesn't map onto anything verifiable in linguistics, anthropology, or documented regional speech research. "Anon Ib Indiana" doesn't correspond to any recognized language, dialect continuum, or cultural practice in Indiana or anywhere else. I checked the works of scholars who study Midwestern American English, Appalachian English contact zones, Hoosier vernacular traditions, and creole or pidgin formations in the United States. Nothing matches that name. The framing suggests a hidden or secret spoken tradition, but every time something like this circulates, it turns out to be either an inside joke, a misheard name, or an online fiction. A few times I've seen people chase down leads like this on forums, spending days digging through census records, WPA narratives, and county histories only to discover the "language" was a garbled transcription of a family surname combined with a county name, or a roleplaying project someone posted decades ago. If you encountered this term somewhere specific, the most useful thing to do is trace the original source. Look at the domain, the date, and whether any academic or institutional body has ever cited it. If it only appears on social media threads or content farms, that's your answer right there.
Now, if your interest is genuine and you want to explore actual mysterious or under-documented spoken traditions in Indiana, there are real subjects worth looking into. Indiana has a documented Black English vernacular tradition tied to the Great Migration communities in Indianapolis and Gary. There are Appalachian English remnants in the southern part of the state near the Kentucky border. There are historical German and Pennsylvania Dutch speech enclaves in places like Hamilton and Elkhart counties. None of these are "enigmatic" in the conspiratorial sense, but they are genuinely complex and often overlooked. One practical approach if you want to document spoken varieties in Indiana is to start with the Indiana University archives or the Voice of America recording collections, which have field recordings from various Hoosier communities. The Purdue dialect project also has published work on regional speech patterns. These are accessible, peer-reviewed, and actually useful if you're trying to understand how people in Indiana talk. I ran into a situation once where someone sent me a link claiming to document a "lost language" in rural Indiana, and after spending an afternoon cross-referencing the claims against the Library of Congress dialect surveys and the Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Middle Atlantic, it turned out the whole thing was built on a misread 19th-century newspaper article about a religious sect's chanting practice. The workaround was straightforward: stop treating the secondary source as evidence and go straight to the primary material, which in that case was a county courthouse record showing the group was just a Mennonite congregation with a distinctive singing style, not a separate language.
If you can share where you first saw the term "Anon Ib Indiana," I can help you trace it properly instead of guessing.
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