English in Madeira: History and features of a lesser-known variety in the Atlantic

Abstract

‘Lesser-known varieties of English’ (Schreier, 2009; Schreier et al., 2010) have received increasing attention in the last decade. In particular, Englishes on islands with historical and political ties to the United Kingdom or the United States have been described, such as the varieties in Bermuda (Eberle, 2021), Samoa (Biewer, 2020), and Tristan da Cunha (Schreier, 2009). However, Madeira has hitherto received extraordinarily little attention, although it used to be home to a small but enormously influential group of British expatriates who controlled large parts of the economy and owned a considerable amount of land on the island. Even today, approximately 1,000 emigrants from the United Kingdom live permanently in Madeira, which constitutes the second largest group of foreign residents (DREM, 2020b: 11). ‘Madeira’ refers to both a Portuguese archipelago and this archipelago's main island located ca. 737 km west of Morocco's coast (see Figure 1). Overall, Madeira had a population of 267,785 in the last official census from 2011 and is a highly popular tourist destination, with roughly 8 million overnight stays by visitors in 2019 (DREM, 2020a).