Terra incognita in the anglophone world

Abstract

This paper examines the development of a distinct contact-based variety on the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean. It outlines the sociohistorical context of the community as well as its linguistic and sociolinguistic implications, speculating on the original input varieties and processes of contact dynamics, new-dialect formation as well as feature selection and retention that occurred since the island was colonised in 1816. It provides a structural profile and discusses selected grammatical variables of this variety, with the aim of investigating feature selection from the relevant donor sources and identifying differential evolution patterns that occurred in this particular setting, even though it is not always possible to keep these two questions apart.

The segmental phonology of nineteenth-century Tristan da Cunha English: convergence and local innovation

“…On the other hand, the strength of the British input may also have a sociohistorical motivation. As hypothesized in Schreier (2002a), the length of residence of the British settlers was considerably longer. This meant that the first native Tristanians who selected features from their parents' speech had a higher exposure to British accents.…”

“…A set of features can be pinpointed to the variety presumably brought to the island by the St Helenian women who arrived in the late 1820s. The input strength of this variety has already been pointed out by Zettersten (1969) and Schreier (2002aSchreier ( , 2003a, who argued (mostly on the grounds of morphosyntax) that some prototypical creole properties found in TdCE, such as aspect markers and absence of morphological tense marking, have their origins on St Helena. Our phonological account provides further support for this claim, identifying features such as:…”

“…(cf. Schreier, 2002a). In this vein, how are we to interpret the earliest known phonological features of TdCE and how can the observations reported in this article contribute towards the understanding of how and under what circumstances the local accent formed?…”

“…Tristan da Cunha was an economic boomtown in the 1950s: the living conditions and housing standards improved and the changes brought about by the development scheme led to a complete transformation of the traditional Tristanian way of life within one generation (Schreier & Lavarello-Schreier, 2003). These social changes had linguistic consequences and marked a steady increase in the adoption of nonlocal features (Schreier, 2002a(Schreier, , 2003a.…”

“…2 Tristan da Cunha and TdCE: social and sociolinguistic evidence Until recently, very little was known about TdCE. What was known mostly derived from Zettersten's pioneering (1969) analyses and Schreier's recent research (Schreier 2002a(Schreier , 2003a. Both suggested that TdCE is a contact-derived form of colonial English which adopted features from several donor dialects that were transplanted to the island in the first half of the nineteenth century.…”