English World-Wide - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2002

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.

After showing that standardisation processes in spoken and written usage in Jamaica must be seen as distinct from each other, the paper focuses on the role of the creole substrate in the formation of the emergent written standard in Jamaica. The approach is corpus-based, using material from the Caribbean component of the International Corpus of English and, occasionally, from other digitised text data-bases. Jamaican Creole lexicon and grammar are shown to exert an influence on written English usage, but, generally speaking, direct borrowing of words and rules is much rarer than various forms of indirect and mediated influence, and the over-all impact of the creole is as yet limited. While probably no longer a typical English-speaking society (cf. Shields-Brodber 1997), Jamaica will continue to be an English-using one.

Desert islands such as Norfolk in the south-west Pacific offer important insights into the genesis and development of languages. The paper addresses the particular issue of the origin of place names. It shows the tension between the different groups that settled on the island since 1788 and pays particular attention to the diverging naming practices of British colonial administrators and Pitcairn Islanders. It also comments on the consequences of globalization such as the growing pressure to select names that enhance the images promoted by the tourist industry.

This study looks into the use of English in Southern British Cameroons, a territory where English was introduced some 500 years ago by British privateers. The data are a collection of answers to a questionnaire devised to check the respondents’ use of English in various domains such as the home, neighbourhood, place of work and others. The findings reveal that English, a co-official language of the country, is gradually entering the home environment, where the indigenous languages are expected to dominate; it is the language of instruction in primary and secondary schools, and of religion and the court as pastors and lawyers consistently use it in their respective trades; in short it is the means of expression of educated people, the elite of the land. However, English finds itself in a situation of competition with other languages in this territory. At a lower level, it has to compete with Pidgin English, a contact language which dominates the neighbourhood domain. At a higher level, it competes with French, the other official language, which is dominant in tertiary level education, in the media (where most newspapers as well as most foreign radio and cable television programmes are in it), in public places (where respondents report overhearing talks and reading notices in tongues other than English), and in the civil service (where most official correspondences are initiated in it). In short what seems to have been taking place in the country since Reunification with French Cameroon in 1961 is a one-way bilingualism, with speakers of English being made to fully operate in French.