THE LINGUISTIC SITUATION ON TRISTAN DA CUNHA

ARNE ZETTERSTEN

The isolated Community on Tristan da Cunha has never ceased to fascinate the worid. The disastrous volcanic eruption in 1961, which forced
the inhabitants to leave their homes, was the starting-point for a series of
newspaper Interviews and radio and television programmes, which made
the Situation of the islanders even more widely known. Several books
about life and conditions on Tristan da Cunha have been written by
Outsiders', who for some reason or other spent sonie time on the island.
The Norwegian Scientific Expedition to Tristan, da Cunha 1937-1938
resulted in more than fifty publications on a variety of topics such s
volcanology, sociology, ornithology, etc. Considering this, it is rather
surprising that practically nothing has been written about the language
spoken on Tristan. Only stray remarks on the peculiar pronunciation
can be found in some of the books referred to above.1
Languages spoken in isolated communities are, indeed, of very great
interest. The special conditions, under which the inhabitants on Tristan
da Cunha lived for about 150 years, are strongly reminiscent of life on
Pitcairn Island in the South Seas. The linguistic Situation, however, is
entirely different. The Pitcairnese language, spoken by the descendants
of the mutineers of the Bounty, is a kind of pidgin a mixture of English
and Tahitian.2 The language spoken on Tristan da Cunha, on the other
1

See K. M. Barrow, Three Years in Tristan da Cunha (1910), 11; H. Deherain, Dans
V Atiantique (1912), 127; W. Robert Foran, "Tristan da Cunha, Isles of Contentment",
The National Geographie Magazine, 74 (1938), 673; J. Brander, Tristan da Cunha
1506-1902 (1940), 258; P. A. Munch, Sociology of Tristan da Cunha (= Norw. Sc.
Exp., No. 13) (1945), 314; Martin Holdgate, Mountains in the Sea (1958), 36; R.
Svensson, Tristan da Cunha South Atlantic (1965), 22. In this paper the abbreviation
Norw. Sc. Exp. is used for the Results ofthe Norwegian Scientific Expedition to Tristan
da Cunha 1937-1938. I take the opportunity here to thank Professor Randolph
Quirk, London, and Docent Jan Svartvik, Gteborg, for helping me to gain access
to the tape-recorded material of the dialect spoken on Tristan da Cunha.
2
The language spoken on Pitcairn Island has been described by A.S.C. ROSS in The
Pitcairnese Language (1964).

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hand, has been English ever since the first settlement in the early nineteenth Century, although it has been modified in various ways under the
influence of the different idiolects or micro-dialects of the settlers. In
the case of Pitcairnese one can follow the birth of a nevv language from
its earliest stages.3 The language spoken on Tristan da Cunha, on the
other hand, is a dialect of British English in which the contributions to
the spoken language by the early settlers cannot be distinguished with
any certainty. In one field, however, the similarities are apparent. The
place-names on both islands are pristine, i.e. names whose origin and
creation are known.4
The colony on Tristan da Cunha dates back to 1816, when the Island
was used s a British base. Three men of the original garrison were
allowed to remain on the island and one of thern, Corporal William Glass
from Kelso, was to become the leader of the Tristan colony during the
first half of the Century. He was married to a coloured woman from
Cape Town. The two other men were stonemasons from Plyrnouth,
Samuel Burnell and John Nankivel. In the course of the Century most
of the newcomers to the island were shipwrecked sailors. The most
notable change in population was caused by the Immigration of five coloured women from St. Helena in 1827. They married the five bachelors
who had been living on the island together with two married couples.
It is clear that the local dialect on Tristan acquired its peculiar character
during that Century and it is not without interest to study a list of the
ancestors5 of the present population amounting to about 250 people:
Name
William Glass
Maria Magdalena Glass, nee Leenders
Alexander Cotton (English)
Thomas Swain
Maria Cotton, nee Williams
Sarah Swain, nee Williams
Mary Green, nee Williams
Peter William Green (Pieter Willem Groen)
Rogers
3

Place of birth
Kelso, Scotland
Cape Town
[Unknown]
Hastings
St. Helena
St. Helena
St. Helena
Katwijk, Holland
New England

Arrival
1816
1816
1821
1826
1827
1827
1827
1836
1836

See ROSS, op.cif., 11.

4
This term was coined by ROSS, who regards a place-name s pristine "if, and only
if, we are cognisant of the actual act of its creation" (Ross, "Notes on some 'pristine'
place-names of Pitcairn Island*', Acta Salamanticensia, Filosofia y Lettras, XI, (1958),
333.
5
See Munch, op. dt., 47, and Svensson, op. cit., 22.

THE LINGUISTIC SITUATION ON TRISTAN DA CUNHA

Andrew Hagen
Susannah Swain, noe Philips
Andrea Repetto
Gaetano Lavarello
Elizabeth Glass, nee Smith (Anglo-Irish)
Agnes Rogers, nee Smith (Anglo-Irish)

New England
St. Helena
Genoa
Genoa
Kilkenny
Cape Town

121

1849
1863
1892
1892
1908
1908

The accepted leader of the Community after William Glass's death in 1853
was Peter Green, who died in 1902. These two men thus governed the
Community and led the development of the island for a whole Century.
In spite of the fact that several nationalities were represented among the
people who stayed on the island, including Dutchmen, Italians and Scandinavians, besides the British and the Americans, the common language
was always English, s can be seen from the letters written in English by
Peter Green and Andrea Repetto.6 A few American whalers settled on
the island during the first half of the Century and may have exerted some
influence on the language. It was sufficient at least for Erwin H. Dodgson,
the clergyman and schoolmaster of Tristan da Cunha, to write in a letter
to the Gospel Missionary in 1882 that "all the people here speak English
slightly Yankeefied s they do a good deal of trade with Yankee
whalers".7 The whale trade, however, soon took other directions. The
last American whaler to settle on Tristan da Cunha was Joseph Beetham,
who arrived about 1866.
In 1961, after the evacuation of the population of Tristan, recordings
of the speech of the Tristan people were made by members of University
College, London, in co-operation with the British Broadcasting Corporation. Through the kindness of Professor Randolph Quirk I have
gained access to this material. Before the Tristans returned home in
1963 other recordings were made by Miss Katherine Patch of the Phonetics Department, University of Edinburgh. Under the direction of
Professor Abercrombie work i s now being done on the phonology of the
dialect.
It is, indeed, fortunate that these recordings were made in time. The
archaic peculiarities are best preserved among people of the older generation. Naturally the young people adapted themselves more easily to
conditions in England and were open to the influence of other people,
teachers, the radio, etc. The details characterizing the dialect of Tristan
da Cunha, which I mention below, are representative of people of mature
6
7

See Brander, op. cit., 237-38, and Deherain, op. cit., 126.
See Brander, op. <?//., 258.

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f

or old age. I found the following informants particularly useful: Willi

Repetto (59), Sidney Glass (51), Gordon Glass (63), Alfred Glass (72),
Mary Swain (64), Robert Lavarello (64), and Arthur Repetto (62).
The following features in the phonology are the most striking.
Consonants: The frequent use of the glottal stop, particularly s an
allophone of /t/; sometimes an intrusive /h/ initially in words like up,
egg; the general dropping of A's initially; /f, v/ for RP /, /; /igk/ for
/irj/ in everything, morning, but otherwise generally unstressed /in/ for
/ii)/ in pres. participles; and the use of/w/ for RP /v/.
Vowels and diphthongs: A tendency to lengthen certain vowels can
be observed. Words like dog, donkey, across, pot, cqffee, long, Job, have
a characteristic lengthened vowel. In square, there, hair, etc., [e:s] is used
for RP [es], It is also worth mentioning that /aj/ infine, etc., has a back,
rounded initial element, while /oj/ in boil, etc., has a closer initial element
than is found in RP.
In the morphology and syntax the following details may be mentioned:
Fs, you's, we's, they's are used in the present tense of be, s well s we
was, etc., in the preterite. "How you is?" is the Standard phrase for
"How are you?", the answer being "Fs fine, thanks".8 The formation of
tenses is sometimes strnge. "How many minutes is they been in?",9 and
"When you done went"10 for "When you have gone" are examples of
phrases peculiar to the dialect. Double negatives are frequent, too, and
phrases like "we's best walk", "them hardies" for "those hardies", and
"he, she don't" for "doesn't", can also be observed.
The vocabulary provides many interesting details. A great many of
the words used on the island are words whose form and meaning are
the result of special local conditions. Words like Fleshie's tea, molly-bags,
and tassel-mats, etc., are highly specialized and are unlikely to be found
in any dictionary. Below I have chosen five groups of words in order to
give a few examples of the special Tristan vocabulary r11
A. CLOTHES:
Blood-shirt: an old jacket or shirt made of canvas used when the islanders kill a sheep or shoot wild cattle. Munch, 92.
Cappie: a head-covering worn by girls. It is probably a loan-word
from Afrikaans, perhaps introduced by the Boer woman, Maria Mag8

On these phrases see Holdgate, op. cit., 36.

See A.B. Crawford, / Went to Tristan (1941), 119.
10
See Holdgate, op. cit., 36.
11
These words are found either in the tape-recordings or in the books by Barrow,
Crawford, F. Wild (Shackletorfs Last Voyage, 1923), Holdgate, and in the various
volumes of Results ofthe Norwegian Scientific Expedition.

THE LINGUISTIC SITUATION ON TRISTAN DA CUNHA

123

dalena Leenders, who arrived in 1816. She was the first woman to
settle on Tristan (cf. Munch, 48, 90).
B. FOOD:12
Brady: This word occurs in pumkin brady and cabbage brady which
are boiled dishes mixed with meat.
Fannie's tea, Fancy tea: boiled water and milk.
Fleshie's tea or Island tea: tliis is a tea substitute based on one of
the wild plants, Chenopodiwn tomentoswn.
C. DAILY WORK:
Kraal: small enclosure in which the sheep are penned for the night.
Also called lamb-house which indicates that it jnay earlier have been
a roofed hut. Cf. Munch, 132 and Barrow, 37. The word kr aal is a
loanword from Afrikaans. See OED, s.v. kraal (< Colonial Du. kraai),
Mollybags: bags in which the Tristan mollymawks are carried home
after being skinned. See Y. Hagen, Birds of Tristan da Cimha ( Norw.
Sc. Exp., No. 20) (1952), 67.
Tassel-mats: mats made of the yellow plumes of the penguins. Tassel <
OFr tas(s)el (OED). See Hagen, 33.
D. BIRDS :13
Gutter-Snake: The American purple gallinule.
Molly or molly'awk: the yellow-nosed albatros. MollyQi)a\vk is a
corrupt form of mollymawk (< Du. mallemok; see OED, s.v. mallemuck).
Peeco or peo: the sooty albatross. This name comes from Imitation
of the bird's cry.
The Flying Pinamin: the Tristan diving petrel. Pinamin is a corruption
of Penguin. See Hagen, 134.
Ring-Eye: the spectacled shoemaker. The name is due to the white
streaks round the eye of the bird.
E. PLANTS:
Dog-catcher: a kind of plant which grows burs (Wild, 245).
Island tree: Phylica arborea. See U. Hafsten, Norw. Sc. Exp., No. 22, 8.
Peak berries: red crowberries.
12

The most detailed report concerning food on the Island is found in S. D. HenriksenP. Oeding, Medical Survey on Tristan da Cunha (= Norw. Sc. Exp., No. 5) (1940),
121-25. The dishes mentioned in this paper are all described in Henriksen-Oeding's
report.
13
The birds of Tristan da Cunha were described by Yngvar Hagen in Norw. Sc. Exp.,
No. 20 (1952). The fishes of Tristan da Cunha were studied by Erling Sivertsen and
his results published in Norw. Sc. Exp.f No. 12 (1944). The following local names of
the eleven kinds of fish occur: bluefish, concha (conger), fivefinger, klipfish, mackerei,
shark, snoek, soldier, steambras, and yelhwtail (Sivertsen, op. c/V., 28).

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*

Finally it must be mentioned that the pristine place-names off er a great

deal of interesting material in connection with the vocabulary*14 Various
groups of names can be distinguished. Names of the following type are
self-explanatory: Big Beach, Big Green HUI, Black Cliff Point, East End,
Rookery Point, Seal Bay, Soggy Plain, Stony Beach, etc. A great many
names are based on personal names: Barrow's Pond, Crawford Point,
Daley*s Hill, Gane's Beach, Glass Point, Jenny*s Rock, Joey's Garden, and
SnelVs Beach, Names of ships occur in some names such s Carlisle
Beach, Falmouth Beach, Herald Point, Julia Reef, and Quest Bay. Some
of the names are curiously long: Down-where-the-minister-Iand-his-things,
East-End-of-Sandy-Point-Gulch, The Gulch-come-down-the-west-Side-ofthe-Ridge-where-the-Goat-jump-off, etc.15
One striking fact about these names is that, apart from being pristine,
they almost all seem to appear in their original form. It is thus only
rarely that we meet with names which are corruptions or worn-out forms.
The following two names can be mentioned s examples: Shateller's
Hut < Charlie Taylors Hut (Crawford, 225), Tommy"s Eyeloose <
Thomas9s Oil-House (Crawford, 226).
It is clear from the above examples of features characterizing the
language of Tristan da Cunha that the isolated milieu has brought
about a great variety of interesting linguistic phenomena. The vocabulary
of the islanders is naturally rather limited and only the specific local words
yield something new to the lexicographer. On the other hand, the peculiarities in phonology, morphology and syntax briefly touched upon
above, give the definite character to the spoken dialect. This can roughly
be described s a fossilized early nineteenth Century cockney with certain
overlays possibly due to contacts with St. Helena and South Africa. A
detailed overall description of the dialect spoken on Tristan da Cunha is
certainly called for.
4

14

1966

Engelska Institutionen
Lunds Universitet
Helgonabacken 14
Lund
Sweden

I have planned to publish my studies of the place-names of Tristan da Cunha

separately.
16
These names are reminiscent of names on Pitcairn Island such s Dwn-underJohnny-fall, Out-wkere-Maria-fell, O*er~where-the-Saor-hide, etc. (Ross, The Pitcairnese
Language, 175,179, 183).