In Small Speech Comm

Journal of English Linguistics
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The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary: Individuation, Linguistic

Heterogeneity, and Sociolinguistic Eccentricity in a Small Speech
Community
Daniel Schreier
Journal of English Linguistics 2006; 34; 26
DOI: 10.1177/0075424206287584
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Journal of English Linguistics

Volume 34 Number 1
March 2006 26-57
2006 Sage Publications
10.1177/0075424206287584
The Backyard as http://eng.sagepub.com
hosted at
a Dialect Boundary http://online.sagepub.com
Individuation, Linguistic Heterogeneity,

and Sociolinguistic Eccentricity in
a Small Speech Community
Daniel Schreier
University of Zurich, Switzerland
This article shows that individuals in groups with tight-knit and dense social networks
display considerable variation, despite the fact that they share a set of common social
characteristics. Drawing on case studies from Tristan da Cunha English, spoken on a
South Atlantic island, interindividual variation is traced in two members of the same
family, who have identical social backgrounds and are in frequent face-to-face contact
with each other. Results from a quantitative analysis of four selected variables and the
evaluation of a perceptual dialectology study are interpreted in terms of their relevance
for accommodation theory, social network theory, and mobility-related effects on
language change. The study thus examines the role of individual variation and seeks to
provide explanations for individuation (i.e., unexpected patterns of language usage on a
micro level in single speakers), outlining its general relevance for sociolinguistic theory.
Keywords: individuation; language in isolation; mobility effects; network theory;

accommodation; Tristan da Cunha English
O ne of the fundamental assumptions of traditional dialect geographers was that geo-

graphically (or, for that matter, socially) isolated communities are characterized by
linguistic conservativeness. This belief was implicit in methods of speaker selection,
Authors Note: I came up with the idea for this article a few years ago, just after I had a lively discus-
sion with Raphael Berthele as to how individual variation may affect our interpretation of traditional
dialect data. Raphi may not agree with all the conclusions reached here, but he was certainly crucial in
pushing me to formulate themmerci viumau! I also wish to thank Peter Patrick, who allowed me to use
one of his speech samples of mesolectal Jamaican Creole, and Randy McGuire, Pius XII Memorial
Library at St. Louis University, for kindly making the Svensson corpus available to me. A particularly
heartfelt thank-you goes to Walt Wolfram, who granted me a fellowship that allowed me to extract some
of the data reported on here; to Jeffrey Reaser, who helped me digitize the data and prepare the stimuli;
and, of course, to Erik R. Thomas for his support and open ears when I designed the perceptual dialectol-
ogy experiment. Finally, the argument put forward benefited from the input and insightful criticism of a
number of people who read earlier versions: Barbara Johnstone, Edgar W. Schneider, the two editors of
this journal, and the two anonymous reviewers who gave excellent advice.
26

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Schreier / The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary 27
when field-workers were advised to focus on the speech of nonmobile men from rural
areas (the so-called NORMs; Chambers and Trudgill 1998). Conservativeness was pri-
marily explained by factors such as seclusion and endocentricity, which were further
enhanced by the strength of leveling and accommodation effects. Social dialectologists
have shown that these manifest themselves most strongly in dense social networks where
members engage in frequent face-to-face interaction. Accordingly, speech communities
in rural areas are typically considered to lag behind in the adoption of innovative forms
and thus not to partake in language change as more integrated (urban) communities do
(discussion in Andersen 1988; but see Bailey et al. 1993). The rationale is therefore that
linguistic innovations originate in dynamic (mostly metropolitan) settings and that they
spread from these focal areas to outlying regions, where they are successively adopted
and used (e.g., in a cascade model, Trudgill 1973; Chambers and Trudgill 1998). This
view has found support in modern quantitative dialect research, for instance, in the
recently documented diffusion of the Northern Cities CHAIN Shift from larger agglom-
erations throughout the northeastern United States (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2005).
Anotheroften implicitassumption was that tight-knit and socially cohesive
groups would display homogeneity, partly as a consequence of social pressures, group
dynamics, and accommodation effects, partly because criteria such as social class
would not have the same significance as elsewhere. However, recent research has
considerably challenged the view of a linguistically homogeneous speech commu-
nity. Dorian (1994), for instance, investigated patterns of variation in a rural Scottish
community, tracing external parameters and examining their influence on linguistic
variability across a community-wide level. Similarly, British dialect atlases report
considerable heterogeneity in the speech of NORMs from the same setting, and insular
communities along the U.S. Atlantic Coast display interindividual variation (e.g.,
Ocracoke, North Carolina, Wolfram et al. 1997; or Smith Island, Virginia, Schilling-
Estes 2002). It is thus not clear whether the amount of linguistic heterogeneity in
small tight-knit groups equals that found in larger communities with wider (and
comparatively weaker) social networks. What is apparent is that individual speakers
distinguish themselves linguistically no matter what type of community they live in.
The task, then, is to pinpoint the parameters that condition individual variation.
The present study examines some general aspects of micro variation (i.e., the
manifestation and possible motivation for linguistic variation within single speakers
in small, tight-knit groups). Particular focus is given to individuals with similar char-
acteristics who display unexpected patterns of language usage, so that they fall out-
side and counter well-established tenets of sociolinguistic theory (see below).
Chambers (1995, 84) calls this phenomenon individuation: Occasionally we come
upon individuals whose speech seems completely anomalous. Possible explana-
tions for individuation are manifold, ranging from the status as outsiders or periph-
eral group members (e.g., the lames in Labov et al.s [1968] seminal study),
particularly ambitious aspirers (whose career-oriented goals are reflected linguisti-
cally in higher usage of standard features), or individuals who for some reason do

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28 Journal of English Linguistics
not accommodate to local patterns (further discussion below). What is clear in any
case is that micro variation does not provide insights into language variation and
change at large (and this is quite likely why, with the exception of Johnstone 1996
or recent research on stylistics, variation in the individual speaker has not been thor-
oughly studied). On the other hand, such studies provide information on the socio-
psychological underpinnings of variationthat is, the role and limits of linguistic
accommodation, the relationship between group and individual, and also the inter-
play of integration and assimilation, self-expression, and identity (Johnstone 1996).
These aspects are discussed in detail below.
Two parameters have turned out to be instrumental for individual and societal
variation: mobility and attitudinal factors. Both are important for the case study
below and need to be discussed in detail prior to data analysis and discussion. Social
dialectologists have shown that members of small communities whose social net-
works are characterized by strong density and multiplexity tend to be more local
(and often nonstandard) in their speech than speakers with wider networks and con-
tacts outside their immediate social environment or speech community (Milroy and
Milroy 1985; L. Milroy 1987). More mobile speakers thus typically adopt nonlocal
features as a consequence of widening their networks; they take on the role of inno-
vators as they increasingly use these adopted (new) features in their own commu-
nity. In a sense, mobility-related leveling effects were already taken into account in
traditional dialect geography since field-workers chose limited mobility as the prin-
cipal criterion in the selection of informants (see above). Notwithstanding, even
though mobility is generally recognized as a driving force in dialect shift and loss,
few studies have taken it into account as an independent extra-linguistic variable per se.
Perhaps the most important study here is the Milroys pioneering Belfast study
(L. Milroy 1987; Milroy and Milroy 1978, 1985; cf. also J. Milroy 1992a), where
men with jobs in the local industry were found to have consistently higher percent-
ages of nonstandard features than women who held jobs outside their neighborhoods
(and thus had wider social contacts). The Belfast study not only uncovered possible
linguistic consequences of the loosening (or expansion) of network ties but also
highlighted the influence of mobility on interindividual variation by showing that an
increase in mobility commonly entailed the loss of local features.
By the same token, Wolfram (1969) reported far-reaching linguistic implications
of an increase in social mobility in the African American speech community of
Detroit. In analogy to Belfast, he found that linguistic variation correlated with
mobility rates of individual speakers, the general trend being that more mobile
speakers (particularly the women) had higher percentages of standard features.
Some social dialectologists have speculated on the general impact of mobility on de-
dialectalization processes, and Chambers (1995) goes as far as to formulate two
dialect laws of mobility:
Mobility . . . has the force of a natural linguistic law: mobility causes people to speak
and sound more like people from other places.

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In dialectology it was the corollary of this law that was enshrined: isolation causes
people to speak and sound less like people from other places. (66)
Assertions such as these feed into the common belief that isolated communities are
prone to be linguistically divergent from mainstream ones, in that archaic language
features linger and are maintained longer by the communitys speakers (what
Andersen 1988 labeled the relic assumption; see also Schilling-Estes 2002).
Another relevant factor is the impact of attitudinal criteria on the adoption and
persistence of linguistic forms. It has long been recognized that attitudes toward a
certain lifestyle or locality strongly affect the maintenance (or even strengthening) of
local patterns. In fact, attitudinal factors may on occasion interact with and ultimately
outweigh mobility-related effects. This manifests itself most clearly when mobile
members of a community are more nonstandard than one would expect them to be;
this pattern is most noticeable when the mobile speakers have higher percentages of
local features than comparatively immobile speakers with similar social characteris-
tics. This was shown in Labovs (1963) landmark study on Marthas Vineyard, where
some of the communitys most mobile members, who had left the island for career or
education purposes and subsequently returned to the island, were found to have the
highest percentage of local features. Labov concluded that the emotional attachment
to the island and the endorsement of island life and its traditional values had a
strengthening effect on the usage of the variable analyzed (centralized onsets in /ay/
and /au/ diphthongs). As a consequence, salient features of the local variety came to
function as a linguistic indicator of the communitys values and thus subconsciously
demarcated locals from outsiders (who were not held in particularly high esteem).
The impact of attitudes on language variation is a general phenomenon and by no
means limited to Marthas Vineyard; for instance, it also manifested itself on Ocracoke
Island, off the North Carolina coast, which has experienced similar sociodemo-
graphic developments over the past half century (Wolfram et al. 1997). Smith Islanders
(Schilling-Estes 2002) have even undergone dialect intensification (i.e., they increas-
ingly use local dialect features as their sense of local identity grows). The fact that
local features do not necessarily disappear in the speech of the most mobile speak-
ers reflects the influence of attitudinal factors on language variation and change.
Considerations of this kind have thus to be taken into account when an increase in
mobility or a widening of social networks does not automatically lead to the
(expected) increase in the usage of nonlocal forms. Attitudinal factors to a large
extent account for why some individuals in isolated speech communities pick up
nonlocal features, whereas others with similar characteristics do not.
To sum things up, insular, rural, or otherwise isolated communities are particularly
prone to maintain relic or archaic features, simply because they do not partake in inno-
vations as more integrated communities do. Few inhabitants of rural Illinois show
traces of the Northern Cities Shift, speakers of Appalachian English have maintained
a-prefixing (we was a-huntin bears), and the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha have
maintained /h/-insertion (in I am looking for my hoilskins), a historically attested

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feature that was lost in British English over the last 150 years. (However, and this
crucial point must be made, this does not mean that isolated communities are always
linguistically conservative, i.e., that they maintain relic forms only. They also have
the capacity of innovating or else catalyzing ongoing changes, as a result of which
language change becomes more dynamicsee Schreier 2003d; Schilling-Estes 2002.)
Notwithstanding and despite the fact that speakers in more isolated communities may
adhere to archaic features, individual speakers in such communities display variation,
and this variation correlates with a complex set of extra-linguistic parameters, most
notably education, social class and status, sex/gender, mobility, attitudes, and lifestyle.
The present article addresses these issues by means of a case study of interindividual
variation in one of the most isolated places in the English-speaking world: the island
of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean. The aims are the following:
1. to document individual language usage across individual speakers and to quantify

linguistic micro differentiation in small tight-knit communities (in line with Dorian
1994 and Wolfram et al. 1997);
2. to examine the interplay of social and psychosocial criteria here;
3. to show that the complex nature of individual variation must be explained both on
a micro level (i.e., with reference to the personal histories of individual speakers)
and a macro level (i.e., global developments that affect the entire community); and
4. to offer possible explanations as to why speakers may not display expected patterns
of variation and individuation.
The article is structured as follows. It first traces the settlement history of the
Tristan da Cunha community and its linguistic implications (see Schreier 2002a,
2003a for more detail). Then it provides some personal information on the two indi-
viduals whose speech is analyzed here, followed by an in-depth analysis of four
selected linguistic variables (two morphosyntactic onesleveling of past be to was
and third-person singular present tense and two phonological onesconsonant
cluster reduction and /h/ insertion), completed by the findings of a perceptual dialec-
tology study. In a final section, the analysis is contextualized with reference to the
speakers personal histories and sociolinguistic characteristics, followed by an in-
depth discussion of the case of individuation at hand.
Tristan da Cunha
The island of Tristan da Cunha is situated along the maritime mountain ridge that
divides the Atlantic Ocean longitudinally. There is no airfield, and the sea is the only
way to reach the island; only about ten ships travel to Tristan da Cunha each year, usu-
ally via Cape Town, which is located some 1,800 miles to the east. The geophysical
isolation is unparalleled as the closest settlement, Jamestown, St. Helena, is about
1,400 miles distanta place that cannot be directly reached, though, as there is no
transport between the two South Atlantic islands. The population of Tristan da Cunha

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is 280 people, all of whom live in one settlement and thus in closest proximity to each
other. The geophysical location and the sociodemographic setup of the community
make Tristan da Cunha an ideal site to look into the manifestation of language varia-
tion and change in isolation, both on personal and group levels (cf. Schreier 2003a).
Settlement History
Though discovered and charted by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century,
Tristan da Cunha was not settled until the 1790s, when the American fishing and whal-
ing industry expanded to the South Atlantic Ocean (Brander 1940; Crawford 1945). The
first permanent settlement was established in 1816, when the British admiralty formally
annexed and integrated Tristan da Cunha into the British Empire (Crabb 1980). The mil-
itary garrison was withdrawn within a year, but several adults stayed behind and
founded the present-day population: William Glass, from Kelso, Scotland, with his
South African wife and their two children, and Samuel Burnell and John Nankivel, two
stonemasons from Plymouth, England (both of whom did not stay on the island long).
The population increased when shipwrecked sailors and castaways arrived.
According to Earle ([1832] 1966), an artist and naturalist stranded on the island in the
mid-1820s, the early colony consisted of the Glass family; Richard Old Dick Riley,
from Wapping in the London East End; Alexander Cotton, from Hull/Yorkshire; and
Thomas Swain, from Hastings/Sussex. The late 1820s and 1830s saw the arrival of a
contingent of non-British settlers, most notably several women from St. Helena
(Taylor 1856), a number of European settlers (from Denmark and Holland; Brander
1940), and a small group of American whalers (Gane 1928).
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the whale and seal trade declined and
the community became increasingly isolated; in 1882, for instance, an average two
ships called at Tristan da Cunha per year. The influx of new settlers decreased, and
two sailors from Camogli, Italy, were the only newcomers in the second half of the
century (Gane 1928). The sociocultural isolation of Tristan da Cunha peaked in the
early twentieth century. According to Evans (1994), the community received no mail
for more than ten years; a minister reported in the mid-1920s that the children had
never seen a football (Rogers 1925); and in the late 1930s, only 4 out of more than
300 Tristanians had ever left the island (Crawford 1999: 151). Isolation came to an
end in April 1942, when a British naval station was stationed on Tristan da Cunha to
construct a meteorological and a wireless station. The contact with the outside world
led to farreaching social and economic changes (Munch 1945, 1971). The tradi-
tional subsistence economy was replaced by a paid labor force economy when a
South African company established a permanent fishing industry on the island.
The changes were catalyzed in the early 1960s when a volcano erupted near the
settlement. The entire community had to be evacuated and was forced to spend two
years in exile in England. Upon their return, the community underwent quick mod-
ernization, and the Tristanians adopted modern dress, dances, and entertainment.
A new fishing company employed the entire local workforce. The living conditions

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improved considerably, and the 1970s and 1980s were a period of unprecedented
economic prosperity (Schreier and Lavarello-Schreier 2003). In recent years, the com-
munity has become increasingly open and exocentric (in Andersens 1988 usage).
Today, the Tristanians have more extensive contacts than ever with the outside world.
An overseas teaching program became available in England and on St. Helena
(Evans 1994), allowing teenagers to pursue secondary education off the island, and
it is now very common for adults to leave the island for further job training.
Linguistic Implications
A first and most important point is that, due to its geophysical isolation, Tristan da
Cunha English (TdCE) is one of the most remote varieties of English around the world.
South African English and St. Helenian English, geographically speaking the closest
varieties, are more than 1,400 miles distant. Consequently, notwithstanding the com-
munitys recent opening up, the islanders have always had limited face-to-face inter-
action with speakers of other varieties of English. As for genesis and evolution, TdCE
has undergone a highly complex development, the full complexity of which we are still
in the process of understanding (Schreier 2002a; Schreier and Trudgill 2006). As
Zettersten (1969) points out, it was paramount that there was no direct language con-
tact on Tristan da Cunha; there was no indigenous population when the island was col-
onized, and the communitys founders did not come into contact with preexisting
language varieties. The origins of this variety can thus be dated to the 1820s, and the
local contact scenario included the following forms of English:
1. Several forms of British English and Lowland Scots (the British founders of the
colony came from the Scottish Lowlands, East Yorkshire, the London East End, and
Hastings; this led to koinization, as outlined in Siegel 1985, 1987; Trudgill 1986).
2. American English (presumably from Eastern New England; Captain Andrew Hagan,
the most influential American resident, was a native of New London, Massachusetts).
3. Second-language (L2) forms of English (the first languages of the non-Anglophone
settlers were Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, and Italian, even though it has to be stressed
that all of them had sufficient knowledge of English that they could survive in an
English-speaking environment; Earle [1832] 1966; Taylor 1856).
4. St. Helenian English, which may have undergone creolization and may be structurally
similar to English-based creoles in the Caribbean (Hancock 1991; cf. Schreier 2005).
The question of origins and development is not pursued here, but analyses on
morphosyntax (Zettersten 1969; Schreier 2003c) and segmental phonology (Schreier
and Trudgill 2006) indicate that TdCE primarily derives from British and
St. Helenian English; moreover, it has undergone independent local developments,
which set it apart as a distinct variety of world English. For the present purpose, we
state that the Tristan da Cunha community is characterized by extreme isolation and
dense and multiplex networks (all the speakers live in the same village); there is no
immigration and very little out-migration.

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Two TdCE Speakers: Heather and Sam
Heather and Sam are pseudonyms for speakers 3 and 37. They were among
the subsample of thirty-five TdCE speakers whose speech was analyzed with the aim
of identifying new-dialect formation mechanisms and processes of contact dynam-
ics that gave rise to the current form of TdCE (Schreier 2003a, 80). For that study,
the speakers in the sample were studied collectively and grouped in cells of individ-
uals with similar social characteristics (age, mobility, and sex/gender), a technique
that uncovers general patterns of variation and change but has been repeatedly criti-
cized since it leaves little room for a study of interindividual variation in speakers of
the same sex, age, and mobility group. I interviewed Heather and Sam individually
when conducting fieldwork on the island in 1999. Due to a six-month stay on Tristan
da Cunha, I was well familiar with both of them; I waited for two months before
intensifying my fieldwork activities, and the interviews were conducted in contexts
as informal as possible. I visited both of them in their homes and had chats with them
about topics that I knew would be of interest from previous experience (mostly about
local events, their reminiscences of the 1961 volcanic eruption, or experiences of
time spent abroad).
Heather and Sam were selected for this study for several reasons. First of all, they
have close and to a large part overlapping social networks. Both are natives of Tristan
da Cunha, Sam being born in 1935 and Heather in 1945, and both spent their entire
childhood and early adolescence on the island. They were born in a crucial period in
island history, around World War II, which saw the emergence of insularity and is of
paramount importance for the development of twentieth-century TdCE. Moreover,
Heather and Sam are brother and sister, grew up in the same family, and thus have the
same familial background. They attended the same school and thus have the same level
of education as well. However, they differ drastically in terms of mobility. At the time
they were interviewed in March and April 1999, Heather had left the island on two occa-
sions only: during the 1961-1963 exodus, when the community spent the two volcano
years in England, and in the mid-1990s, when she went to St. Helena for three months
to visit her daughter who had emigrated there. Sam, on the other hand, had spent
lengthy periods off the island and was in fact one of the most mobile Tristanians of his
age group. He left the island in his early twenties to work as a handyman on Gough
Island, where he was employed for nine months by a South African company to con-
struct a meteorological station; he also accepted short-term contracts as a cook and fish-
erman on board ships, where he spent almost two years. During the two volcano years
in England, he fully integrated into the English community and socialized with people
of all walks of life and social backgrounds; he worked as a welder in a small
Southampton factory and was one of the few Tristanians who received a personal invi-
tation to Buckingham Palace, where he met Queen Elizabeth II. On return to the island,
Sam volunteered for the job as the first police officer in the history of Tristan da Cunha.
He was sent abroad and received two years training in England and Scotland in the
1960s, followed by an additional training course in the late 1970s. In recent years, Sam

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has spent considerable amounts of time in Cape Town, South Africa, both for holidays
and health reasons. All in all, he has spent approximately eight years of his life in the
outside world, mostly in England, Scotland, and South Africa.
Today, both Heather and Sam are married and have children on the island. Both
held working-class jobs at the time the interviews were conducted: Sam worked as
a fisherman in the local factory and Heather as a bartender in the pub. They live next
door to each other, separated by a backyard and a fence. They get along well, meet,
and converse daily. Moreover, they work together in the potato patches, the islands
most important food stock (Schreier and Lavarello-Schreier 2003), which is a time-
intensive activity and involves long hours and hard work throughout the year. Both
Heather and Sam have a strong sense of identity and regard Tristan da Cunha as their
home. However, this was not always the case; in the interviews, both explained how
at earlier stages of their life they had longed to stay elsewhere (they had itchy feet,
as Heather said in our tape-recorded chat). Sam explained that he was very much a
man to go places and see the world, which explains his interest in exploring new
job opportunities. Today, however, both are content to be where they are and could
not imagine living anywhere else.
Consequently, Heather and Sam represent an ideal case study to investigate interindi-
vidual variation and individuation. They have frequent face-to-face interaction and
share most of their social contacts and networks; they vary strongly in their degrees of
mobility, yetat the present stage of their liveshave a strong sense of identity with
the island and the local lifestyle. The question of interest, then, is how these character-
istics are reflected linguistically. How strong is their degree of interindividual variation,
and how would individuation manifest itself in their speech ways? Who of the two is
more local in their speech, and why? It is with the aim of addressing these questions that
we turn to a discussion of some selected variables in their speech.
Tracing Interindividual Variation: Some Selected Variables
Four variables were selected to gain insights into the degree of linguistic differ-
entiation between Heather and Sam. Two variables subject to a quantitative analysis
are morphosyntactic (leveling of past be with was as a pivot form, third-person sin-
gular present tense ), and two are phonological (consonant cluster reduction, /h/
insertion). The background of the four variables is briefly presented and discussed
in each case, followed by the presentation of the results. The findings and conclu-
sions are discussed in a separate section.
Leveling of Past be to was

The first variable investigated here has featured prominently in the variationist liter-
ature: the leveling of past be with was as a pivot form (as in we was happier in those

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days, there was no mailmen then). The inherent irregularity of the present and past
tense paradigms of to be is of vital interest to variationist linguistics for several reasons.
For one, it is the only English verb that has preserved person-number concord in the two
tense paradigms. English verbal morphology is pervasively regular; as a consequence,
tense allomorphs are linguistically marked minority forms and commonly subjected to
analogical pressures. Trends toward paradigmatic regularization1 are particularly notice-
able (and well researched) in nonstandard varieties, many of which display tendencies
to bring irregular concord patterns in line with the vast majority of verbal paradigms that
display no such agreement. Past be regularization has been attested from the first doc-
umented forms of English onwards. Historical studies indicate the diachronic dimen-
sion of this process; Quirk and Wrenn (1960), for instance, document past be leveling
in Old English, and Forsstrm (1948), Jespersen (1961), and Visser (1963-1973) trace
its development and alignment in the Middle and Early Modern periods of English.
The historical evidence is complemented by a plethora of synchronic studies in
English around the world. Past be regularization has been investigated in the British
Isles (Cheshire 1982; Ojanen 1982; Britain 1991, 2002; Tagliamonte 1998), the
United States (Labov et al. 1968; Labov 1972; Wolfram and Christian 1976; Feagin
1979; Hazen 1994, 2000a, 2000b; Mallinson and Wolfram 2002), the South Atlantic
(Britain and Sudbury 2002; Schreier 2002b, 2003a), Australia (Eisikovits, 1991),
Canada (Meechan and Foley 1994), and the Caribbean (Tagliamonte and Smith
2000). Whereas most of these quantitative studies examine the patterning of varia-
tion and its internal and extra-linguistic correlates, research has also focused on the
delimitation of genetic relationships and (potential) founder effects (Tagliamonte
and Smith 2000) or on regularization mechanisms in conditions of dialect contact
and new-dialect formation (Hay and Schreier 2004).
The literature on subject-verb agreement with be throws light on some general
characteristics. First, extension of the pivot form was (i.e., forms such as we was) to
environments where standard varieties have were is so widespread that it constitutes
a vernacular root of English. This point is made by Chambers (1995, 242), who
identifies we/you/they was as one of the variables [that] appear to be primitives of
vernacular dialects in the sense that they recur ubiquitously all over the world.
Second, alternation between be allomorphs is subject to robust linguistic constraints;
individual grammatical environments vary in how often leveling to was occurs. As
Tagliamonte (1998) points out, third-person plural contexts offer particularly impor-
tant insights here. Third-person plural environments can co-occur with a personal
pronoun (they were), a noun phrase (the cows were), or with an existential subject
(there were cows). These three environments have different agreement patterns, with
existentials generally having the highest levels of was agreement (there was cows)
and personal pronouns having the lowest (we/they was). This hierarchy is replicated
in practically all studies on subject-verb agreement that involve finite forms of be
(Cheshire 1982; Britain 1991; Eisikovits 1991; Feagin 1979; Hazen 2000a; Wolfram
and Christian 1976; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1994).

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On the other hand, second-person singulars tend to have higher levels of was than
other personal pronouns (Feagin 1979; Eisikovits 1991; Tagliamonte 1998). This
most likely represents a reflection of earlier forms of English, which had particularly
extensive was/were alternation in this context (cf. Forsstrm 1948, 22). Second-
person singulars commonly have higher levels of was agreement than first- and
third-person plural contexts, which tend to behave similarly (Eisikovits 1991; Smith
and Tagliamonte 1998). Plural NP subjects, on the other hand, often exhibit higher
levels of was agreement than personal pronouns, and studies such as Feagin (1979)
or Hazen (2000b) report that the type of plural NP (simple, collective, or conjoined)
may have an effect on agreement patterns. The absolute and relative positioning of
verb and subject phrases is thus of particular relevance (Meechan and Foley 1994;
Britain and Sudbury 2002). Was agreement is much more likely to operate when
the verb precedes subject NPs (for instance, in existential constructions) than when
the NP occurs in pre-V position. Existential plural constructions have by far the
strongest effect on the use of was in contexts of standard were (Smith and
Tagliamonte 1998, 109), and this finding is reproduced in all varieties that have been
subject to linguistic scrutiny.
The question of interest here is twofold. First, to what extent do Heather and Sam
regularize their past be paradigms? Second, in what environments do they use was
rather than were? In an earlier study, I traced the development of this variable in a
cross-community study and found that its usage strongly correlated with age and
mobility (Schreier 2002b). Moreover, twentieth-century TdCE was truly remarkable
in that variation was leveled out entirely: were forms were entirely absent in the gen-
eration of Tristanians born before World War II. As Table 1 and Figure 1 indicate,
Heather and Sam have different tendencies to regularize past be. Sam has partaken
in categorical language change, and were does not feature in his past be paradigm at
all. Heather, on the other hand, uses were in all environments (with the notable
exception of plural existentials).
Heathers overall usage of was instead of standard were is still comparatively high
(65.5 percent), but her total rate of past be leveling is not categorical, as it was in early
twentieth-century TdCE (and still is in Sams speech). Moreover, the frequency with
which she has leveled was varies drastically between the individual environments
namely, from 0 percent in second-person singular (you were down Pigbite, right?) to
100 percent with existentials (there was army barracks there). The other environments
align in between. The environment-related hierarchy is striking: existentials favor past
be leveling more than plural NPs (64.3 percent) and personal pronouns (51.7 percent).
This hierarchy is consistent with common patterns in other varieties of English.
Third-Person Singular Present Tense Zero

The second variable considered here is third-person singular present tense zero.
Present tense concord has been subject to extensive research in English around the

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Table 1
Leveling of Past be with Pivot Form was (Total n = 177)
Heather Sam
was were Percentage was was were Percentage was
Second singular 0 3 0 4 0 100

First plural 3 1 75 20 0 100
Third plural 12 10 54.5 65 0 100
Plural NP 9 5 64.3 18 0 100
Plural existentials 12 0 100 15 0 100
Figure 1
Leveling of Past be with Pivot Form was (Total n = 177)
100 100 100 100 100 100

100
80 75
Levelling to WAS (per cent)
64,3
60 54,5
40
20
0
0
2nd singular/plural 1st plural 3rd plural Noun Phrase Existential
Grammatical environment
Heather Sam
world (Early Modern English, Bailey, Maynor, and Cukor-Avila 1989; the British Isles,
Trudgill 1974, 1998; Appalachian English, Wolfram and Christian 1976, Montgomery
1989; Newfoundland English, Clarke 1997; Saman English, Poplack and Tagliamonte
1989; African American English, Schneider 1983, 1989). The research indicates that
there exist several alternative systems of present tense concord:
1. A standard-like system, with s marking on third-person singulars only

2. A system where all grammatical persons and plural noun phrases have variable s
suffixation

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3. A system where only the third-person singular and plural persons as well as plural
NPs are marked (e.g., in they come and goes, the dogs barks, what Montgomery
1989, 1994 labels the Northern Concord system)
4. A system where none of the persons receives s marking
The standard-like system is unusual in that the only grammatical subject to be

morphologically marked for tense is the third-person singular. The saliency and
irregularity of s makes third-person singular subjects ideal candidates for all sorts
of leveling processes, which operate in the direction of paradigmatic conformity and
may manifest themselves in either s attachment or nonmarking with all persons.
Both processes are attested: s tense marking in all environments (e.g., I takes, we
works) is found in southwestern England and northern England (Wakelin 1977,
1986, 1994; Hughes and Trudgill 1996), whereas third-person singular present tense
zero (no overt tense marking, as in thats the road what go up to Rogers house)
is found in East Anglia (Trudgill 1998), African American English (Rickford 1999;
Green 2002), and pidginized/creolized forms of English (Holm 1988).
The pattern adopted in TdCE was third-person zero (which, though not pursued
here, is a strong indication of the strength of the St. Helenian input, where this fea-
ture is very common). Earlier studies (Schreier 2003a) found this feature to be very
persistent in Tristanians born before World War II (see also Zettersten 1969). In later
generations, however, s marking with third-person singulars increased subse-
quently. While was still a majority form in the speech of Tristanians born in the
1970s and 1980s, s had made an inroad into the local variety, with average s mark-
ing levels of around 10 percent for males and 30 percent for females (Schreier
2003a, 99). What patterns do we find in the speech of Heather and Sam? Figure 2
shows that Sam has in sixteen out of a total of eighteen environments where stan-
dard varieties would have s marking (88.9 percent). Heather, on the other hand,
varies almost evenly in her preference of the two variants and has in nine out of
twenty-one cases (here the total percentage amounts to 42.9).
It is not possible to conduct a more detailed analysis of internal constraints due
to the fact that the number of tokens is low in this case (total n = 39). We thus con-
tent ourselves by emphasizing that Heather and Sam vary sharply in their usage of
this variable. Sam has a strong preference toward (although he uses s as a minor-
ity form), and Heather uses a more standard-type marking, varying between the two
forms (even though the local variant is still common in her speech).
Consonant Cluster Reduction

After having looked into morphosyntactic features, we now consider two phonolog-
ical variables in Heather and Sams speech. The first one is consonant cluster reduction
(CCR), also referred to as word-final stop deletion. This phonological deletion process

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Figure 2
Third-Person Singular Present Tense Zero (Total n = 32)
100
88.9
80
3rd zero (%)
60
42.9
40
20
0
Heather Sam
3rd singular present tense zero
affects final plosives in syllable-coda consonant clusters (e.g., /t/ in fast, or /k/ in
flask) and has been particularly well researched in varieties of American English (for
instance, in Tejano English, Bayley 1994; Santa Ana 1996; Appalachian English,
Wolfram and Christian 1976; Philadelphia English, Guy 1980; Lumbee English,
Torbert 2001) but also in York/U.K. English (Tagliamonte and Temple forthcoming),
Indian English (Khan 1991), mesolectal Jamaican Creole English (Patrick 1991),
and New Zealand English (Holmes and Bell 1994; Schreier 2003b).
Even though some issues have not been settled to the satisfaction of all researchers
(most notably, the total number of clusters that may variably undergo reduction and the
effects of specific phonetic environments), there is consensus that CCR is principally
governed by phonetic and morphosyntactic factors. Indeed, the findings postulated in
the pioneering studies of Labov et al. (1968), Wolfram (1969), and Fasold (1972) have
been confirmed with remarkable consistency in most varieties studied. Monomorphemic
clusters (as in past, desk, or find) are more prone to undergo final stop deletion than
bimorphemic clusters (such as passed, stopped, or knocked); of particular importance
here is the fact that past tense formation of English regular verbs involves -ed suffixa-
tion, which often leads to bimorphemic clusters (e.g., /vd/ in lived, /st/ in passed, or /zd/
in praised). Clusters are more robust when some of the segments carry morphological
meaning by themselves (i.e., when a cluster includes more than one morpheme).2 The
second factor concerns the nature of the phonetic segment that immediately follows the
cluster. Following consonants have an enhancing effect on cluster-final stop deletion,

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whereas vowels or pauses do not. Therefore, both the morphemic status of the cluster
and the clusters phonetic environment affect the variable nature of CCR, and this has
been confirmed in practically all varieties. Such is the regularity of CCR in English
around the world that it has been labeled the showcase variable for variationist soci-
olinguistics (Patrick 1991, 171) or the paradigm case of systematic variability in
social dialectology (Wolfram, Childs, and Torbert 2000, 17).
While all varieties of English variably reduce syllable-coda clusters to at least some
extent, they at the same time differ in the frequency and conditioning with which this
process is applied. For instance, varieties such as African American English or Hispanic
varieties of English have comparatively higher CCR percentages than varieties such as
(White) New Zealand English or York/U.K. English. This is usually explained as a
holdover effect of language contact processes and direct consequences of phonotactic
transfer (discussion in Schreier 2005). Moreover, there exist qualitative differences as
well. What is particularly noteworthy in this context is that an alternative (and rare) con-
straint hierarchy was noted in mesolectal Jamaican Creole English (Patrick 1991,
1999). This variety deviates from the common pattern in that bimorphemic clusters are
more likely to undergo CCR; this type of conditioning is most likely explained by the
interactive effect of two common processes in creole varieties, namely, by the reduction
of clusters (due to substratal phonotactic transfer and preference for more natural/
regular CV(C) syllable types) and the strong trend not to mark tense morphologically,
using preverbal tense markers instead (Patrick 1999). This pattern also features in
St. Helenian English (Schreier 2005), which raises important issues for the generality
of this process in creolized varieties of English and is subject to further research.
To return to the focus of the present article, a total of 100 tokens were extracted
for both speakers; I only selected monosyllabic items or words with stress on the ulti-
mate syllable, extracting no more than 5 tokens of any one lexical item to control for
type-token relationships (for more detail, see Schreier 2003b). Heather and Sam dif-
ferentiate themselves strongly with regard to this feature, not only in the overall fre-
quency with which they reduce clusters but also in the internal hierarchy that
underlies the deletion of final stops. In terms of frequency, Sam deletes 90 percent of
all cluster-final plosives extracted for this study, whereas Heather deletes only 46 per-
cent. As for the major effects of morphemic status and phonetic environment, Heather
and Sam could not be more different. As Figure 3 and Table 2 indicate, Heather
adheres to the common hierarchy, deleting monomorphemic clusters more frequently
than bimorphemic ones; the effect is slight in preconsonantal environments but very
clear before pauses or vowels. Quite to the contrary, Sam reverses this pattern by
favoring final plosive realization in monomorphemic clusters. Moreover, he does not
realize a single bimorphemic ed morpheme (n = 27), which strongly suggests that
morphological tense marking is absent in his speech altogether and that this is a gram-
matical rather than a phonological process. He does not morphologically mark regu-
lar verbs for past tense.
Whereas Heather thus follows the general trend (although she certainly has a higher
CCR frequency than what is reported elsewhere), Sam has a very unusual pattern

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Figure 3
Consonant Cluster Reduction (Total n = 200)
100 100 100

100
91.7
90 87.2
81.1 80
80
70
70
CCR (percent)
60
50
40
30 25
20
20 15.4
10
0
0
pre-C mono pre-C bi pre-P mono pre-P bi pre-V mono pre-V bi
Morphological cluster status and following phonetic environment
(C = Consonant, P = Pause, V = Vowel)
Heather Sam
Table 2
Consonant Cluster Reduction (Total n = 200)
Pre-C Pre-P Pre-V
Monomorphemic Bimorphemic Monomorphemic Bimorphemic Monomorphemic Bimorphemic
Heather
Realized 7 1 12 2 21 11
Reduced 30 4 3 0 7 2
Percentage 81.1 80 20 0 25 15.4
reduction
Sam
Realized 5 0 3 0 2 0
Reduced 34 11 7 5 22 11
Percentage 87.2 100 70 100 91.7 100
reduction
that, to my knowledge, has only been reported in mesolectal Jamaican Creole

English and St. Helenian English. As reported in Schreier (2005), the bi > mono
hierarchy was common in TdCE speakers born between 1890 and the 1920s; this is
another attestation of the phonological or, in this case, phonotactic input of St. Helenian

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English. As in the morphosyntactic features reported above, Sam retains a local

nonstandard feature, and Heather is more innovative in that she has a higher percentage
of nonlocal variables.
/h/ Insertion
The final variable reported here is /h/ insertion (as in I never buy green happles),
alternatively referred to as excrescent <h> (Lass 1999, 118) or hypercorrect /h/
(Adamson 1998, 600). This process is closely connected to the longstanding history
of weakening and variable loss of initial /h/ in English (as in where did I put my
ammer?), which may have started as early as in the eleventh century (J. Milroy 1983,
1992b) and led to the fact that [h] is a defective or de-articulated segment in
contemporary English (Lass 1999, 61). The beginnings of this change can be traced
to Indo-European, where initial *k- became a glottal fricative /x/ (Grimms law),
which then changed to a velar approximant. The further development of /h/ in English
is a complex one indeed; for one, <h> is frequently absent in Middle English manu-
scripts (J. Milroy 1992b), only to appear in words where it should be absent on etymo-
logical grounds. For example, <howled> and <howt> spellings appear for old and
out in the fifteenth-century Cely Letters (cited in Wyld 1936), and J. Milroy (1992b)
examines thirteenth-century manuscripts of Genesis and Exodus (believed to have
been written in East Anglia) and finds spelling practices such as <hic> I, <hunkinde>
unkind, and <ham> am. Deletion and insertion even occur in the same literary
work: Lass (1999, 118, quoting from Wyld 1936) reports the incidence of /h/ in the
sixteenth-century diarist Machyn, who has <elmet> and <Amton Court> alongside
<holyff> for olive and <harme> for arm.
In contemporary British English, however, /h/ insertion has practically died out
and is absent, making an occasional appearance in emphatic pronunciations of the
letter h. This feature is still reported in Caribbean English, such as on the Bahamas
(Childs, Reaser, and Wolfram 2003) or in Jamaica, where Akers (1981, 32) notes that
when a form is accented, [h] may occur in initial position before vowels. Examples
are [hinglis] English, [ho:nli:] only, [hegz] eggs, [haks] ask, and [hais] ice.
/h/ deletion, on the other hand, is especially frequent in unstressed syllables, particu-
larly in function words (Have you seen her recently?), but it also occurs in stressed
lexical words, where it is particularly noticeable. Despite its sociolinguistic signifi-
cance and strong stigmatization, /h/ deletion in lexical words is a widespread and
well-established feature in British English and not confined to a single region. In
contrast, though, it is virtually absent in colonial varieties of English (Wells 1982).
TdCE is one of the very few varieties of English in which /h/ may still be inserted
(Zettersten 1969; Schreier 2003a, 211; Schreier and Trudgill 2006). Indeed, it
appears to be one of the most prominent characteristics of this accent as it is often
commented on by outsidersfor example, in Crawfords (1982, 49) comment that
the tendency to add an h before vowels makes all islanders highlanders! The
main questions for our purpose, then, are how often /h/ is maintained and/or inserted

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Table 3
/h/ Retention and Insertion (Total n = 300)
Function Words with Initial /h/ Function Words without Initial /h/
+ /h/ /h/ Percentage /h/ Retention + /h/ /h/ Percentage /h/ Insertion
Heather 8 11 42.1 0 61 0.0

Sam 13 13 50.0 20 61 24.7
Lexical Words with Initial /h/ Lexical Words without Initial /h/
+ /h/ /h/ Percentage /h/ Retention + /h/ /h/ Percentage /h/ Insertion
Heather 28 2 93.3 1 39 2.5

Sam 24 2 92.3 11 6 64.7
in TdCE and to what extent Heather and Sam distinguish themselves with regard to
this feature. I extracted a total number of 150 tokens for each. Included were
(unstressed) function words as well as lexical words, plus all words that began with
a stressed vowel where an /h/ could be (and is variably) inserted (such as island, oil-
skin, upset, under, etc.). Table 3 presents the results.
Both Heather and Sam are strongly /h/-ful; they realize practically all /h/s in lexical
words, and they also have high levels in words where /h/ is likely to be dropped in other
varieties (as in the rock which is here by the Mission Garden or we let them had it).
It is remarkable that they do not distinguish themselves in this respect at all. As for
insertion, however, we see a strong difference. The right-hand column shows that
Heather has no insertion in function words at all and that she inserts /h/ in only 2.5 per-
cent (n = 39) of all lexical words extracted (in the example that (h)upset us very much,
you see). Sam, in contrast, inserts /h/ in 24.7 percent of function words and in 64.7 per-
cent of all lexical words that begin with a vowel and have initial stress (n = 17). /h/ inser-
tion is thus very strong in his speech. One should point out that the segmental
phonology of early twentieth-century TdCE is extraordinarily conservative in that it has
maintained a truly archaic feature (see discussion above). Further research on this vari-
able (with more extensive data drawn from a wider sample of speakers) is necessary to
gain an understanding of the conditioning of /h/-insertion in earlier TdCE (and, by infer-
ence, in nineteenth-century British English). For now, we conclude that /h/ maintenance
is equally strong in both speakers; as for insertion, however, Heather has practically no
traces of this feature, whereas Sam uses it commonly, particularly in lexical words.
Further Evidence: Perceptual Dialectology
The quantification of variable usage is one important piece of evidence for deter-
mining interindividual variation. Another one is the attitudes that are evoked by

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different speech samples. The domain of perceptual dialectology has made considerable
advances over the past two decades or so (Preston 1999), and it is certainly useful
to investigate attitudes toward Heathers and Sams speech patterns to comple-
ment the quantitative analyses. In the following, then, I report on some preliminary
results of an ongoing perceptual study, which so far has been conducted in the United
States, New Zealand, and South Africa and will be carried out in other English-
speaking areas before final analysis.
To briefly summarize the background of the experimental design: a total of six
TdCE speakers, among them Heather and Sam, were selected for the study, along with
four control speakers (of African American English, mesolectal Jamaican Creole
English, New Zealand English, and English Cockney). A short sample of about thirty
seconds length, drawn from natural conversation, was selected and digitized for each
of the ten speakers. In the first part of the study, the subjects (twenty-two Americans
and one Canadian, all aged between nineteen and thirty-two and residents of Raleigh,
North Carolina) were presented with the ten passages. They were asked to evaluate a
number of social characteristics of the speakers they were listening to. The rankings
were on a scale from 1 to 7, and the criteria considered were, among others, the
following: rural/urban (1 = rural, 7 = urban), working class (WC)/middle class (MC)
(1 = lower WC, 7 = upper MC), education (1 = low, 7 = high), and good English
(1 = no, 7 = yes). Each passage was presented twice, and the subjects were given suf-
ficient time after each sample to note their responses on an answering sheet provided.
Figure 4 indicates Heathers and Sams global percentages for each of the four criteria
in question. Heather ranks higher in all four: she is perceived to be more urban, more
highly educated, and more middle class and to speak good English much more than
Sam, who in turn is perceived as rural, comparatively noneducated, and working class.
In addition, I conducted a second (and more innovative) experiment, in which the
same twenty-two subjects were asked to listen to shorter speech samples, which were
arranged as follows. Ten shorter passages (for six TdCE speakers and the four control
speakers) were randomly grouped in pairs, representing all forty-five combinations of
passages. The forty-five pairs were arranged in nine groups of five pairs and presented
to the subjects in random order. The subjects were instructed to listen to the paired
samples and to note if they thought the two speakers spoke the same dialect or not.
If, in their opinion, the dialect of the two speakers was the same, they were asked to
circle the letter Y (for yes) on an answering sheet provided; if they thought that the
dialect of the two speakers was different, they were instructed to circle the letter N
(for no). All the subjects completed the matching task without difficulty.
Figure 5 gives the matching results for the total of fifteen possible matched pairs for
the six TdCE speakers. Only one of the pairs is positively identified (p < .01), whereas
four more pairs are matched, though the findings are not statistically significant. It is
noteworthy that ten pairs of TdCE speakers are classified as not speaking the same
dialect at alla finding that, needless to say, considerably challenges the assumption
of a linguistically homogeneous speech community. Moreover, almost all subjects

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Figure 4
Attitude Evaluations (Rural/Urban, Education, Working Class
[WC]/Middle Class [MC], Good English)
2.74
Rural/Urban
4.39
3.26
Education
5.17
2.74
WC/MC
5.13
3.65
Good English
5.35
1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 6
Heather Sam
Figure 5
Matching Results for Six Tristan da Cunha English (TdCE) Speakers
1 (female, 2 (male, 3 (female, 4 (male, 5 (male,

b. 1906) b. 1902) b. 1945) b. 1935) b. 1969)
6 (female, b. 1978) Y (n.s.) N (n.s.) N (n.s.) N (p < .01) Y (n.s.)
5 (male, b. 1969) Y (n.s.) N (p < .01) Y (n.s.) Y (p < .01)
4 (male, b. 1935) N (n.s.) N (n.s.) N (p < .001)
3 (female, b. 1945) N (p < .001) N (n.s.)
2 (male, b. 1902) N (n.s.)
Note: n.s. = not significant.

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partaking in this study were under the impression that Heather and Sam spoke different
varieties altogether; a chi-square test confirms that the result is statistically significant
(p < .001). The findings from the quantitative analysis are thus strengthened and further
supported; not only do Heather and Sam differ in their usages of local features, but they
are also perceived to speak distinct varieties of English, with Sam being judged to be
more working class, more rural, and lower educated.
All in all, then, there is overwhelming quantitative, qualitative, and perceptual
evidence that there is a considerable degree of linguistic differentiation between
Heather and Sam. How can we explain the patterns at hand, and what does this mean
for the manifestation and motivation of individual variation in general?
Summary and Implications
Tristan da Cunha is one of the most isolated speech communities there is. The
approximately 280 inhabitants of the island live in one village, almost 1,400 miles
distant from the next settlement; their social structure is characterized by frequent
interaction and dense (and to a large part overlapping) social networks. TdCE is thus
an excellent variety to scrutinize the effects (1) of restricted or increasing mobility
on language change, (2) of limited interaction patterns with outsiders and social
cohesion on linguistic homogeneity, and (3) of dense and multiplex networks on
interindividual variation. All these effects can be studied in the case at hand.
Heather and Sam distinguish themselves strongly in their usage of each of the four
variables analyzed. As for past be, Sam has partaken in categorical language change
and leveled the paradigm so that were forms are absent; Heather, in contrast, consis-
tently uses were in standard contexts and displays a constraint pattern that is attested
in most forms of English (existentials > plural NPs > personal pronouns). As argued
in Schreier (2002b), the leveling out of were forms is most likely to have its origins in
processes of contact dynamics. The sociolinguistic scenario on Tristan da Cunha led to
an acceleration of language-inherent changes and to unprecedented regularization of past
tense be. As a result, the generations of Tristanians born before 1942 (which includes
Sam) have a leveled paradigm with the pivot form was. Then, however, Tristanians
born around or after World War II (which includes Heather) increasingly begin to use
standard were forms in standard contexts, and the progress of de-regularization
reflects the communitys emergence from insularity. In other words, the present case
study indicates how quickly TdCE transformed in that period.
As for third-person singular present tense zero, Sam has high levels of , whereas
Heather varies between and a standard type of s marking. This pattern also emerges
in the analyses of the phonological variables: Sam has very high levels of consonant
cluster reduction and displays a highly unusual constraint ranking. Bimorphemic clus-
ters with a final ed tense morpheme are more often reduced, whereas monomorphemic
clusters are more intact, and this in all three environments (following consonant,

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vowel, pause); Heather, on the other hand, while still having comparatively high
reduction levels, adheres to the commonly reported pattern mono > bi. Again,
Heather has a more innovative variant, and the traditional one is strongly maintained by
Sam; morphological tense marking (or ed suffixation) was absent in early twentieth-
century TdCE (Schreier 2003a). Finally, as for /h/ insertion, both Heather and Sam
typically realize /h/ when present, even in unstressed function words; Sam, more-
over, has a strong tendency to insert /h/ before syllable onsets with a stressed initial
vowel, a feature practically absent in Heathers speech. The last piece of evidence on
the degree of differentiation comes from the perceptual dialectology study: Heather
is perceived to be middle class, more urban, and higher educated (in contrast to
Sam), and a dialect matching study shows that practically all the subjects judge
Heather and Sam not to speak the same dialect of English (p < .001).
These are obviously not the findings we would expect if isolated communities
were linguistically homogeneous and if linguistic variation and the usage of nonlo-
cal variants were a consequence of increasing mobility and widening social net-
works. The findings of the perceptual experiment thus clearly go against commonly
held assumptions; most matched pairs that involve TdCE speakers are judged to rep-
resent different dialects of English rather than one and the same, and the subjects
impressions are particularly strong in the case of Heather and Sam. This conse-
quently supports previous claims that isolated communities display considerable
linguistic heterogeneity (see, e.g., Dorian 1994).
The question of interest here is how we are to explain this particular manifesta-
tion of individuation. It must be emphasized again that both Heather and Sam are
rural by any account of classification and that they belong to the same social (work-
ing) class: Sam working as a fisherman and Heather as a bartender in the pub. In
addition, they have the same amount of education and the same familial background,
their social networks overlap considerably, and they are neighbors, which means that
they engage in face-to-face interaction with each other very often and that they have
done so for the past forty years. Moreover, they do not differentiate themselves in
the access to other varieties of English through various media forms. At the time
I carried out my fieldwork, there was no TV on Tristan da Cunha, and the Tristanians
only received the BBC World Service. There was (and still is no) public Internet
caf or e-mail facility. The only access to media was videos, either loaned from
the library or else privately distributed, as well as written correspondence with the
outside world.
Perhaps a good way to approach these findings is to see them in the light of what
one would typically have expected. In terms of mobility, for instance, it would have
been much more likely for Heather to be more nonstandard than Sam, simply on
account of the fact that she had left the island on only two occasions and that Sam
spent about eight years in the outside world, where he socialized heavily and met
with people of all walks of life. Sam should thus be more nonlocal due to his having
picked up outside features, and Heather should have high percentages of local

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features since she had practically no contact with non-TdCE speakers. This is not
evidenced in the data at all. A second criterion concerns the effects of change in social
structure and expanding/widening social networks. Both Heather and Sam have, to
a large part, overlapping social networks in the island community; they meet and
converse daily, which attests to the density of their network, and they are neighbors,
family members, and part of the same working gang that attends to the potato crops,
which indicates that their network is multiplex as well. The degree of interindividual
variation found in their speech can thus not be satisfactorily explained by their func-
tion in the communitys social structure or their belonging to distinct social groups.
Social networks can therefore not be a decisive factor here either.
Social integration and mobility thus fail to account for this pattern. What about atti-
tudes? Can the strength of interindividual variation as displayed by Heather and Sam
be explained with reference to attitudes toward the island and the outside world? Other
studies (Labov 1963) showed that attitudinal factors can outweigh mobility effects out-
right, most evidently when highly mobile members of a community (who often are the
ones with the highest education as well) return to their island because they are strongly
attached to the community and its values and beliefs. In some cases, they may rank
among the most nonstandard speakers, simply because the usage of local norms (sub-
consciously) symbolizes the social group whose values and lifestyle they embrace and
vernacular usage marks them as insiders. Thus, the pattern at hand could be explained
by the fact that Heather has no emotional attachment to the island and that she would
rather live in the outside world, an attitude symbolically reflected in her language
usage. However, this is not the case. Heather could not imagine living anywhere else;
she has children and grandchildren on the island and would even hesitate to leave the
island for a holiday in South Africa. Consequently, then, attitudinal factors cannot be
advanced as an explanation, as both Heather and Sam are strongly attached to the
island and its way of life and could not envisage living anywhere else.
The degree of interindividual variation at hand is extraordinarily complex. Neither
increasing mobility nor expansion of social networks nor attitudinal factors can
explain why Sam should be more nonstandard than Heather. General sociolinguistic
theory is therefore inadequate to explain anomalous and unexpected linguistic pat-
terns in individuals. We are in a quandarynone of the common criteria seem to
apply, and the differences must be explained alternatively. The crucial point of the
argument is the following. In order to explain individuation as a sociolinguistic phe-
nomenon, researchers should make every effort possible to gather information on the
personal history of a single speaker and to reconstruct how attitudes may have mani-
fested themselves and changed throughout the life span of the individual whose
speech is researched. Many cases of individuation can be accounted for only when a
speakers general development is considered, with her or his personal background and
beliefs held in present and past. Other cases in the sociolinguistic literature support
this contention, for instance, the well-known case of Mr. J in Toronto (Chambers
1984). Mr. J featured all aspects of Canadian English yet did not display the common

JENGL287584.qxd 3/7/2006 11:40 AM Page 49
pattern of Canadian Raising in /au/ diphthongs that was common in his age group. It
was only after going back to Mr. Js personal history when Chambers discovered that
he was not a native of Toronto at all but that he emigrated from upstate New York as
an eleven-year-old. Thus, Mr. J simply failed to fully accommodate to this particular
feature of Canadian English; the apparent anomaly was only discovered when more
information on his past became available.
To go back to our case, the fact that Heather and Sam are content on Tristan now
does not necessarily mean that they were always happy. Accordingly, just as present-
day attitudes were shown to be of major importance in places like Marthas Vineyard
or Smith Island, it is also possible that past attitudes are reflected in present language
variation, so that these effects somehow persisted. This seems to be the most promis-
ing explanation here. We saw that both Heather and Sam had as adolescents felt an
urge to live elsewhere and to experience life in different parts of the world. Heather
mentioned repeatedly that she enjoyed her time in England very much; she was quite
outspoken about her preference to stay in Southampton and said she only moved
back because of her family. She said that she lived with an English family, had a
local boyfriend, and was trained as a hairdresser (her profession of choice), which
she loved immensely and did not want to give up. However, at the time of the inter-
view, this did not strike me as an important factor; after all, Sam had expressed sim-
ilar intentions, and other Tristanians who had also wanted to stay in England reverted
to local language norms upon their return. Moreover, I simply could not imagine
how an individual, a native speaker of TdCE on top, could be immersed in her native
community for so long without reaccommodating.
However, this seems to be exactly what happened. When doing follow-up research,
I came across documents that showed how much Heather enjoyed her time in England
and how much she suffered from having to return to the South Atlantic at the time.
When doing research in Pius XII Memorial Library at St. Louis University, Missouri,
I discovered copies of English newspapers from the early 1960s, when the Tristanians
were in English exile. Heather featured prominently in a number of national newspa-
pers, and the British tabloids had a field day with the young Tristanian girl who
wanted to remain in England and expressed her vehement opposition to the commu-
nitys decision. There were lengthy articles covering her story, complete with photo-
graph and headlines such as GIVE US BRITAIN, RAT RACE AND ALL, or XXX
WEPT AND WEPT (Daily Mail, November 23, 1963). The combination of Heathers
personal accounts forty years later and the (though tabloid-style) information from
newspapers at the time indicate how reluctant and dissatisfied Heather was that she
had to go back to the South Atlantic. These feelings must have persisted for some
time, as Heather saved money to return to the United Kingdom, but waned after she
married and had children, raising her family on the island.
Consequently, the experience(s) of the two volcano years in England provide the
most plausible explanation as to why Heather uses less local forms than one would
expect her to and why she is perceived as more urban, higher educated, and more

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middle class than other Tristanians of her age group and social background. She
loved the English way of life and had to go back to Tristan da Cunha because of her
family, and there was nothing she could do to change this. The only way to voice her
personal protest was linguistic, namely by maintaining nonlocal norms on Tristan,
which she had accommodated to quickly in the outside world and symbolically rep-
resented the environment where she longed to be at the time. The usage of nonlocal
norms in Heathers speech thus most likely originates in accommodation to (south-
ern English) English speech and nonaccommodation to local norms upon her return.
One of the anonymous reviewers stressed that Heather emigrated as a teenager and
that this would have had a strengthening effect on the rapidness and persistence of
accommodation in her case. I certainly agree with this. Back on Tristan, however,
Heather must have maintained her usage and did not shift back to local norms, as
others did (see Schreier 2003a). What is truly remarkable in this case is that the non-
local features fossilized and persisted for almost four decades, despite the fact that
the island values and local way of life were accepted and fully embraced again
(a feeling that is very strong now). The most plausible explanation is thus that
Heathers attitudes in the past account for the linguistic differentiation found in her
present-day speech. Consequently, Heather is eccentric in a sociolinguistic sense;
she does not adhere to community norms and cannot be assigned to a category of
speakers one would expect her to be in.
We thus have an interesting double case of nonaccommodation. Sam is eccen-
tric as well, though in a quite different way. He did not adopt outside norms and con-
tinued using broad TdCE features even though he spent a considerable part of his life
in the outside world. One might object to this, pointing to the fact that Sams speech
was not recorded when he was in Scotland. One has to admit that it is difficult, of
course, to establish how stable his speech was when he was abroad. Only a real-time
study can throw light on the amount of earlier accommodation and show the extent
to which it correlated with mobility and expanding social networks. Strictly speak-
ing, one cannot simply conclude that Sam always spoke broad TdCE since he does
so at the age of sixty-three. Though not as flexible as preadolescents, adults partake
in variation and change throughout their lifetimes (Harrington, Palethorpe, and
Watson 2000). The possibility certainly exists that Sam accommodated when his
social networks expanded and that he may have picked up Scottish English features
while training in Scotland, only to reaccommodate to TdCE norms upon his return
to the island (perhaps as one would have expected Heather to do). If this were the
case, then any claims as to the maintenance of local features and nonaccommoda-
tion are futile as accommodation theory would account for Sams usage of non-
standard features (note, though, that it could not explain why Heather is so nonlocal
in her speech). However, two observations speak against this. First of all, a very short
recording of Sam made by the Swedish painter Roland Svensson in the early 1970s,
immediately after Sam had returned from police training in Scotland, shows that
thirty years ago, he had the very same features as now (even though the interview

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was too short to yield sufficient material for a real-time analysis). Second, I met Sam
when traveling to Tristan da Cunha in January 1999 and was actually fortunate
enough to share a cabin with him. Sam was highly nonstandard in the first conver-
sations between the two of us and with other passengers on board ship (thus in con-
texts where one would expect Sam to accommodate and use nonlocal forms if he
could or wanted to). In fact, my first fieldwork notes, based on Sams speech in our
first chats, make reference to all the variants analyzed here and stress how often he
used them. So, even though this of course is no proof that Sam maintained TdCE fea-
tures throughout his lifetime, this is at least a strong indication that he did not accom-
modate to outside norms only to switch back to TdCE again when resettling on the
island. Sociolinguistic eccentricity consequently manifests itself in two ways here:
in the case of Sam, in his oblivious attitude to the world around him, which has the
effect of making him incapable of accommodation; in the case of Heather, in her not
shifting back to TdCE norms, despite the fact that she spent her entire youth on the
island and that she left her native community only once between 1963 and 1999
that is, she was completely immersed for practically her entire life.
To conclude, what do these results mean for individuation and linguistic hetero-
geneity in isolation? First of all, small, tight-knit communities display considerable
variability; it is simply not the case that density and multiplexity of social networks
categorically level off individual differences. The case at hand stresses that micro
variation reflects the complex interplay of exposure to nonlocal norms (and the
degree to which these are accommodated) and attitudinal factors (how strongly local
values and lifestyles are embraced). The findings of this article thus stress the sym-
bolic function of language. Heathers language usage is an emblem of individuality
as she defied social pressures to assimilate to the language norms of the place she
was unhappy to return to as an adolescent. It is remarkable that these effects have
persisted for so long even though Heather was completely immersed in the Tristan
community. Sam, on the other hand, has never really accommodated, and the widen-
ing of his social networks seems to have had practically no effect on his speech.
A final question in this context addresses the role of individuation in sociolin-
guistic theory. With the exception of sex/gender, the traditionally observed language-
external factors (mobility, social networks, current attitudes) cannot account for
diverging or unexpected patterns, such as when a less mobile speaker has more non-
local forms than a mobile one, even though both have a similar social and educa-
tional background and strongly identify with community values and the local way of
life. Neither can effects of social class or status be advanced as an explanation here,
perhaps also since they do not have the same significance in small insular commu-
nities as they do elsewhere. However, as one of the anonymous reviewers rightly
points out, this does not question or refute general principles of sociolinguistic
theory. Of course, mobility-related effects have a general significance in that the vast
majority of individuals will adhere to them; by the same token, nobody would question
that many women in Western, industrialized societies tend to use more standard-like

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variants than men. Consequently, well-established sociolinguistic principles will not

have to be rewritten because they do not apply across the board. Nevertheless, and
this is where individuation comes in, it is sometimes ignored that these are general
guidelines only and not categorical laws. The majority of a population will display
expected trends and common patterns, for instance, when their variable language
usage correlates with social class, ethnicity, or mobility. If this were not the case,
then we simply could not make general assessments of linguistic variation, and we
would fail to model language change on a societal level. On the other hand, it must
be borne in mind that there always exist cases of unexpected language usage at a
micro level, no matter whether the individual is an interloper, a lame, or an aspirer
(Chambers 1995, 84-101). Possible explanations for such apparently anomalous dif-
ferences emerge only when we focus on the individual speaker herself or himself,
rather than on her or his function in an agglomerate cell of speakers with similar
characteristics, and when we closely analyze that individuals personal development
and attitudes throughout her or his lifetime.
In conclusion, individuation is of little, if any, value for the embedding of
language change. Focusing on individual language usage is of little relevance for
sociolinguistic theory; as Chambers (1995, 85) states, Discovering how various
personality factors interact to make idiolects would probably not repay the effort
because they carry almost no social significance. Notwithstanding, individual case
studies increase our understanding of how individuals function in groups, how they
(socio)linguistically conform to others or differentiate themselves, how they
develop, modify, or retain their speech patterns across time (Johnstone 1996). It is
hoped that this area of research deserves more attention; not only would this research
provide further insights into the sociolinguistic expression of individuality and iden-
tity, but it might also at some stage in the future allow us to pinpoint the origins of
language change within an individual speaker. Consequently, I hope it is not too
exaggerated to state that individuation may provide vital clues in our pursuit to
model how innovations originate and how they gain a foothold in the first place
either as truly new features or simply through accommodation and adoption of non-
local onesand how they subsequently diffuse throughout wider groups and across
communities.
Conclusion
The findings of this study indicate that small, tight-knit communities are charac-
terized by a vast amount of linguistic differentiation, both on social and individual
levels. Indeed, rather than enforcing homogeneity, they display considerable toler-
ance toward interindividual variation. Personal and social causes for leveling (or
nonleveling) are complex, and individuation can on occasion override generally
valid criteria. Whereas groups of speakers partake in general patterns of language

JENGL287584.qxd 3/7/2006 11:40 AM Page 53
change, we also have to allow room for variability of speakers with similar social
characteristics and overlapping social networks. Focusing on individuation may not
yield general patterns and trajectories of change; on the other hand, reshifting the
focus on single speakers may provide answers as to how individuals diverge from
common patterns, perhaps even offer answers as to why they might do so. Individual
language usage thus provides us with information that is vital to a range of soci-
olinguistic concerns. To name but a few: the role and function of self-expression and
identity as expressed through language, the nature of linguistic accommodation and
fossilization, the motivation of linguistic differentiation on a micro level, the causes
and consequences of individuation, and so on. The case at hand may be an unusu-
ally strong example of individuation, but it indicates that, at least for speakers like
Heather and Sam, it can manifest itself so strongly that the backyard may represent
a dialect boundary indeed.
Notes
1. I should add that the two terms leveling and regularization are used interchangeably here.
2. When an ed suffix is preceded by a coronal stop, such as in grant or mend, then the surface real-
ization [i- d] or [d] does, of course, not lead to a word-final cluster.
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Daniel Schreier is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is author
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Variation and Change, Folia Linguistica Historica, and Journal of English Linguistics and is on the editorial
board of English World-Wide: A Journal of Varieties of English. He is currently researching the origins and
development of St. Helenian English, which developed in the South Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries and represents the oldest variety of Southern Hemisphere English.

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Journal of English Linguistics

The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary: Individuation, Linguistic

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Journal of English Linguistics

Individuation, Linguistic Heterogeneity,

Keywords: individuation; language in isolation; mobility effects; network theory;

O ne of the fundamental assumptions of traditional dialect geographers was that geo-

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Schreier / The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary 27

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28 Journal of English Linguistics

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Schreier / The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary 29

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30 Journal of English Linguistics

1. to document individual language usage across individual speakers and to quantify

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Schreier / The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary 31

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32 Journal of English Linguistics

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Schreier / The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary 33

Two TdCE Speakers: Heather and Sam

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34 Journal of English Linguistics

Tracing Interindividual Variation: Some Selected Variables

Leveling of Past be to was

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Schreier / The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary 35

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36 Journal of English Linguistics

Third-Person Singular Present Tense Zero

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Schreier / The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary 37

was were Percentage was was were Percentage was

Second singular 0 3 0 4 0 100

100 100 100 100 100 100

1. A standard-like system, with s marking on third-person singulars only

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38 Journal of English Linguistics

The standard-like system is unusual in that the only grammatical subject to be

Consonant Cluster Reduction

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Schreier / The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary 39

3rd singular present tense zero

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40 Journal of English Linguistics

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Schreier / The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary 41

100 100 100

Monomorphemic Bimorphemic Monomorphemic Bimorphemic Monomorphemic Bimorphemic

that, to my knowledge, has only been reported in mesolectal Jamaican Creole

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42 Journal of English Linguistics

English. As in the morphosyntactic features reported above, Sam retains a local

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Schreier / The Backyard as a Dialect Boundary 43

Heather 8 11 42.1 0 61 0.0

Heather 28 2 93.3 1 39 2.5

Further Evidence: Perceptual Dialectology

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44 Journal of English Linguistics