Falkland Island English

This is the first book length account of the history and structure of the English of the Falkland Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic. The book begins with a sociolinguistic history, considering the Anglophone period since 1833, settlement history, present-day mobility, language policy, esp. in the education system, language attitudes, and language in the media. The central core of the volume examines the structure of Falkland Island English. We first examine the phonetics of the variety, the vowel and consonant systems, as well as suprasegmentals (hiatus resolution, stress, rhythm, timing and intonation). We then describe and exemplify the major distinctive characteristics of the grammar of the variety, as well as noticeable discourse-pragmatic phenomena. The chapter on lexis looks at the distinctive vocabulary – e.g. loan words from Spanish, local terms for flora and fauna, local terms associated with the military presence. To conclude, the volume considers what is distinctive about Falkland English, evidence of geographical variability, and of settler dialect contact. It also considers how the variety patterns in relation to other Englishes, especially those of Australia and New Zealand. Finally, we consider what our analyses of Falkland English can tell us about lesser-known varieties of English more generally.