Insularity and Linguistic Endemicity

Abstract

Insularity can play a crucial role in the development (or adoption) of endemic dialect structures. This claim is based on an analysis of the co-occurrence of preterit forms with the quasi-modal used to, as in we used to went there all the time, in the dialect of English spoken on the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha. The author argues that useta went structures most likely originated in second-language (L2) forms of English since some of the Tristan da Cunha settlers had nonnative competence of English. Two crucial stages need to be considered for an explanation of the emergence and development of such structures: an origination phase, which depends on nonnative influence and admixture with interlanguage forms, and a consolidation phase, which depends on the nonlinguistic conditioning of the community. The analysis is contextualized with reference to language acquisition and language-learning processes elsewhere.