Terra incognita in the anglophone world

This paper examines the development of a distinct contact-based variety on the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean. It outlines the sociohistorical context of the community as well as its linguistic and sociolinguistic implications, speculating on the original input varieties and processes of contact dynamics, new-dialect formation as well as feature selection and retention that occurred since the island was colonised in 1816. It provides a structural profile and discusses selected grammatical variables of this variety, with the aim of investigating feature selection from the relevant donor sources and identifying differential evolution patterns that occurred in this particular setting, even though it is not always possible to keep these two questions apart.