Conclusion

Dialect contact investigates the effects of social/geographic mobility on language change, and contact-induced change has been investigated in a variety of settings, such as in Norway (Omdal 1977), Fiji (Siegel 1987), South Africa (Mesthrie 1993), England (such as the English Fens (Britain 1991, 1997, 2002) and new towns such as Milton Keynes (Kerswill 1994, 1996; Kerswill and Williams 2000)), or Trinidad (Mohan 1978). Following Trudgill (1986), special attention was given to linguistic processes operating in such scenarios and to the social conditions that favour the emergence of a new, contactbased variety. By the same token, research has generally examined linguistic changes in contexts characterised by high mobility and sociolinguistic heterogeneity, for instance in new towns or in colonial settings that involved social mixing and restructuring (Chapter 2). In practically all of these cases, the sociodemographic dynamism was ongoing, as new settlers or colonialists arrived and earlier ones left; the investigated communities are practically always in a state of social flux, and the continuing transformation of a community’s linguistic and social configuration poses considerable problems for research and challenges sociolinguistic analyses. As we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, Tristan da Cunha, in contrast, represents an opposite community type: it is highly stable, endocentric and non-mobile, in addition to being extremely isolated. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Archaeology · Colonialism · Dynamism · Economic geography · Epistemology · Ethnology · Geography · Linguistics · Political science · Restructuring · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics) · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy