Phraseology and Culture in English

Focus on user-related varieties:
Dialects and ethnolects 

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Greetings as an act of identity in Tristan da Cunha 
English: From individual to social significance?
1
Daniel Schreier 
1. Introduction 
Greeting routines and procedures have received considerable attention in 
anthropological linguistics, often in terms of their potential for turn-taking 
or as culturally determined formulaic routines. Like all speech patterns, 
pragmatic greeting procedures vary regionally and socially, and greeting 
formulae may occasionally serve as a linguistic demarcation of sociocul-
tural identity of speech communities (e.g., grüezi in Swiss German, howdy
in the southern and Midwestern US, servus in Austria and southeastern 
Germany, gidday in Australia and New Zealand). This paper looks into the 
local construction of insider vs. outsider identity in an insular community 
and discusses the symbolic value of the greeting formula how you is? on 
Tristan da Cunha, an island in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. It is 
argued that the usage of this greeting has individual significance for some 
members of the Tristan community. This manifests itself in reactions to 
outsiders using how you is? when addressing locals, which occasionally is 
interpreted as an unwarranted trespassing into local norms. On an individ-
ual level, this greeting formula therefore represents a marker of local iden-
tity and functions as a linguistic expression of group membership and in-
sider status, symbolically standing for the islanders’ traditional culture and 
beliefs. By the same token, it is suggested that this greeting formula does 
not carry social significance (yet), as most members of the community have 
comparatively neutral attitudes and do not openly object to outsiders using 
this local greeting formula. Nevertheless, usage and interpretation of how
you is? is quite possibly in the process of change, inasmuch as it carries 
distinct symbolic values for islanders of different age groups. This has lin-
guistic and pragmatic implications for recent developments and changes 
affecting the local dialect, which are contextualised with reference to simi-
lar processes elsewhere. 

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Daniel Schreier