Phraseology and Culture in English

partaken in the massive changes that had occurred in the western world 
(Munch 1945) and that they lived in non-industrialized conditions. 
This situation came to an abrupt end in April 1942, when the British 
admiralty ordered the installation of a naval station on Tristan da Cunha. Its 
main purpose was the construction of a meteorological and wireless station. 
The arrival of the navy corps entailed far-reaching economic changes; a 
South African company obtained exclusive rights to establish a permanent 
fishing industry on the island, employing practically the entire local work-
force. The traditional subsistence economy was replaced by a paid labour 
force economy, and the traditional way of life was modified as a result of 
the creation of permanent jobs with regular working hours. Tristan da Cun-
ha was an economic boomtown in the 1950s: the living conditions and hous-
ing standards improved and the changes brought about by the development 
scheme led to a complete transformation of the traditional Tristanian way 
of life within one generation (Schreier and Lavarello Schreier 2003). 
In October 1961, unforeseen volcanic activities forced a wholesale evacu-
ation of the entire population. The Tristanians were forced to leave the is-
land and were transported to England, but virtually all of them returned 
from their exile to the South Atlantic in 1963. The dramatic evacuation and 
the two “volcano years” in England affected the islanders more than any 

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Greetings as an act of identity in Tristan da Cunha English 
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other single event in the history of the community. The unforeseen expo-
sure to the norms of the outside world changed the Tristanians in many 
ways; the community underwent quick modernisation and adaptation to west-
ern culture, and they adopted modern dress, dances and entertainment. A 
new fishing company provided all the households with electricity, which 
improved the living conditions considerably, and the 1970s and 1980s were 
a period of economic prosperity. In recent years the community has had 
more extensive contacts with the outside world: in 1983, an overseas edu-
cation program became available in England and on St Helena (Evans 
1994), allowing Tristanian teenagers to pursue secondary education off the 
island and adults to leave the island for further job training. 
3.2. Origins, form and function 
Tristan da Cunha English (TdCE) is the result of linguistic contact proc-
esses that occurred in this particular setting and it displays developments 
commonly found in contact dialectology (Trudgill 1986). TdCE does clear-
ly not represent a transplanted dialect brought to the island via one settler 
or a group of settlers. As I noted in Schreier (2002: 23), “TdCE evolved out 
of a mixing situation … Even though some varieties appear to have been 
more significant than others … no single dialect (regardless of structural 
and typological affiliation) served as a model per se for the first generations 
of native Tristanians.” The origins of the unusual structural properties of 
how you is? are explained by two different (and in this particular case co-
occurring) processes, namely by leveling of the present be paradigm to is
(which is paramount in contemporary TdCE and found in all environments, 
as in ‘I is’, ‘they is’, etc., see discussion in Schreier 2003) and also by lack 
of word-order inversion in question-type sentences, which was brought to 
Tristan da Cunha via the women from St Helena.
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There are several ways to trace the origins of the greeting formula how
you is? in the local vernacular. First of all, it could represent a direct legacy 
of St Helenian English, where it still features as a minority form today, and 
it is certainly possible that it was brought to the island as such via the group 
of women who cross-migrated in the 1820s. An alternative explanation would 
be that leveling to is and lack of word-order inversion in question-type 
sentences were brought to the island via different inputs, and that they sub-
sequently interacted to yield this characteristic greeting formula when the 
local dialect formed and evolved in the nineteenth century. It is noteworthy, 

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