Phraseology and Culture in English

parts of the English-speaking world. 
3.
How you is? on Tristan da Cunha 
How you is? is an infrequent greeting formula and unknown in most areas 
in the English-speaking world, how are you?, how you doin’?, how are 
things?, etc. being much more widespread and common.
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Whereas it is 
probably not restricted to Tristan da Cunha, how you is? is both structurally 
and socioculturally unusual. It is a salient and prominent opening of inter-
actions involving Tristanians, and most outsiders to the island are unfamil-
iar with this formula. The pragmatic usage and function of how you is?
offers thus the opportunity to explore the socially-constructed identity that 
is attached to such markers and at the same time allows to investigate 
whether the usage of salient markers of this kind continues when the com-
munity which uses them undergoes rapid transformation and change, or, in 
contrast, whether it dies out as a result of accommodation to and adoption 
of outside norms. This section highlights the social history of the Tristan 

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Greetings as an act of identity in Tristan da Cunha English 
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community and briefly deals with the historical origins of this marker. The 
main part is dedicated to the discussion of this formula’s pragmatic func-
tion and social significance, particularly with reference as to how its usage 
is restricted to group members and how it may function as a symbolic lin-
guistic demarcation between locals and outsiders. 
3.1. Tristan da Cunha: A brief social history 
The island of Tristan da Cunha lies in the heart of the South Atlantic Ocean 
and has a population of 285; it is 2,334 kilometres south of St Helena, 
2,778 kilometres west of Cape Town, and about 3,400 kilometres east of 
Uruguay (Crawford 1945). It was first discovered by the Portuguese admi-
ral Tristão da Cunha in 1506, but the Portuguese did not pursue a concerted 
settlement policy for the island. The English and Dutch, too, became aware 
of the islands; the Dutch were the first to effect a landing in 1643 (Bein-
tema 2000), but none of the colonial powers developed an interest in estab-
lishing a permanent colony on the island. Things changed towards the end 
of the 18th century, when the American fishing and whaling industry ex-
panded to the South Atlantic Ocean and Tristan da Cunha served as an oc-
casional resort to the sealers and whalers fishing in the region (Brander 
1940). The growing economic interest, as well as the strategic position of 
Tristan da Cunha along a major sea-route, attracted a number of discoverers 
and adventurers. The island was settled in 1816, when the British admiralty 
formally annexed Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, apparently with 
the intention of blocking a possible escape route for Napoleon Bonaparte, 
who at the time was exiled on the island of St Helena (Schreier and Lava-
rello Schreier 2003). A military garrison was dispatched to the island, but 
they withdrew after a one-year stay. Some army personnel stayed behind 
with the intention of settling on Tristan da Cunha: two stonemasons from 
Plymouth (Samuel Burnell and John Nankivel), a non-commissioned officer 
from Kelso, Scotland, named William Glass, his wife, “the daughter of a 
Boer Dutchman” (Evans 1994: 245), and their two children. 
The population increased when shipwrecked sailors and castaways ar-
rived, some of whom settled and added to the permanent population. Au-
gustus Earle, an artist and naturalist who was stranded on the island in 1824, 
reports that apart from the Glass family, the British colonisers consisted of 
Richard ‘Old Dick’ Riley (from Wapping, in the London East End) and 
Alexander Cotton (from Hull, Yorkshire), who arrived in the early 1820s 

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Daniel Schreier 
(Earle 1832). The late 1820s and 1830s saw the arrival of a group of women 
from St Helena and three non-Anglophone settlers (from Denmark and Hol-
land). The population grew rapidly and by 1832 there was a total of 34 people 
on the island, 22 of whom were young children. The 1830s and 1840s saw 
a renaissance of the whaling industry and once again numerous ships called 
at Tristan da Cunha to barter for fresh water and supplies; this led to the 
arrival of a number of American whalers, some of whom settled permanently. 
The second half of the 19th century witnessed a period of growing isola-
tion, for a number of political and economic reasons: the American whale 
trade declined quickly, the increasing use of steam ships made bartering 
unnecessary, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 drastically reduced 
the number of ships in the South Atlantic. This affected the influx of set-
tlers, and a weaver from Yorkshire (Crawford 1945) and two Italian sailors 
were the only new arrivals in the second half of the century (Crabb 1980). 
The sociocultural isolation of Tristan da Cunha peaked in the early 20th 
century; Evans (1994) notes that the community received no mail for more 
than ten years, and a minister reported in the mid-1920s that the children 
had never seen a football (Rogers 1925). When visiting the island in 1937, 
the Norwegian sociologist Peter Munch found that the Tristanians had not