On languages on islands

ABSTRACT

Islands as specific research sites in their own right have been given little direct attention by linguists. The physical segregation, distinctness, and isolation of islands from mainland and continental environments may provide scholars of language with distinct and robust sets of singular and combined case studies for examining the role of islandness in any appreciation of language. Whether distinct and particular sociolinguistic and typological phenomena can be attributable to islands and their islandness and vice versa remains unexplored. This position article considers the possibility of there being anything particular and peculiar about languages spoken on islands as compared to languages spoken on mainlands and continents. It arose out of a workshop titled ‘Exploring island languages’ held at Aarhus University, Denmark on 30 April 2018. The main question posed was: Is there anything special socially, linguistically, grammatically, and typologically about the languages of islands? If so, is it possible to talk about such a thing as an island language?

KEYWORDS:

• Creoles
• frames of spatial reference
• island languages
• linguistic isolates
• sociolinguistics

Acknowledgments

The conceptual foundation for this position article is based in several probing discussions between Joshua Nash and Peter Bakker in early 2018 about the nature of islands and their cultures, the languages of and on islands, how researchers have done linguistics on islands, and whether or not there is anything special or marked about these languages. These discussions led to a workshop which took place at a research island of and on its own, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS), an island-like refuge set away from the hustle and bustle of metric fixated, modern day academia.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Sébastien Doubinsky and Nicolas Tessier contributed to the discussion but not to the text.

² Not to be confused with the better known Bird’s Head (Vogelkop) peninsula of West New Guinea.

³ This is not the only case of speakers of an island language emigrating to another continent, taking the language with them. The Frisian dialects of Föhr and Amrum have speakers in the USA, especially in New York and Petaluma in California (Århammar 2013, 314).

⁴ We thank Harald Hammarström for his help. The map was generated as follows:

https://glottolog.org/glottolog/language.map.html?type=families&sEcho=1&iSortingCols=2&iSortCol_0=4&sSortDir_0=desc&iSortCol_1=0&sSortDir_1=asc&sSearch_1=Isolate#2/-2.3/159.2.

⁵ Hammarström et al. 2018 do not count these languages as isolates because they consider them as clusters of closely related ‘languoids’ (describable units, which could also be dialects, cf. Gil 2016). But when closely related languoids spoken in a coherent area do not have any relatives otherwise, one could reasonably count the language made up by them as an isolate as well. This means that North and South Haida are not isolates (because cognate with each other) but Haida still is.

⁶ Not to be confused with the island of the same name in the Moluccas, after which it was in fact named.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Nash

Joshua Nash is an islophilic generalist-cum-linguist working on the language of Pitcairn Island. He writes about ethnography, the anthropology of religion, architecture, pilgrimage studies, and language documentation. He has conducted linguistic fieldwork on Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island, South Pacific, Kangaroo Island, South Australia, and New Zealand; environmental and ethnographic fieldwork in Vrindavan, India; and architectural research in outback Australia. He was Associate Professor at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark in 2018–2019. He is currently Australian Research Council DECRA postdoctoral fellow at University of New England, Armidale, Australia. Joshua was born on a continent not on an island.

Peter Bakker

Peter Bakker is senior lecturer at Aarhus University. He works at the intersection of typology, historical linguistics and anthropological linguistics. His main research area is the genesis of new languages, including pidgins, creoles, mixed languages and languages created by twins. He was born in Dordrecht, the oldest city of Holland, and located on an island.

Kristoffer Friis Bøegh

Kristoffer Friis Bøegh is a PhD student at Aarhus University. He has conducted fieldwork in the Virgin Islands and is currently writing his dissertation on Crucian, the English-lexifier creole of Saint Croix.

Aymeric Daval-Markussen

Aymeric Daval-Markussen is an independent scholar. His research interests include creoles and the creolization process, linguistic typology and historical linguistics, as well as computational approaches for the analysis of linguistic phenomena.

Hartmut Haberland

Hartmut Haberland is an emeritus professor of German language and the Sociolinguistics of Globalisation at Roskilde University, Denmark. He has published about the pragmatics of German, Danish, Modern Greek and Japanese.

Dale Kedwards

Dale Kedwards is HM Queen Margrethe II Distinguished Research Fellow at the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Institute for foreign languages at the University of Iceland, the National Museum of Iceland, and the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. His research focuses on the literature and culture of medieval Iceland, with particular emphasis on the relationships between Latinate and vernacular textual cultures.

John Ladhams

John Ladhams is a Research Fellow at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, having worked at Universities in Portugal, Brazil and England since 1971. His principal area of research is the Creolization of Language, Culture, Society and History.

Carsten Levisen

Carsten Levisen is a Danish linguist and linguistic anthropologist. He is an associate professor at Roskilde University. His research focuses on cognitive semantics, cultural pragmatics, and postcolonial language studies.

Jón Símon Markússon

Jón Símon Markússon is a researcher and adjunct lecturer at the University of Iceland. His research seeks to account for changes in the inflectional systems of Icelandic and Faroese, from a usage-based cognitive perspective

Joost Robbe

Joost Robbe is a research fellow at the Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics at Aarhus University. He works on historical linguistics, particularly within Dutch and German, and Germanic minority languages.

Jeroen Willemsen

Jeroen Willemsen is a PhD candidate at Aarhus University specializing in descriptive and comparative linguistics. His PhD project includes a comprehensive description of the Reta language, for which he conducted extensive fieldwork on the islet of Pulau Pura.