D. Schreier - Böcker

Extremely isolated communities offer 'laboratory conditions' for examining the processes of language change and dialect formation. It documents the historical formation of a unique local dialect and investigates the sociolinguistic mechanisms that underlie dialect contact and new-dialect formation.

Applying insights from variationist linguistics to historical change mechanisms that have affected the consonantal system of English, Daniel Schreier reports findings from a historical corpus-based study on the reduction of particular consonant clusters and compares them with similar processes in synchronic varieties, thus defining consonantal change as a phenomenon involving psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, phonological theory and contact linguistics. Moreover, he weighs the impact of external and internal effects on causation, examining data from a total of 15 varieties with different time depths and social histories.

Extremely isolated communities offer "laboratory conditions" for examining the processes of language change and dialect formation. This book presents findings of ethnographic fieldwork on the most remote island in the world with a permanent population, Tristan da Cunha. It documents the historical formation of a unique local dialect and investigates the sociolinguistic mechanisms that underlie dialect contact and new dialect formation. It also uncovers the linguistic consequences of post insularity language change processes as a result of increasing contacts with other communities and speakers. Researchers and students of language variation will find this book a unique resource.