9 - The legacy of British and Irish English in Newfoundland

Summary

Newfoundland English as a relic variety

In the unravelling of the complex history of transported Englishes, a special role is played by the island of Newfoundland – which in 1949, after almost four hundred years of existence as a British colony, became along with Labrador the tenth province of Canada. From a sociohistorical perspective, the speech of the island occupies a unique position in the investigation of transplanted English, for several important reasons. First of all, Newfoundland varieties are among the oldest of any transported English: the island was claimed for the British crown in 1583, and English settlement dates from the first decade of the seventeenth century. Secondly, the origins of British and Irish emigrants to Newfoundland have been documented to a degree virtually unprecedented in the history of New World settlement, a task facilitated by the fact that the two major source areas for emigration were highly geographically restricted. As the historical geographer John Mannion (1977:7) has observed, ‘It is unlikely that any other province or state in contemporary North America drew such an overwhelming proportion of its immigrants from such localized source areas in the European homeland over so substantial a period of time.’ Thirdly, as an island off the east coast of North America, Newfoundland remained relatively isolated from the rest of the continent until the mid twentieth century, the majority of residents having little contact with mainland speech varieties.