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9 - Insular Varieties of English in Britain

9.C Mersea Island

from Part I - English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2024

By
Jenny Amos
Edited by
Susan Fox
Susan Fox
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
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Summary

Mersea Island is a small island off the coast of north-east Essex, UK, which has a rich history of contact, ranging from Viking and Roman settlements to more modern influxes of evacuees and military personnel during both World Wars. The island itself also has a history of isolation, due to its only access road being cut off regularly by lunar tides. However, this isolation has been challenged over more recent years by various building projects, resulting in a large influx of non-islanders moving and settling on the island. This overview will present a range of phonological features across both the consonantal and vocalic systems of Mersea Island English as evidence from both older and younger Islanders to highlight traditional features and the direction of change within the community as a whole. A selection of morphosyntactic features which highlight more salient structures of Mersea Island English is then presented before a discussion of how we may wish to evaluate paths of change moving forward in relation to both socio-cultural and linguistic factors.

Keywords

variationchangedialectMersea IslandSouth-Eastislandphonologyconsonantsvowelsmorphosyntax
Type
Chapter
Information
Language in Britain and Ireland , pp. 249 - 257
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

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