Introduction Out of all the varieties presented and discussed in this book, Tristan da Cunha English is the smallest by a large measure: spoken by a tiny community of 278 speakers (as of June 2008), it is far from sociodemographically significant as a variety of English around the world. At the same time, it is the most isolated variety of all the LKVEs: Tristan is about 2,300 kilometres south of St Helena, 2,800 kilometres west of Cape Town (South Africa), and 3,400 kilometres east of Uruguay. The island is only accessible over the sea (there is no airport or air strip on Tristan) and the trip from Cape Town to the heart of the South Atlantic Ocean takes anywhere between five and fifteen days, depending on the weather conditions. To complicate matters even more, there are only eight to ten occasions to take such a trip a year (fishing trawlers, supply ships or cruise liners). The variety that sprang up in this location, Tristan da Cunha English (TdCE), is unusual for a number of linguistic and sociolinguistic reasons. First of all, it is one of the youngest native-speaker varieties of English around the world: a bit older than Falklands Islands English (FIE; see Chapter 11) or New Zealand English, but a generation or so younger than South African or Australian English.
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