Falkland Islands English

Falkland Islands English is the dialect of the English language spoken in the Falkland Islands. Though it is mainly British in character, as a result of the remoteness of the islands, the small population has developed and retains its own accent and dialect, which persists despite many immigrants from the United Kingdom in recent years. In rural areas (i.e. anywhere outside Stanley), known as 'Camp' (from Spanish campo or 'countryside'), the Falkland accent tends to be stronger. The dialect has resemblances to Australian, New Zealand, West Country and Norfolk dialects of English, as well as Lowland Scots.

In recent years, a substantial Saint Helenian population has arrived, mainly to do low-paid work, and they too have a distinct form of English.

The Falkland Islands, a cluster of 780 islands, that are 300 miles from the eastern coast of Argentina, had no indigenous population when the British arrived to explore the islands in 1690. Continuous anglophone settlement of the islands dates only to 1833, when British forces removed 26 Argentinian soldiers from the islands and claimed them for Britain. In 1845, the capital town of Stanley, located on East Falkland, was established. Argentina also has a claim to the islands, and in 1982, Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands. The British moved to defend the British control of the islands, with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher calling the islanders "of British tradition and stock". In under three months, nearly a thousand people were killed, and over 2,000 were injured. British-Argentinian tension regarding claim to the islands still exists, but the identity of the island overall is tremendously British, as shown when over 99.8% of islanders voted to remain under British sovereignty in a referendum. This history has implications for the linguistic features of Falkland Islands English, which is similar to British English but distinct in some vocabulary and phonology.

According to linguist Anne Sudbury, Falkland Islands English is, alongside New Zealand English, probably the youngest native speaker variety of English. The origins of the dialect present an unusual example of what Sudbury terms "pure dialect contact", where, despite the presence of some Scandinavian and Spanish sailors and a possible small influence from Scots Gaelic in the 19th century, the dialect was formed almost exclusively from contact between native speakers of English. There was also a transient presence of South American gauchos from Uruguay and Chile in the 19th century, however, very few of these became permanent residents of the island and their influence was limited to the lexicon of Falklands English, having no noticeable effect on its grammar and phonology.

The geographical origins of the British settlers to the islands, and therefore the dialects of English they spoke, are hard to trace, due to a lack of detailed historical records. This problem is further complicated by the transient nature of many settlers' stays in the islands; settlers often found the conditions on the islands harsh and returned home, whereas others migrated onwards to Patagonia. Still more residents were employed as temporary workers on two- to five-year contracts, many of whom chose to return to the UK upon the contract's completion.

However, the partial records that do exist, tend to suggest that the two areas providing most settlers were the West Country and the Scottish Highlands and Islands. The principal varieties of English involved in the formation of Falkland Islands English are likely to be West Country English and other dialects of Southern English. As well as these two varieties, it is probable that West Highland English was spoken by settlers, although, despite the fact Gaelic was only spoken on the islands for a generation, the highland settlers may have been Gaelic monolinguals upon arrival.

In addition to these non-standard varieties, until land reforms in the 1970s, the wealthier strata of Falklands society, landowners and later farm managers, were typically speakers of RP or near-RP, as were the government officials present on the islands. Due to the small population, these individuals were less socially separated from the majority of the population than in other English-speaking regions, and so influenced the emerging variety.

This dialect contact resulted in a process of koineisation, by which speakers of various dialects accommodated to each other by mixing and levelling their speech to produce a new variety of English. Until 1982, there is evidence that separate accents existed on West and East Falkland, which were themselves different from the accent of Stanley. However, by 2000, Sudbury reports there was no noticeable difference in accent between regions of the islands.