St. Helena English: phonology 

A brief history

Originally uninhabited, St Helena was discovered by the Portuguese in 1502, and was used by them and many other European seafaring nations as a refreshment station on their journeys to and from the East. Until claimed by the British East India Company in 1658, the island was never permanently or formally settled. From this date, a concerted policy of settlement was implemented, and Company employees (soldiers and servants) and ‘planters’ were recruited to St Helena, along with slaves supplied on request by EIC ships.

Of the European population, little is recorded of their precise origins, except that most probably hailed from the southern parts of England. Various records and correspondence detailed requests for, and the arrival of, slaves from the Guinea Coast, the Indian sub-continent and Madagascar, as well as some mentions of slaves coming from the Cape, the West Indies, the Malay Peninsula and the Maldives. In 1789, the importation of slaves ended. The first consignment of Chinese indentured laborers arrived on the island in 1810, followed by more in 1816. It appears that very few, if any, stayed on permanently.

In 1815 the total population was 2 871, comprising 776 whites, 1 353 slaves, 447 free blacks, 280 Chinese and 15 lascars (Barnes 1817). When slavery was finally abolished on the island in 1832, only 614 people were classed as ‘slaves’. In 1834, St Helena’s administration was transferred from the East India Company to the British government. By 1837, the population figures were noted as “2 113 whites and 2 864 coloureds”, implying that miscegenation had already occurred to a large degree. In 1875, Melliss notes that about one-sixth of the population constitutes “pure West Coast Africans”, who were introduced after 1840 when St Helena was used as a base for rehabilitating slaves from captured slave ships. Some chose to stay while the majority were sent on to the West Indies or repatriated to the African mainland.

St Helena was host to 500 Afrikaans-speaking Boer War prisoners in 1902. Upon their release, negligibly few stayed and left little influence of their culture or language.

The advent of steam-driven ships and the opening of the Suez Canal voided the island’s raison d’etre as a refreshment station for shipping and a strategic British possession. Left ‘stranded’ in mid-Atlantic, St Helena relies heavily on financial support from the British government. With the exception of a short-lived flax industry (which ended in 1965 when the British postal service switched to cheaper synthetic fibre for tying mail bags), no industry has provided a viable means of sustaining the island. There is no airport, and a single government-subsidized ship plies between the United Kingdom, Ascencion, St Helena and Cape Town (with an annual run to Tristan da Cunha). Many St Helenians (or ‘Saints’) undertake contract work on the military bases on Ascencion and the Falkland Islands, and up until 1999, when the British Government conceded full citizenship rights to islanders, had limited access to work in the UK.

Given the historical demographics and socio-economic conditions of the island, it is unlikely that a full-blown creole language ever developed on St Helena. The relatively small and impoverished European population and paucity of arable land meant that slave ownership was on a small scale, with tiny communities living in relative isolation from each other due to the volcanic geography of the island – deep valleys and steep hillsides which could only be traversed by narrow, winding donkey-paths. Slaves initially lived in a close – if socially stratified – relationship with their settler masters. By the 19^th century, the population was further integrated by the practice of garrisoned soldiers marrying or entering into common-law relationships with free blacks. Such circumstances made the development of a creole unnecessary, as access to English was generally always close at hand. What is fairly probable is that the non-European population exerted an influence on the English dialect which developed in the mid-Atlantic, in a similar vein to the Cayman Islands and Bay Islands in the Caribbean – Holms’ “creole-influenced non-creole Englishes” (1988/89).

There is still evidence of phonological variation between the various settlements on St Helena, particularly among the older population who are not as mobile as the younger people who all attend a centrally located high school, or who may travel across the island to work in Jamestown. While some St Helenians have access to a more or less standard variety of English, particularly if they have undergone tertiary education on the British mainland, the speech community could be considered as spread over a continuum, from the basilectal ‘broad’ variety of St. Helena English (StHE) (commonly referred to on the island as ‘Saintspeak’) to a fairly Standard British English at the acrolectal end. There is no evidence that there is any one-way movement towards standard English, as young speakers, if anything, have a more marked tendency to use non-standard features.