Reviewed by Thomas Hoffmann, University of Regensburg

St Helenian English (StHE) is considered to be the oldest Southern Hemisphere variety of English. In light of this, it is somewhat surprising that so far no large-scale linguistic description of it has been available. Now, based on his own fieldwork on the island, Daniel Schreier tries to close this gap with his book, St Helenian English: Origins, evolution and variation.

After a short introductory chapter (1–8), Ch. 2 (9–66) surveys the basic principles of contact linguistics. Because one of the main issues addressed here concerns the question of whether StHE is the result of dialect contact or creolization, S carefully surveys and discusses all of the crucial concepts involved in these two processes (e.g. koinéization, mixing, levelling, simplification/regularization, reallocation, independent developments, interdialect forms vs. jargonization, borrowing, pidginization, creolization, mixed languages, creoloids, and semicreoles).

In Ch. 3 (67–121), S provides an overview of the history of StHE, focussing on the contact setting and the sociodemographic and sociolinguistic evolution of the variety. He argues that from its discovery in 1502 to the mid-eighteenth century, St Helena was characterized by large-scale immigration as well as emigration, and that it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the population began to stabilize. Furthermore, because the two main groups of immigrants in the eighteenth century were Southern English settlers and Malagasy slaves, S claims that the varieties of these immigrants must have been the most important contributors to the local feature pool.

Next, in Ch. 4 (123–58), S tries to reconstruct the diachronic evolution of StHE by surveying various historical texts. In all, he identifies over fifty phonological and morphosyntactic features that recurrently appear throughout his data. For each of these, he discusses potential sources (such as the South of England for the interchange of /v~w/ or creolization for the invariant negative marker no).

In the first part of Ch. 5 (159–201), S provides an overview of the StHE’s synchronic segmental phonology using Wells’s lexical set. The second half of this chapter deals with the variety’s synchronic morpho-syntax.

Ch. 6 (203–21) presents the results from a sociolinguistic variationist study of two selected variables (consonant cluster reduction and copula absence). As S argues, the results from both studies show some degree of regional variation on the island. Moreover, both variables are taken as indications that StHE is the result of language contact.

Finally, Ch. 7 (223–53) summarizes S’s main results. He claims that the island’s complex contact history explains why StHE possess many features typical of English-based creoles, while at the same time exhibiting, for example, a segmental phonology similar to dialect contact varieties such as Australian or New Zealand English.

Helenian English: Origins, evolution and variation is an extremely careful and well-written account of the diachronic evolution and synchronic features of StHE and should be of interest to anyone working on contact linguistics, varieties of English, or sociolinguistics in general.