Voices from the Past
CONWAY, Ark. (June 10, 2008) – Since being settled in 1686 by a group of Britons, Virginia’s Tangier Island has remained secluded from the mainland, accessible only by boat and small plane. The islanders’ famed accents, which resemble Elizabethan English, enticed Bakersfield native Caelan O’Sullivan to visit Tangier Island in May.
O’Sullivan, who is a junior German and business and economics double major at Hendrix College, has a deep interest in linguistics. She spent her senior year of high school in Germany, and she will be studying in Austria this fall. The research trip to Tangier gave her the opportunity to explore the variations in her native language.
The Tangier Island accent, which is a pidgin form of Cornish English, has remained largely unchanged since the seventeenth century. The island’s 600 or so residents have developed their own slang terms, such that “no” may mean “yes,” and “ugly” often means “pretty.” Residents who moved to the island but were not born there are known as “come-here people.”
O’Sullivan said the island would be the perfect set for a horror movie. Her research partner, junior Lauren Kendall of Overland Park, Kan., brought two cameras to keep a visual record of the island.
“It was kind of an eerie and creepy island,” O’Sullivan said. “After the first day or so I noticed there were these big, iron stars on all of the houses, stuck on the wall at the highest point of the house. A local policeman said it was just a trend, but I sort of wondered if that corroborated what I’d heard about the island being this kind of cultish place.”
Part of the island’s mystery is the quiet that takes over after 8 p.m. Because most men make their living catching crabs, the crabbing schedule dictates life on the island. Folks go to bed early so the men can wake up at 3 a.m.
As they head off to work in the dark of night, the crabbers walk past dozens of graves. Traditionally, family members were buried in the front yards of their homes, but space has become limited recently. Some recently deceased residents have had to be buried off the island.
Cable TV and internet service have come to the island in the past decade, but the increasing modernization has affected the island’s men and women differently. The sexes are developing slightly different speech patterns, O’Sullivan said.
Most Tangier men spend their days on the Chesapeake Bay, talking only to each other. The women, who run most of the restaurants, inns and tourist services, have more exposure to the standard American accent and more incentive to make sure their own accents are easily intelligible.
“The best place where we really saw the thick accents that we could barely understand was when we went down to the shipyard and observed the men talking amongst themselves,” O’Sullivan said. “There was some kind of crab net that got caught around the rudder of this boat, so they got busy working and ignored us.”
“That was sort of the crowning point, as far as our research,” she said. “We really experienced a lot, even just in the ten minutes we were there.”
Time was of the essence for O’Sullivan and Kendall. The isolation of the island also raises the prices of lodging for guests, limiting the number of days they could afford to spend there.
“Unfortunately we could only spend three nights on the island,” O’Sullivan said. “It was not nearly long enough to get to know people well enough to really dig into their lives. Even so, the trip made us so much more aware of and interested in American linguistics.”
The trip was sponsored by the Hendrix Odyssey program, a curricular program that offers funding and credit for experiential learning projects at home and abroad. O’Sullivan and Kendall, who have been planning their trip for more than a year, were informed in March that the trip would be funded. The pair used their funding to pay for airfare and lodging.
Hendrix, founded in 1876, is a selective, residential, undergraduate liberal arts college emphasizing experiential learning in a demanding yet supportive environment. The college is among 165 colleges featured in the 2008 edition of the Princeton Review America’s Best Value Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For more information, contact Mark Scott at scottm@hendrix.edu or 501-450-1462.
