A Reflection on Greg Dening's Mr Bligh's Bad Language and Its Relation to the Pitcairn Island Language

Abstract

<p>I should say that the language of Pitcairn - surely a sign of socialising forces – was English, well, English enough to be recognised and understood by visitors from outside. Out of a polyglot of dialects - Philadelphian American English, London cockney, Aberdeen and Ross-shire Scotts, as well as dialects of the North Country, Guernsey Island, St Kitts in the West Indies, Cornwall and Manx - came an English that has delighted phonologists. But it was not Tahitian. And we have the puzzle that English was the language of power - shall we say of the Sea? - and Tahitian the language of everyday social life - shall we say the Land? (Dening 1992: 322)</p><p> Fiction is too disrespectful of the generations of archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians and scholars of all description who have helped us to know what we know. (Dening 2004: 9)</p>