Antarctic English

Antarctic Englishis a variety of theEnglish languagespoken by people living on the continent ofAntarcticaand within thesubantarctic islands.Spoken primarily byscientistsand workers in theAntarctic tourism industry,it consists of various unique words and is spoken with a uniqueaccent. During the 19th and 20th centuries, Antarctic English was influenced by Spanish-speakingSouth AmericansandNorthern Europeanexplorers who introduced new words that continue to be used today.
In 1989, Australian writer Bernadette Hince travelled to Antarctica in order to study the vocabulary of scientists working there. She wrote about a variety of unique words that originated on the continent and were not used anywhere else on earth. In 2000, she published theAntarctic Dictionary, a book detailing the words found in the dialect.
An Antarctic accent was first reported in 2019 in theJournal of the Acoustical Society of America, in a study in which researchers observed changes in the vocal phonetics of scientists over the course of a winter period in Antarctica. They observed a change in vowel pronunciation in the scientists, and vowels such as that in "food" and the second in "window" began being pronounced in a more fronted position of the mouth than in other English varieties.The changes are very slight, the lead researcher said “You can’t hear the differences very well because they are so small, but you can measure them.”
Antarctic English features various words that are different from other varieties of English. Occurrences of new vocabulary include:
Antarctic English also has over 200 words for different types of ice. Words includetabulars(large flat-topped southern icebergs that break off from the Antarctic ice sheet and are usually over 16 km or 10 mi long), andgrowlers(underwater decaying icebergs roughly the size of a house).The tourism industry has terms for different types of tourist encounters, such asKodakpoisoning(what happens when many tourists take photographs of the same site) andDead-PenguinTours(a type of tour in the late summer after penguins have abandoned weak chicks to die, leaving their bodies in popular tourist destinations, which causes grief in tourists).
Antarctic English has been influenced by both Spanish and various Northern European languages.In theFalkland Islands, Antarctic English has been influenced by Spanish-speaking South Americans, such as with the wordcamp, which originates from the Spanishcampoand refers to the countryside outside of a town.During the 18th and 19th centuries, Northern European industrialists interested in whaling and the fur trade introduced various technical words like the Norwegian-origingrax, which describes the leftover solids at the end of thewhaling process.Other words introduced by these Europeans during the 19th and 20th centuries includednunatak,mukluk,pemmican, andNansensled,which they in turn adopted from various indigenous American languages. Some terms in Antarctic English have their origins inmilitary terminology.
Antarctic English has also influenced other varieties of English. Further, a number ofArctic Englishterms were first adopted in Antarctica (particularly terms relating to ice).