Tangier Island – The Disappearing World
Tangier is a special place. People who come to the island say they didn’t a place like this still existed in the USA. Tangier is a tiny island with 460 inhabitants. It ninety miles south-east of Washington, DC, in the middle of Chesapeake Bay. It is a peaceful island where there are almost cars. People don’t lock their doors, mobile phones don’t work there, you won’t find alcohol for sale in the island’s grocery store. If visitors bring their own alcohol, they asked not to drink it in public. the past few hundred years, the only way to get on and off the island has been by boat. This is why the island is one of the last places in the USA people still speak the language of their colonial past.
When you people from the island, you immediately notice they do not speak the same way as the rest of the people in the USA. Many words by the inhabitants of Tangier are similar to the language of the first English settlers. Some people have even described the Tangier way of speaking as ‘Elizabethan’ English. to the strange accent, there are more than 300 expressions that don’t exist anywhere else. The inhabitants also use words that are from the 17th century – the time when people sailed over from England.
People living on the island about the future of their language. With limited jobs on the island, many people to leave Tangier to find work on the mainland USA. Modern technologies are also a great danger to the language. According many experts, the special way of speaking on the island is disappearing.
It is not only the language that is disappearing. At highest point, the island is only 1.2 metres high, and as sea waters rise due to climate change, more than 35,000 m2 of Tangier disappear each year. Scientists fear the island may be completely underwater by 2050.
