Insular Toponymies: Place-naming on Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island(9 Culture and Language Use)

How do people name places on islands? Is toponymy in small island communities affected by degrees of connection to larger neighbours such as a mainland? Are island (contact) languages and mainland languages different in how they are used in naming places? How can we conceptualise the human-human interface in the fieldwork situation when collecting placenames on islands? This book offers answers relevant to toponymists, linguists, island studies scholars, and anthropologists. It focuses on two island environments within Australia – Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, South Australia – and puts forward a number of novel findings relevant to Australian linguistics and the linguistics and toponymy of islands anywhere.

Table of Contents:
1. Preface; 2. Chapter 1. Insular Toponymies; 3. Chapter 2. The Context; 4. Chapter 3. Doing ecolinguistic fieldwork on islands; 5. Chapter 4. Linguistic aspects of Norfolk Island toponymy; 6. Chapter 5. Cultural aspects of Norfolk Island toponymy; 7. Chapter 6. Linguistic aspects of Dudley Peninsula toponymy; 8. Chapter 7. Cultural aspects of Dudley Peninsula toponymy; 9. Chapter 8. Toponymic Ethnography; 10. References; 11. Appendix A. Norfolk Island Data; 12. Appendix B. Dudley Peninsula Data; 13. Index

Review :
Insular Toponymies is a book that should appeal to a wider range of readers than its subject matter might on first glance attract. It provides an intimate window into Norfolk Island society through the people/land connection that place names represent. Its reflective, personal style offers a model for linguists attempting to write for a broader audience. The maps, photographs, and appendices will be useful to other researchers interested in Norfolk Island or Dudley Peninsula in general. Linguists interested in narrower, more structural questions about the Norf’k language are unlikely to find their curiosity completely sated here, but there are a few gems to reward even these readers. Much the same could be said for Nash’s work on Norfolk. In this book, Nash raises several interesting theoretical issues that push the boundaries of place-name studies, and in analyzing both the ecological implications of place names and their formal structure, Nash goes some way toward addressing the “distinct gap in linguistics of a method and theory in toponymy” (4), providing a model for future studies and forging a new field of insular toponymy. Nevertheless, the enduring value of this work can be found in the place-name inventory. Norf’k is a unique and highly endangered language, and toponyms form a specialized domain of knowledge that is rapidly eroding. Nash’s meticulous first-hand field work with some of the last remaining place-name experts on Norfolk Island will stand as an enduring record of Norf’k language and culture for generations to come. In his detailed ethnography on the use of place-names in two insular locales of the South Pacific, Joshua Nash well accomplishes two feats in linguistics. First, he establishes an (ethno)historical record of place-names, never systematically collected before, and thereby provides an interesting corpus of official and unofficial local names used by inhabitants or outsiders, academic or otherwise. [...] Second, Nash positions his uniquely comparative study of seemingly simple locational names on two islands into the wider arenas of ecolinguistics and linguistic theory. [...] ‘[Toponymy] shows how space becomes place through linguistic and cultural appropriation, and how humans invent and continually re-invent and re-create place through the process and practice of naming’. Nash’s ecology of language elaboration of the linguistic and cultural aspects of Norfolk and Dudley toponymy contributes significantly to (island) toponymy, ethnography, and ecolinguistics.