Populating the landscape with absent friends : the use of personal names in Palmerston Island toponyms

This paper describes and contextualizes placenames on Palmerston Island, a small Pacific island populated by around 50 descendants of a mixed-origin group of settlers in the 1860s. The inhabitants today are monolingual speakers of a dialect that has been described variously as an English dialect or an English-based creole. I show that Palmerston English placenames are rarely complex or detailed descriptive names, and this can be accounted for by the small, isolated and densely-networked nature of the population. The isolation and transience of the community may also contribute to the high number of placenames that index people's names or other locations.