Antarctica is a bleak, remote and dark place during the winter, but a handful of people each year brave the conditions to live in almost totally cut off from the rest of the world. The experience can change how they speak.
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Over the following 26 weeks of near perpetual darkness and harsh weather, Clark and his fellow inhabitants at Rothera would work, eat and socialise together with barely any contact with home. Satellite phone calls are expensive and so used sparingly. With just each other for company and limited entertainment on the base, the "winterers", as they are known, would chat to each other – a lot.
"We would be talking to each other while working, on our breaks, playing pool or in our rooms," says Clark, who helped coordinate the collection of the winterers recordings. "We got to learn each other's stories pretty quickly. There were a lot of conversations about weather – these crazy winds we'd get, the sea ice, icebergs, clouds. We were very comfortable with each other." Their common language was English, sprinkled with slang words unique to the Antarctic research stations – more on this later.
Amid all that conversing, something surprising was happening: their accents were changing.
Clark and his colleagues did not notice this at the time. All they knew was that they were taking part in an unusual experiment, which involved tracking their own voices over time. This was done by making 10-minute recordings every few weeks. They would sit in front of a microphone and repeat the same 29 words as they appeared on a computer screen. *Food. Coffee. Hid. Airflow. *Most were words they used regularly during their day and contained vowel sounds known to differ in English accents.
It has to do with environmental factors, I think. Like maybe their station affects acoustics somehow. Overall, a dialectal linguistic change generally requires a shift of generations.