CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Paul B. Garrett (Human Development, CSU, Long Beach), December 3, 1999.

"'You spit in the air, it fall on your nose': Language Socialization and the Dynamics of Language Change in St. Lucia, West Indies."

First a French colony and later a British colony, St. Lucia (population 150,000) has for the last tweny years been an independent nation-state. As a result of the island's dual colonial heritage, a French-lexified creole language known as Patwa co-exists with the country's official language, English. This presentation examines currently ongoing processes of rapid language change, convergence, and shift that are resulting from this situation of language contact. Two interrelated phenomena are considered: the emergence of a creole-like, heavily Patwa-influenced English vernacular, and the anglicization and decline of Patwa. The research reported on is a linguistic anthropological study of language socialization in a rural St. Lucian village. Culturally specific ways in which parents and other caretakers interact verbally with young children are examined, as are the ideologically informed ways in which children are taught, both explicitly and implicitly, to use and to think about the languages of their community. Language socialization practices are shown to be a driving force in processes of rapid language change that are currently underway in St. Lucia. Some broader conclusions concerning the relationship between ideologies of language, language socialization practices, and processes of language change in multilingual contexts are also suggested.