St. Lucian children are confronted with a complex sociolinguistic environment in which they receive highly variable, multilingual input. As they acquire language they must learn to control multiple varieties or codes, including a French-lexicon creole (Kweyol), various emergent forms of English-lexicon creole, and "standard" English(es). In the course of developing the communicative competence to use these different varieties in pragmatically and culturally appropriate ways, these children acquire detailed knowledge of a great degree of both linguistic and sociocultural variation, as well as an intimate understanding of how these two orders of variation are interlinked in St. Lucian society. In the process, they learn to draw on these language varieties as a rich cultural resource for setting forth their emergent identities and negotiating various types of social interactions. These developmental processes will be investigated through a language socialization study. The language acquisition process will be longitudinally documented in six children of differing social backgrounds. Regular periodic audio recordings will be made of the children's speech interactions with various interlocutors in a variety of naturalistic settings. These recordings will be annotated in detail and transcribed in cooperation with local consultants so as to place the recorded utterances in ethnographic context. The course of language acquisition will be analyzed with regard to the extent to which different varieties are used in each child's verbal environment, the differing structural features of those varieties, the differences in pragmatic salience among particular forms and variants, and the sociocultural norms of their use. This research will yield insights into how children acquire communicative competence in multilingual settings, and how knowledge of linguistic variation and the social differentiation it indexes and encodes forms an essential part of the overall cultural competenc e of persons living in creole societies. More broadly, the study will contribute to theoretical understandings of how multilingual communities are constituted and organized; and it will provide insight into how individuals apprehend their social worlds and how they use language in asserting and managing their often shifting identities in these heterogeneous (and today, increasingly prevalent) settings.
