What a language is good for: Language socialization, language shift, and the persistence of code-specific genres in St. Lucia

Abstract

In many bilingual and multilingual communities, certain communicative practices are code-specific in that they conventionally require, and are constituted in part through, the speaker's use of a particular code. Code-specific communicative practices, in turn, simultaneously constitute and partake of code-specific genres: normative, relatively stable, often metapragmatically salient types of utterance, or modes of discourse, that conventionally call for use of a particular code. This article suggests that the notions of code specificity and code-specific genre can be useful ones for theorizing the relationship between code and communicative practice in bilingual/multilingual settings, particularly those in which language shift and other contact-induced processes of linguistic and cultural change tend to highlight that relationship. This is demonstrated through an examination of how young children in St. Lucia are socialized to “curse” and otherwise assert themselves by means of a creole language that under most circumstances they are discouraged from using.The fieldwork on which this article is based was supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; immediate post-fieldwork support was provided by the Spencer Foundation. The work time necessary for writing this article was made possible by a Temple University Presidential Research Incentive Summer Fellowship, a Temple University Research/Study Leave, and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship. For their comments on a much briefer earlier version (presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association), I thank Bambi Schieffelin, Patricia Baquedano-López, and Leslie Moore. For comments on this version, I am grateful to Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers. I am solely responsible for any and all shortcomings.