What a Language Is Good for: Language Socialization, Language Shift, and the Persistence of Code-Specific Genres in St. Lucia

In many bilingual and multilingual communities, certain communicativepractices 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 bilingual0multilingual
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.