The Concept of Competence in a Creole/Contact Situation. York Papers in Linguistics, Number 3.

The purpose of this research was to frame a hypothesis accounting for the observed behavior of particular children in a contact language area, in an attempt to understand their linguistic learning processes. The community involved was the township of Benque Viejo at the Guatemalan frontier, and the four informants, aged 10-13, spoke varying mixtures of Spanish, English, and Creole. The questions asked were: (1) What is the linguistic character of the community? (2) What is the nature of the children's competence, and in what sense is it a "knowledge" of the language of the community? Individuals were seen to create their own competence norms, competence being their knowledge of the available code. In the analysis of the children's renditions of "The Three Little Pigs," their individual codes were marked by particular expressions of hispanization, such as the dropping of the final -z, creole-ness, such as nasalizations, and r-colorations, which illustrated the extent of their "book-learning." For these children, there is no single internalized linguistic system; rather, they weigh their chances of being accepted in one role or another and create for themselves the linguistic stereotypes of those roles. (LG)