Takes the position that the use of creole and English varieties in Guyana is socially motivated. Examines the linguistic behavior of nine groups of individuals from three communities within a theoretical framework proposed by LePage. The framework shows these groups, and the individuals, exploiting the codal resources of their society to their…

Supports a greater use of repeated recordings and elicited intuitions by sociolinguists in assessing the linguistic competence of individuals or groups. A replication of an earlier implicational analysis of pronominal variation in the Guyanese creole continuum shows that, with repeated sampling and the inclusion of elicited intuitions, the…