Tourism and small-language persistence in a Panamanian Creole village

This article examines the emerging impact of international tourism on language choice and language persistence in the village of Old Bank on the Panamanian island of Bastimentos. The article employs the concept of language ideologies to account for patterns of language choice among Creole English-speaking residents of Bastimentos and tourists visiting the Western Caribbean island. Ethnographic data from spontaneous discourse are used as a means to analyze speakers' metalinguistic awareness of language choice. Analysis of speakers' awareness of language choice reveals that the status of the creole in relation to Spanish is changing and that the creole persists at least partly as a result of increased contact with varieties of English spoken by tourists