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Language attrition research usually attempts to elicit all types of usage from speakers of all fluency levels in a dying language in order to abstract changing linguistic patterns from situational variation. Informants adept at hiding their vernacular and improvising in an obsolescing variety are reluctant to admit to such scrutiny. In a linguistic study reported here, the isleno community asked researchers to act as archivists for a dialect revitalization movement. The few hundred remaining semi-speakers and bilinguals of "isleno" Spanish in Saint Bernard Parish (Louisiana) wanted the "best" Spanish to be recorded: the most formal register used by the last performers of oral narratives. The solution reached by community members and researchers was to have audiotapes of "typical" speech (everyday conversational style) used for less fluent members to reduce immediate identification and judgment. Both styles of speech, formal and informal, which contains hallmarks of language death such as loan phonology, simplified verb morphology, and English-like syntax, will be used to support the revitalization effort. Contains 29 references. (Author/MSE)

The few remaining fluent speakers of the isleno dialect of Spanish vary their casual pronunciation of /s/ in a manner consistent with, but not identical to, other Caribbean Spanish dialects. The behavior of /s/ in the speech of nonfluent islenos parallels that of fluent speakers, differing only in the higher degree of aspiration and deletion. This variation by isleno semispeakers can be regarded as a type of speech accommodation called 'upward convergence' expressing social integration and identification. Fluent speakers are accorded prestige for preserving the culture's oral traditions, and semispeakers are motivated towards integration and solidarity by varying their pronunciation of /s/ to resemble the perceived behavior of /s/ in the speech of fluent speakers who are identified as prestigious. (Contains 23 references.) (Author)