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St. Barthelemy, a small island in the northeastern Caribbean, is populated primarily by descendants of 17th century French settlers, and hosts seven language varieties. To explain the linguistic complexity of the island, this article reconstructs both its social history (using censuses, church records, and land registries) and its economic history, analyzing the effects of economic change on the island's population. The two offshoot communities on St. Thomas provide evidence of social fragmentation related to occupational differences. Functional explanations for St. Barth's linguistic diversity are inadequate; however, the social network theory of Milroy & Milroy 1992 proves useful in explaining the persistence of language differences in this small isolated community.

This paper presents evidence for a causal relationship between particular sociolinguistic contexts and a direction of language change in morphosyntax. A class of contact languages that share similar sociolinguistic environments is identified; these are "lower" languages used in multilingual diglossic speech communities that are isolated from the standard, specifically, types of Louisiana and Canadian French, Iowa German, Scots Gaelic, Konkani, Overseas Hindi, and so forth. These languages, in contrast to standard and to the "upper" language in the community, demonstrate common morphosyntactic tendencies, among which are changes in heads of relative clauses in a dialect of Konkani and in varieties of colonial French. Nadkarni (1975) discusses a variety of Konkani in contact with Kannada in which relative pronoun heads have been replaced by interrogative pronouns and clause-final markers (khanco . . . ki). Two separate studies of Maine and Missouri French report identical development-relative pronouns ce que, ce qui replaced by quoi and qu est-ce que. Neither borrowing nor common inheritance can explain the phenomenon; the only common factor is the similar sociolinguistic environment. Data from creole languages and "dying" languages showing similar morphosyntactic reductions suggest that these tendencies emerge elsewhere. These examples support an enlarged view of the influence of contact on the direction of language change; Traugott's concept of natural semantax is useful in understanding the phenomena.

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