Varilingualism: A term for 21 st century language acquisition contexts

Varilingualism is a term that was coined in the Anglophone Caribbean language context in 1990 (Youssef 1990; 1991a; 1996), specifically in the twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago (T & T), to describe a type of developing communicative competence for which I needed a label and found no existing term adequate. Neither bilingualism nor bi-dialectalism, nor multilingualism, nor any subdivision of any of these captured the full reality of the acquisition that was taking place. It encompassed not only the acquisition of more than one code but also the capacity for variable production of the contact codes according to the circumstances of a child’s precise language exposure (language input) and the diverse sociolinguistic situations in which the child found him/herself (situational context) and to which he/she responded stylistically. It involved acquisition of motivated and ordered codemixing simultaneous with acquisition of forms and meanings from the closelyrelated contact codes. In this paper the term is reconsidered and elaborated, its full meaning restated, and its significance for other contexts of language acquisition and language education delineated.