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Brief Description
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Limonese Creole is spoken throughout Costa Rica but the major
populations speaking it are located along the east coast of CR (especially in the cith of Limón), the eastern plains area and in the capital San Jose. The first US dissertation written on it was in 1978 by Anita Herzfeld. Other works have been published on it since, including a dissertation from 1998 by Elizabeth Winkler. It is a daughter language of Jamaican Creole; however, since it has been spoken in Limon for more than 100 years and it's been more than 70 years since there has been significant Jamaican immigration, the language is quite distinct from Jamaican Creole, including the incorporation of Spanish lexical and morphosyntactic features (due to the fact that anyone born since the 1950s is usually bilingual with Spanish). Estimates vary of number of speakers from 40,000 to 80,000. (Information from Elizabeth Winkler)
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