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Evidence indicates that the lexicon and morphosyntax of Limonese Creole (LC) are being affected due to contact with both Costa Rican Spanish and Standard English (SE). Spanish, the prestige language of the wider community, has not altogether replaced LC resulting in a situation in which LC speakers borrow from Spanish when speaking LC. Borrowing from Spanish includes not only core lexicon, but also, morphosyntactic borrowing including a shift in the word order of the noun phrase and the combination of Spanish root morphemes with LC affixes. This study examines these changes through the use of token analysis of a naturally occurring corpus to determine which features have been borrowed into LC and which represent examples of codeswitching. The study has 3 goals: 1) to describe the nature and extent of borrowing, 2) to evaluate Thomason and Kaufman's 1988 framework for contact-induced language change, and 3) to offer criteria for differentiating between codeswitching and borrowing. Borrowing in this unusual community provides support for Thomason and Kaufman's framework; nevertheless, it also presents some interesting challenges because LC exhibits contact-induced change on two fronts: borrowing from Spanish and strengthening from SE. Although Spanish is the numerically and socially dominant language of the community, SE has recently begun to affect LC due to a rise in the domains where it is available to the community. This increase in the availability of SE combined with its worldwide prestige seem to be having a stabilizing affect on the LC community stemming what could have been a wholesale community shift to Spanish. LC makes a good test case for the Thomason and Kaufman model because changes have been documented from the beginning of contact between LC and Spanish, permitting language change, maintenance, and shift to be studied and evaluated as they occur.
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