English in Costa Rica

  Spanish‐speaking Costa Rica has been in contact with English for more than a hundred years, not only through education, but also through contact with native English speakers both foreign and domestic. The interaction of native and non‐native speakers of English has triggered several media outlets to evolve in order to fulfill the need of a local English network. Furthermore, the Costa Rican government has implemented several policies to establish English as the first foreign language because of the rapid growth of tourism and foreign investment in the country. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the phenomenon of language contact occurring in Costa Rica, where Spanish is the official language but English is spoken as a first language by a small part of the population. As a native variety in these communities, English has been neglected for many years. However, now that English is spoken worldwide there is much work to do to recover this variety. This article uses Moag's life cycle and Kachru's Model for Non‐Native Englishes to give a parallel description of the life of English both as a native and as a foreign language in Costa Rica. The English spoken as a first language by a small number of Costa Ricans has gone through the four processes of Moag's life cycle of Non‐Native Englishes, and the one spoken by Spanish‐speaking Costa Ricans is, according to Kachru's Model for Non‐Native Englishes, classified as a foreign, integrative, instrumental, and international language. It is argued that this introduces us to a new interaction of world Englishes where an Inner Circle variety competes with an Expanding Circle variety and thus we should rethink the naming process we have used so far.