French Guiana is a department (DOM : Département d'Outre Mer). There might be language shift, but still there is language maintenance in Awala-Yalimapo (the Kali'na amerindian village where I work), but there is a process of language 'losing' in other Kali'na villages of the department. The children's linguistic repertoire in Awala is interesting because while they keep using Kali'na a lot, they also speak French, and they use bilingual talk as a 'peer language'. But children are ashamed of 'mixing'. I heard one of them saying : "she speaks badly : she mixes Kali'na and French". And adults really disagree when they hear children 'mixing'. I never heard the term 'charabia'.

I went to two conferences and wrote the following papers : " An analysis of the bilingual code-switching (French-Kali'na) : The linguistic repertoire of a Kali'na native speaker group in French Guiana " And "Kali'na and French in contact in an Amerindian village school (French Guiana)"

There is a French based creole spoken in French guiana, it is called : Créole guyanais. It is the mother tongue of the 'Créole guyanais'people. Some of the children speak this Creole language because it is - with French and with an English based Creole - the main vehicular language in the département. Kali'na people have been quite isolated untill the middle of the 19th century. They started being in contact again with other languages at this moment. Kali'na has borrowed quite a lot to different languages (Créole guyanais, Sranan Tongo, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese) but not a lot from French until recently. In fact there seems to be a new borrowing strategy in the young generations: They borrow a lot from French and they don't change the phonological forms of the words. Before, all the words that were borrowed where adapated to Kali'na in a phonologic way.

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