Language, competence, use, ideology, and community on Rapa Nui

• I describe communicative competence as socially generated and organized through communicative and socialization practices.
• I examine the dynamic relationship between competence, practice, ideology, and community.
• Highlight how heterogeneity in communicative competence and practice can generate linguistic and sociolinguistic change.
• I emphasize that competence includes language users’ ability to participate in creating social categories and structure.
• Analyses of ethnographic, sociolinguistic census, and interactional data are combined to investigate these links.

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) provides a good illustration of a small community experiencing heterogeneous and changing understandings of communicative competence and of the dynamic relationships between language, competence, use, community, and consciousness. Using ethnographic and linguistic analyses of micro-interactional and macro-sociological processes, this paper demonstrates that communicative style repertoires and competence are socially generated and transformed.