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.