Limon Creole, spoken on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, Central America, descends from Jamaican Creole and is similar to it in many respects. While Jamaican Creole is undergoing a process of decreolization (i.e. the speech community has reached a post-creole status, in De Camp's terminology), Limon Creole exists in the context of a prestige language, Spanish, the national language of Costa Rica, which is not related to Limon Creole. Although English remains as the standard of the acrolect variety, Spanish, as the official language effectively reinforced by the government of the country, affects the creole, particularly the basilect-mesolect variety. The specific aim of this discussion is to suggest some ways in which Costa Rican Spanish exerts influence on the lexicon, semantic range, and syntactic structures of Limon Creole. Since "native" white socio-cultural pressures are such that immediate acculturation of the Negro Limon Creole minority to the Spanish majority is politically desirable, the government has not made any efforts to foster bilingual education. Thus, while Limon Creole is now interspersed with Spanish loans, a prediction can be made as to how this on-going process might affect the future of this unstable bilingual situation. (Author/NCR)