ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the origins and characteristics of Puerto Rican Spanish in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, and describes its development and current use. The island of St. Croix is the largest of the US Virgin Islands. It was sighted by Columbus in his second voyage of 1493 and given the name of Santa Cruz. Like many other islands in Caribbean, it often changed in sovereignty until the United States bought it from Danish West India Company in 1917 for 25 million dollars. The arrival of Puerto Ricans, mainly from the smaller Puerto Rican island of Vieques, into this plurilingual context began in 1920s with the objective of helping the local labor force in the sugar cane industry. Spanish is the native language of Puerto Rican migrants and thus it lives "with a major or minor degree of vitality, as the family language from infancy and later as a language of diminishing advantage vis-à-vis English, sole language of prestige".
