The author assisted at Corsican adult language classrooms in 2011–2012, in which communicative competence was determined with regard to a polynomic ideology of language, identity and community of practice. This study demonstrates that minority language shift and revitalization contexts complicate the “communicative competence” definition, disclosing it as social and ideological and that a focus on communicative competence complicates concepts such as “language shift” and “revitalization”, disclosing their epistemological tendencies.