This chapter focuses on material aspects of language, which include bodily produced and non-embodied, written, or digital realisations of language. In addition, I study discourses about material realisations of language. As elaborated (Chapter 1 and Section 2.5), the theme had not been anticipated but is data-driven. Observations regarding public, institutional, and private writing, practices and discourses of language teaching, media productions, and participants’ reflections on qualities of spoken and written language belong to the data inspected in this chapter. The analyses overall reveal a crucial role of material matter in language ideologies. Besides belonging and prestige, materiality is thus a third relevant topic that contributes to constructing languages as discursive categories.

The relationship between materiality and language is complex and not easy to grasp (see discussion in Section 2.5). Speaking is itself a bodily behaviour, and non-embodied language practices appear in all spheres of life, for example, in handwritten and printed text, digital communication, or public signage. Discourses about physical qualities of language, such as talk about spelling but also about sound, intonation, or word length, are concerned with the material side of language, too (and themselves have a material reality).Footnote ¹ The category materiality, in this study, is therefore approached holistically and encompasses:

• Concepts and cultural practices relating to literacy, as displayed in interview data, in daily and educational life, or in public and academic discourses about literacy development (e.g. relating to orthography, grammar books, and dictionaries).

• Non-embodied linguistic practice, in particular, writing on paper or on screens, public signage, and language-related activities at school, which is documented in linguistic landscape data, school materials, observations on teaching, and in writing practice in school and social media.

• Concepts regarding qualities and structures of spoken language, as found in interview data, in which the material qualities of Kriol as a mostly oral language are discussed.

The following sections give an empirical insight into material language practices and the discourses that co-constitute them.

8.1 Writing and Reading as Material Cultural Practice

A first obvious step in accessing material aspects of language use is to consider public formal writing practice. In my study, online media data was an important resource to learn how language is realised in writing. I regularly observed activities in Belizean online newspapers and online TV news from 2012 to 2015, above all the newspaper Amandala (www.amandala.com.bz) and the most popular TV news (Channel 7 News, www.7newsbelize.com and Channel 5 News, www.channel5belize.com, both present news as video broadcast and in writing). US Standard English is used in these formal written contexts, with some particularities in discourse structure. For example, newspaper articles often focus on the direct speech of participants or witnesses, who are interviewed after an event. Interviews are typically in more or less creolised forms of English. (This can be inferred from videos that sometimes appear on websites together with written newspaper articles.) In writing, however, spoken English or Kriol is always represented as US Standard English. Occasionally, Spanish is used in these interviews, which is then also presented in Standard English in the written form.Footnote ²

All Belizean broadcast media language, spoken and written, has been traditionally produced in Belize City. Given the fact that this is the only district in Belize in which the ethnic group of Creoles form the demographic majority (see Chapter 5), this concentration of media broadcasting in a Kriol-dominant environment contributes to the status of Creoles. Book publications make an exception in the media dominance of Belize City: the largest publishing house is located in a tiny village right next to the Guatemalan border (www.cubola.com/). Books published in Belize, such as novels, non-fiction, or cookbooks are almost entirely written in (mostly US) Standard English, with very few exceptions. For example, Kriol may be used in direct speech in novels, some short stories have appeared in Spanish, Garifuna, or Maya in an anthology, and there are poems and short stories in Kriol in publications by the National Kriol Council (Schneider Reference Schneider, Gilmour and Steinitz2017d). (The largest European collection of books from the Caribbean is hosted in Berlin at the Ibero-American Institute, www.iai.spk-berlin.de, where all books published in Belize can be found.)

It was reported to me that there used to be a short comment section in one newspaper that was written in Kriol, which was initiated by the National Kriol Council, but, at the time of my research, I found nothing written in Kriol in newspapers. The translation of some newspaper articles into Spanish suggests that parts of the population do not read in English. This was confirmed when I visited the city of San Ignacio in western Belize, close to the Guatemalan border, where locals on the streets would read Spanish-language Guatemalan newspapers. In contrast, the use of Kriol in formal and public writing is rare. It currently seems to be more of a symbolic expression of identity than a medium of communication. Due to the writing system in which Kriol is represented, it is accessible to people who are literate in English and have learned the National Kriol Council’s orthography of Kriol (which is discussed in Section 8.3).

Although exogenous norms of English are the target of a vast majority of writing in public spaces, deviations from these norms are common. Individuals with educational or migration trajectories that enable access to formal norms of US or British English tend to have a critical attitude towards such presumably incompetent writing. One of the interviewees, a retired university professor who had been raised in Belize during the colonial era and had lived in Canada as an adult (but had returned to Belize in the meantime) discussed the observation that there has been an increase in the use of Kriol forms in public English writing. As a writer of Kriol poetry, she expresses positive attitudes towards Kriol. Nevertheless, in Excerpt 8.1, she presents a nostalgic view of the times when writing in Belize adhered to British standards and expresses dissatisfaction with current language use.

She criticises the fact that an established educational institution like the University of Belize uses written forms of English that are ‘Kriolese’, meaning that Kriol interferes. At the same time, she is surprised that readers do not complain about creolised forms and that these forms are not commonly noticed or opposed by readers. Detached from her own surprise, or maybe even annoyance, she then returns to a discursive meta-level and observes that ‘something is happening with English. And Kriol’. The social roles of the two languages seem to be changing, and with this, there may also be grammatical changes.

It is safe to say that formal Standard English, and mostly the US variety, is the predominant norm for written language in formal and public genres, while public writing frequently appears that does not conform to this standard. At the same time, it is important to note that print literacy does not play a significant role in the daily lives of the majority of Belizeans, and, for many, reading printed text on paper is not a common activity. For instance, in the village, no shop sold printed newspapers. On certain days, I was able to buy a copy of the Amandala newspaper from a food stall that sold fruits and vegetables. The owner had it sent for him personally from Belize City by boat, together with his other goods. He only had one copy, which he would sell to me after he had read it. There was one bookstore in the village, but it catered only to tourists and sold travel guides, maps, postcards, cookbooks, and so on. A marginal interest in print literacy is not unique to the island, as this quote from a consulting document for governmental language policies indicates: ‘Literacy is more enjoyed in the urban areas, particularly in the Belize District than in the rural areas’ (Narain Reference Narain1996). This suggests that many village inhabitants either do not read newspapers or books, do not read at all, or only read online and on smartphones.

As an effect, reading is indexically associated with class distinction (which is true of many cultural contexts in the world). Those who read lengthy texts, for instance books, ascribe prestige to the act of reading. In my data, four interviewees, who either work in education or have attended elite education, mention several times that they read books, or that their children read books, which they clearly construct as something to be proud of, as in Excerpt 8.2.

The interviewee constructs a link between reading and the acquisition of English, where it is taken for granted that reading takes place in English. During the interview, she mentions that she, her father, and her daughter are ‘avid readers’. A construction of reading as something worthy of attention and positive also occurs in other interviews, and is understood as giving access to knowledge in Excerpt 8.3 by a young female villager.

As I often saw people with tablets or smartphones, including pupils in secondary school or inhabitants of shabby huts, I assume that many people do read and write but more so on screens in interactive messaging or on social media.Footnote ³ Writing in digital media is typically more informal and displays considerable variation (Androutsopoulos Reference Androutsopoulos, Tore and Coupland2011). An example of variable writing from my empirical data set is found in Figure 8.1. When I bought a SIM card and put it into my phone, I received three text messages that had been meant as messages to the former user of the same phone number. The receiver is addressed in three different repertoires, one relatively aligned with international Standard English, except for lack of capitalisation, one in a graphic representation of Kriol, and a third one expressed in a non-standard version of Spanish.

Figure 8.1 Use of non-standard writing in digital communication (copyright: B. Schneider and anonymous)

The linguistic forms in Figure 8.1 confirm that the use of formal standards is common if speakers are socially distant. The fusion of English and Kriol can be observed in the second screenshot, where English spelling is accompanied by forms that index the use of Kriol (Gyal for ‘girl’, ina for ‘in the’, da as article/preposition). It seems to be a message among colleagues. Finally, the choices in the Spanish text message display abbreviations typical of the genre of texting (d for ‘de’, no use of punctuation) and it can also be assumed that it is a message to someone who is socially close. An increased use of writing in informal interaction in digital media increases the visibility of and exposure to variable written forms and thus may contribute to an increased liquidity of language norms.

The ambivalent role of literacy on the job market is another vital aspect in the sociocultural functions of writing in Belize. While individuals with access to education often do not question that education and literacy are important for success on the job market, this is actually not always the case (Piller Reference Piller2013). In a capitalist society, economic opportunities that exist in specific local contexts may have an important influence on language ideologies and language choice (Schneider Reference Schneider2017e). The role of economic development in language maintenance and evolution has been previously discussed (Vigouroux & Mufwene Reference Vigouroux, Mufwene, Vigouroux and Mufwene2020) and it has been argued that ‘the success of endeavors to sustain languages and other cultural traditions depends on how well the socioeconomic structure supports the efforts’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Hill and Ameka2022: 287).

According to my data, formal education and formal writing skills may not be essential for obtaining well-paying jobs in Belizean settings. In the very touristy village where my fieldwork was conducted, the most highly paid and respected positions are those of tour guide and boat captain. School degrees are not required for these positions. Official tour guides are required to pass nationally regulated exams; however, it is not mandatory for the applicant to be able to read and write. A literate person can assist them during the test (personal communication with a library official in spring 2015). Unfortunately, besides these more regulated job markets, transnational drug trade networks have become a more prominent opportunity to make money in recent years (Janowitz Reference Janowitz2014). In this context, teachers I spoke to reported difficulty motivating pupils to attend school and to put efforts into their studies. Pupils are very aware that educational success does not necessarily lead to economic success, unless one is wealthy enough to study in the United States, or talented enough to secure a scholarship. A secondary schoolteacher told me that, when she had arrived from Canada (from where she had migrated to Belize), she told her pupils to work hard in school in order to achieve greater economic success in the future. This was met with laughter from the class. One pupil who had already worked in the drug business found the argument especially amusing (personal communication with teacher in spring 2015).

Proficiency in official writing norms is mainly of symbolic value in job markets that have no demand for it. Indeed, even university degrees may not guarantee financial success in Belize (Section 7.1 and Schneider Reference Schneider2017e). The fact that educational achievement does not necessarily translate into a position of social authority, and vice versa, can be interpreted as a division of two different forms of power: economically based power, often operating transnationally, and politics, which is still predominantly nationally organised (Bauman Reference Bauman2012: vii). Educational institutions and teachers thus have to struggle with their twofold tasks of educating pupils to become citizens of a nation state and preparing them for the global job market. Monolithic standards of writing that are established, taught, and materialised as norms in schools may not always hold value in the latter. The fact that institutionalised school norms compete with other norms is important to consider, and specifically so when studying school life, as is done in the following section.

8.2 Language and Literacy Teaching in Practice

Participant observation in secondary school reveals two main findings. First, English is the almost exclusive medium of education and is constructed as the ultimate goal of educational achievement. Second, classroom language does not always conform to the (British/US) Standard English as is prescribed in official national policies. The anglophone orientation of Belizean schools is strongly institutionalised. Not only do governmental policies construct English as classroom language (Ministry of Education 2007, 2017), but the entire educational system is officially declared to be part of the anglophone Caribbean space. Therefore, the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC, www.cxc.org) is responsible for awarding secondary school examination certificates (Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC)). The Council follows British Standard English orthography. Belize’s orientation towards the Caribbean space, despite its widespread Hispanic traditions, strongly affects the school syllabus. The literary texts that are read, for example, mostly stem from the Caribbean context. At the time of my field stay, the books that were on the shelves in the English classroom were by V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad and Tobago), Michael Anthony (Trinidad and Tobago), Beryl Gilroy (Guyana/UK), and Zee Edgell (Belize). It was unquestioned that school was an English-speaking environment, with ties to the UK and to other former British colonies in the Caribbean. As a result, with the exception of materials in the Spanish lessons, all written materials that I encountered were in English. The use of English as the language of instruction was taken for granted by both pupils and teachers; there was no questioning of its use, nor where there were critical attitudes towards it.

Many interviewees report that literacy and writing, as opposed to informal speech, are conducted in English. Excerpt 8.4 presents a historical narrative on writing practices. An elderly interviewee depicts her relationship to English in school during the 1960s. There is an ambivalent orientation towards English in Excerpt 8.4, relating to observations in Chapters 6 and 7. English ‘was our language’ and Belizeans had ‘a British passport’. This is not remarked upon critically, even though the interviewee mentions that she was ‘made to be ashamed to be talking Kriol’. She describes a clear distinction in domain use. Kriol is used at home, for playing, for the family, and as lingua franca. It is interesting that she first says ‘English’ in line 7 to refer to Kriol. While it may be a simple slip of the tongue, it happens relatively often that respondents use the word English when referring to Kriol, indicating that Kriol can be understood as a dialect of English (see also Excerpt 7.20). Finally, she says that the formal, institutionalised, tangible, and non-embodied language practices, those imbued with official authority and social prestige, those fixed in time and on paper, were clearly distinct: ‘once you picked up a book everything was in English’.

In addition to the colonial history of Belizean English-only education, conservative rituals and practices in everyday teaching are still common today.Footnote ⁴ Even though the founder of the high school started to implement progressive teaching styles during my field stay, I observed daily rituals and methods that I perceived as highly traditional and authoritative. For example, pupils who arrived late had to report to the headmaster. At the end of the day, the headmaster publicly announced the names of students who had been late or had misbehaved during the day. The seating arrangement in class reflected a traditional, teacher-centred educational ideology: all students sat at individual desks, facing the front, while the teacher had a larger desk to support frontal instruction (see Figure 8.2).

Figure 8.2 Single chairs and tables for teacher-centred learning (copyright: B. Schneider)

Conservative and authoritarian ideologies regarding teaching and learning may support the unquestioned reproduction of English as the only medium of education in schools. This is confirmed by observations in Excerpt 8.5 in which a female secondary schoolteacher talks about the relevance of English in writing practice.

The teacher first asserts that non-embodied language in the form of writing is practised in English: ‘when we write we need to write in English’. She does not question this and assumes that the oral use of Kriol is detrimental to learning to write in English. The reason she gives is that pupils have to learn to write to pass externally regulated exams and the teacher clearly orients towards these exams as a central authority (a ‘centering institution’ in Blommaert’s terms; see Section 2.1). Learning is presented as a means to pass a test, and not, for example, as a tool for developing critical thinking skills, creating knowledge, or finding solutions to problems. Therefore, teachers ‘have them speak English’. The wording emphasises a hierarchical relationship between teachers and pupils and thus adds to overall hierarchical, teacher-centred educational ideologies.

The way Spanish is implemented as a school subject further contributes to the construction of school as an English-dominated space. A high number of pupils say that they speak Spanish at home. In my quantitative data, 24 per cent of the high school’s pupils say they use Spanish as a home language, but, given the stigma and a partly unclear conceptualisation of the language, it is likely that the actual percentage is higher. At school, Spanish is taught as a foreign language for two hours a week. The teaching method is designed for pupils with no prior knowledge of the language. It is interesting to note that even some of those pupils who told me that they speak Spanish at home appear to have difficulty understanding and speaking the language in the classroom setting. There was a lot of pupils’ resistance in the Spanish classes, and several students would constantly make jokes or disturb the lesson. I cannot say whether this was because it was the Spanish lesson or for other reasons. (These include the very kind nature of the teacher or his being of Spanish-speaking descent.) Pupils who were successful and cooperative in the Spanish class, during the time of my observations, were mostly female students whose parents had migrated from Hispanic countries recently. Other teachers in this school considered Spanish only for its instrumental value. They regularly emphasised that it was important to have good grades in Spanish, as these marks would count in the final examinations, that it would be important to get a university scholarship at universities in Mexico or Guatemala, and that it could help to find a job. Spanish was never discussed as a local community language in the school environment.

The discursive and material construction of Belizean schools as spaces where only English is spoken is in a certain degree of tension with regard to language practices of teachers and pupils. Consider Field Note 8.1 that I took after the first day of participant observation in school, which indicates that fused language, as discussed in Section 7.3, is also common in the classroom.

Despite the institutional discourses and material practices that jointly produce an image of monolingual Standard English schools, it is common that variable forms are produced. Given the frequent fusion of Kriol and English in everyday life, it is not at all surprising that hybrid forms are frequently produced in the classroom.

Based on the fact that parts of the educational Belizean elite do have access to the features of British/US Standard English, there is a discourse of complaint about the teacher’s lack of proficiency in English. In a Language Policy Mission Report from 1996, it is argued, for example, that ‘All teachers should be literate in English’ (Narain Reference Narain1996: 23), which indicates that this is not the case, at least not in the forms that are considered English by those who write such reports. In the same document, this is made more explicit in mentioning public debates on the teachers’ (lack of) English competence: ‘One of the opinions is that teacher use creole (kriol) in classrooms without being aware that it is not English that they speak’ (Narain Reference Narain1996: 26). Elements of this discourse can also be found in Excerpt 8.6 from an interview with the same education expert who spoke in Excerpt 8.1. She here assumes that some teachers are not competent enough to tell the difference between English and Kriol. In other words, according to her, they are unable to keep the languages apart, thus unable to produce what is locally understood as ‘code-switching’ (see Section 7.3).

The interviewee argues that Kriol and English should be separated but doubts that all teachers are able to make this distinction. She then demonstrates her own use of Kriol. In lines 5–8, she changed her tone of voice and intonation patterns, and started to speak very fast so that it was not possible to transcribe all words with certainty. The interviewee engages in a form of stylised performance, in which she demonstrates her competence in Kriol. While the words and the structures seem to be, at least from what I understood in the recording, not distinct from English, it is mostly the prosody and voice quality that here indexes a code-switch. From line 9 onwards, she switches back to English and says that pupils today would be unable to differentiate English and Kriol. As her own example demonstrates, it can indeed be difficult to distinguish the two if, in some cases, only the sound and intonation patterns but not the words and structures differ (see Chapter 9 for further examples). Despite of her positive attitudes and support of Kriol through the publication of poetry, she discursively constructs Kriol in negative terms and describes deviations from official Standard English as ‘bad’. Accordingly, she says that she can speak the ‘worst’ kind of Kriol in line 5 and that her ‘motive was to come out there’, presumably meaning to leave an uneducated social space with no access to standardised norms of English. Overall, these observations show that intellectual elites, via their discourses but also in materialised policy documents, support the constructions of (British/US) Standard English as educational norm.

Note that the interviewee was the oldest of my sample and grew up in colonial times (see Excerpt 8.4). This must be taken into account in interpreting her utterance. Yet, we can assume that she has quite profound insight into the contemporary Belizean education system as she has taught in teacher education at the University of Belize for many years and still works as an educational consultant. She explains that ‘correct’ English forms are, in the current school system, continuously practised, from primary school to the university level. In Excerpt 8.7, I had asked her why many pupils struggle with particular forms, even though I had seen that they are taught, written, and practised again and again in primary school.

The interviewee lists all the spaces where non-local (British/US) standard forms are taught and practised: in primary school, in secondary school, at university. And yet, in the writing of students, there is ‘that kind of stuff’, here probably referring to writing that has deviations from official standards. She expresses resignation. The forms are taught over and over ‘but even when they get to tertiary level, they have not’ learned it. She ends the narrative with a simple ‘I don’t know’.

When I conducted an interview at the University of Belize with someone who worked in teacher education, we spoke about the same issue and I was shown a workbook that is used in so-called Remedial English Classes, which students have to attend before their normal courses start if their language test results were not good enough. The teaching of non-local Standard English norms to university students is a very common practice. The question of why particular grammatical forms are practised for many years with apparently little effect has various causes, such as exposure to mixed forms, structural similarity of Kriol and English, or lack of teacher training. Additionally, there may be psychological effects of colonial oppression on language learning, which Deumert (Reference Deumert2017: 206) discusses as bringing about a ‘state of nervous anxiety’ that for pupils entails the ‘impossibility of remaining themselves while everything about them [is] denied’ (see also Section 7.3). A lack of identification with non-local Standard English norms may be an important factor in understanding the meagre results of years of teaching Standard English grammar. This is also argued in Excerpt 8.8, again with the elderly female university professor.

According to Excerpt 8.8, pupils avoid forms that are understood as standard school norms, which is here explained in line 3 with the argument that English ‘has not become part of them’. In other words, pupils reject non-local Standard English as an expression of their self and social identity (see Piller & Pavlenko (Reference Piller, Pavlenko, Pavlenko, Blackledge, Piller and Teutsch-Dwyer2001) on social identity in second language acquisition) and therefore struggle to use these forms. I attended an English lesson in Form 3 in which the teacher told her pupils, for example, that ‘Subject–verb agreement is one of the most important things to raise your level of English’ (field note documentation, 16 February 2015). She furthermore explained that ‘Subject–verb agreement is one of the most difficult aspects in switching from Kriol to English’. During my experience as a voluntary tutor for pupils who needed support in English, I was surprised how difficult it seemed for many pupils to produce standard norms for subject–verb agreement or, for another example, nominal plural marking, despite an otherwise highly elaborate linguistic performance. The school workbook on grammar rules, used in all grades in the village’s high school, shows that teachers see a need to teach forms in secondary school that I would rate as rather simple. For example, it entails explanations like the following:

The fact that standard formal writing is trained even at university level has been reported also for other Caribbean settings (Deuber Reference Deuber2014: 42) – and even rote learning and heaps of rules printed on paper and practised again and again over the years seems to be of little use in the face of a lack of identification with the language.

During the period of my field observation, the English lessons proved to be particularly interesting in terms of how English is constructed at an institutional level. This was also because the English teacher was very knowledgeable and willing to explain the rationale behind her classroom activities and how she tried to teach (non-local) standards of English. For example, figures in Figures 8.3 and 8.4 show an exercise on vocabulary acquisition. The teacher had told me that in Kriol, intensification is expressed by reduplication and that subtle semantic differences are expressed not by a plethora of different adjectives, but by combining frequently used adjectives. Therefore, she practised the use and meaning of words with the pupils of ages 13 and 14. Figures 8.3 and 8.4 present two outcomes of classroom work, which served as preparation to learn how to write a description.

Figure 8.3 Classroom work on ‘Disappointed’ (copyright: B. Schneider and pupils)

Figure 8.4 Classroom work on ‘Bored’ (copyright: B. Schneider and pupils)

I had not expected that pupils aged 13–15 had to practise everyday adjectives such as disappointed and bored in order to be able to write a description. After the teacher had explained the task, one pupil asked ‘What’s a description?’ showing that the teacher had chosen an adequate level of difficulty.

The writing practices of pupils display typical forms that I often saw also in other examples of formal writing, for example, in public settings. Among these are the capitalisation of verbs or adjectives (Figure 8.3, left and right card ‘Don’t’, ‘Care’, Figure 8.4, right card ‘Bored’), the use of small letters for words that typically use capital letters (‘i’ for ‘I’ as in right card, Figure 8.3), separation of words (‘some-one’, right card, Figure 8.3, ‘some where’, right card, Figure 8.4), general orthographic particularities (‘Realy’, ‘sopose’, right card, Figure 8.3) and structural irregularities (‘not sopose to be doing’, right card, Figure 8.3). It is also typical that some pupils have no problems in producing formal norms (left card, Figure 8.4), which is either because they have lived in the United States, have US English-speaking migrants as parents, or because they succeeded in learning the forms.Footnote ⁶

To summarise the observations made in this section, it is striking that despite institutional practices that construct Belizean schools as Anglophone spaces, and despite years of activities aimed at producing populations who are able to produce standard norms of English, actual speaking practice is very diverse. At the same time, technologies and cultures of literacy and institutional teaching practices have a decisive influence on normative discourses and indexical functions of language.

8.3 Kriol Language Activism and Orthography Development

Non-embodied language practices such as writing, messaging, or posting are much less common in Kriol than in English. Kriol is not taught in school and the few publications that do exist are almost all published by the National Kriol Council (www.nationalkriolcouncil.org),Footnote ⁷ which aims at supporting and maintaining Creole culture. The so-called Language Arm specialises in the creation of written texts in Kriol. The Council is relatively well known among the population, and particularly Silvaana Uudz, a popular and nationally known figure, supports the use of Kriol in public life. In cooperation with the American, Christian Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), the Council has created an orthography (Glock, Crosbie, & Crosbie Reference Glock, Crosbie and Crosbie2001), published a grammar (Decker Reference Decker2013), a bible translation (Wycliffe Bible Translators 2012), and a dictionary (Herrera & Crosbie et al. Reference Herrera2009). Additionally, they have collected and published Kriol short stories (e.g. Gentle Reference Gentle2005, Glock Reference Glock2005, Sutherland Reference Sutherland2004). The activities of the Council construct Kriol as an index of Belizean Afro-Caribbean Creole culture, which is not unproblematic in the context of Belize, where a lot of non-Creoles identify positively with Kriol.

When I interviewed Silvaana Uudz, we also spoke about the role of writing and reading (Excerpt 8.9). As she is a public figure and active in promoting Kriol writing in the public sphere, I am not anonymising her statements. She regards the writing of Kriol and the use of a spelling convention as crucial to enhance the status of the language. In her role as a spelling consultant, for example to advertising agencies who want to use Kriol in their slogans, she argues that correct spelling leads to the validation of the language. Accordingly, she sees the use of a standardised spelling system as a way of fixing the language and making it legitimate. For her, writing is a central tool for Kriol to be acknowledged. In Excerpt 8.10, she elaborates that a consistent use of spelling norms will demonstrate that Kriol has systematic grammatical rules.

Writing is constructed as contributing to a recognition of Kriol as a language. That ‘it has a system of course’ is central for the argument. If Kriol is written consistently, and always with the same spelling, it displays, according to the interviewee, that ‘this is systemic’. The idea that language must be regular and systematic in order to be considered as legitimate or worthy of attention is common also in linguistics (and critically commented on in Mufwene Reference Mufwene1992a). In Excerpt 8.10, the speaker tacitly assumes that spoken language alone cannot convey the idea that Kriol is systematic. It is writing, that is, standardised disembodied visual–material signs, which is necessary to convince people of the regularity and therefore legitimacy of Kriol. And only if people understand that the language is regular and systematic can they tell the children ‘Don’t be ashamed of the Kriol language’. Modernist language ideologies of regularity and standardisation are reproduced as it is these concepts that are regarded as enhancing the status of the language. Comparing this with the indexicalities of Kriol as an expression of resistance to standardisation (see Sections 7.2 and 8.4), the work of the Council is at odds with the anti-standard discourses that some speakers see as central to Kriol language culture.

The fact that not all Belizeans adhere to the idea that Kriol is a language can be inferred from Excerpt 8.11 from an interview with a middle-aged male education expert.

While not everyone agrees with the concept of Kriol being a language or, in the words of the interviewee above, ‘a language language’, this interviewee argues that Silvaana and her followers ‘have done their research’. The expression of ‘doing research’ appears overall sixteen times in my data set and expresses the idea that someone has studied something thoroughly, or has read about something, implying that this is serious work that leads to reliable results. The phrase is thus not only used in the context of the academic world but also if someone wants to express that they know something with certainty. In Excerpt 8.11, Kriol is a language because research has shown it to be so. It is not argued that Kriol has a proud community of speakers and that this is why it should be considered a language.

The spelling rules of Kriol as defined by the Kriol Council reflect the Council’s language ideologies. Distance from English is considered to be of central importance, which is reminiscent of Kloss’s (Reference Kloss1978) Ausbau language. As in debates on the orthographies of creole languagesFootnote ⁸ elsewhere, in the Belizean context, the creators of the spelling system had to decide between a phonetically oriented and a historically oriented orthography (Velupillai (Reference Velupillai2015: 250–1); on Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, see Deuber (Reference Deuber2014: 42)). According to Silvaana Uudz (personal communication, March 2015), only a phonetically oriented spelling that shows distance from English will lead speakers to perceive that Kriol is an autonomous language and not (bad) English. In an earlier version of the spelling system, as Silvaana said, the influence of English was stronger, but the committee changed it because they understood that ideally an orthography should be different from the spellings of other languages.

The current spelling is at least partly in line with this ideal of autonomy from the English language. See Figure 8.5 for a text from 2005 in the standardised form of writing Kriol.

Figure 8.5 The orthography of Kriol (Williams Reference Williams and Glock2005)

Figure 8.5Long description

A page titled a story that grandpa Sammy told me. It has the text that reads when I was young, I used to do a lot of things with my grandpa. He was named Sammy, and he used to talk to me a lot. One day, he and I were sitting together, and he said, my grandson, I want you to listen to this. In the old days, we used to have a farm where we would go and gather bananas and plantains. We would boil the bananas and roast the plantains and do all kinds of things. It has the same text that is written in a foreign language.

Figure 8.5 presents the first page of a Kriol short story. An orientation towards phonetic script as in the International Phonetic Alphabet can be inferred, even though some sounds are not represented with letters that conform to phonetic symbols, a strategy similar to what is referred to as eye-dialect (Krapp Reference Krapp1926). In particular, vowels and diphthongs still are partly represented with English letters (e.g. <ay> for [e] as in day – note that many sounds that are produced as diphthongs in English are typically produced as monophthongs in Kriol). Silvaana Uudz told me that this is to make the spelling easier for people who learned to read and write in English. I found the spelling slightly confusing, but this may be due to the fact that I acquired literacy in German. When read aloud, many words are easy for an English speaker to understand. However, as the translations at the bottom of each page show, this means that many speakers also may find it difficult to read in this orthography. Overall, the aim of creating an orthography that is distant from English has been achieved (even though the script and the spelling are, after all, based on English conventions). There is a dilemma between the desire to demonstrate difference, and therefore legitimacy, and the practicalities of reading in contexts where literacy is acquired in English. In an early study of written creole, before standardised orthographies for creoles existed, Hellinger showed that spontaneous creole writing, for example in literary texts, typically uses British/US English orthography, with some features, particularly those that are perceptually and/or socially salient, spelled differently (e.g. <de> instead of <the>; see Hellinger (Reference Hellinger, Görlach and Holm1986)). The same type of spelling is used today in many social media posts originating in Belize.

The way in which language is conceptualised in the work of the Kriol Council is similar to modernist European language ideologies, where a language is seen as indexing an ethnic group, and where systematicity and regularity are seen as conferring legitimacy. The aim of the Council’s spelling system is to make the links to English less obvious. The complex fusions of English and Kriol, and the specific cultural history and symbolic functions of Kriol as an index of resistance, are not taken into account in these visualised forms. This is not to deny the value of the Council’s work, as such activities remain central to legitimising linguistic resources associated with colonial oppression. Non-embodied, standardised forms continue to function as indices of verification in many real-life contexts. And yet, as the following section shows, normative language standards are not uncontested in complex and polycentric settings.

8.4 Resisting Standardised Writing

The work of the Kriol Council’s Language Arm is not without controversy. Some interviewees express mild or even open criticism and doubt about Kriol language activism, most often about the spelling system. Excerpt 8.13 from an interview with an enthusiastic Kriol speaker shows why.

Despite this interviewee’s very positive attitude towards Kriol, he has to admit that he cannot read the spelling that the Council has designed. A minute later, after Excerpt 8.13, he says: ‘I want Kriol to be our official language. I would love for that to be the official language, Kriol’ (minute 20), which shows that he is not against the writing of Kriol in general. Obviously, the spelling system poses practical problems even for those who are in favour of its existence. It may be relevant that the above speaker has only attended primary school and may not be a highly proficient reader so that he potentially feels excluded by the spelling system. When I asked Silvaana what she thought about the problem of people struggling with the spelling system, she said:

She expresses frustration by complaining about speakers of Kriol who do not, in her eyes, put enough effort into learning the spelling. Another reason why Kriol reading is hard, she assumes, is that Belizeans have been trained to read and write in English.

The use of Kriol in writing is hindered not only because Kriol speakers find the spelling difficult, but also because of digital language practices. In Excerpt 8.15, the speaker, a secondary school teacher, had said before that she prefers to use Kriol with her friends. However, she refrains from its use when she creates text messages.

Digital practices often enforce the use of standardised language. Mobile/cell phones have automatic text recognition and automatic correction, and it is risky to use Kriol in text messages because the corrections often change the spelling and do not express what the writer meant. No automatic text recognition and correction exists for Kriol, and it is therefore safer to write in English. Discussions about social and linguistic biases programmed into language technologies have only recently begun to take shape (Schneider Reference Schneider2022).

Another strand of criticism of Kriol spelling expresses dislike of spellings that are ideologically charged and related to ethnic divisions within Belize. When I worked as a substitute teacher in a Spanish class, I discussed language issues with pupils in Form 3 and Form 4 (ages 14–16). I showed them some of the Council’s publications, which they found very interesting. Excerpt 8.16 displays their first reactions.

These pupils were not familiar with the Kriol spelling system of the Council. So, their first reaction is an expression of surprise: ‘Why spell da weird?’ They then try to understand the spelling and start to read letter by letter, which shows that the spelling for them means to return to reading like a first-grader. In line 3, one boy comments: ‘They are real real Creoles’. The two adjectives are pronounced slowly, and the speaker creates an ironic comment. Most of the pupils in this class do not consider themselves to be ethnic Creoles (which in this context of ethnic fluidity does not necessarily mean that they do not have Creole ancestors). Several students start to laugh, apparently, they find the production of ‘real’ Creoleness, as performed through this spelling, somehow over the top and therefore funny. The situation indicates inter-ethnic tensions between those Belizeans who are ‘really Creole’, also referred to as the ‘creole Creoles’ and mostly from Belize City, and other Kriol speakers.

The most profound critique of the whole enterprise of making Kriol a ‘real language’, however, relates to the anti-standard indexicalities that are implied in Kriol. Excerpt 8.17 is from an interviewee who migrated to Belize from Spain, runs a publishing house, and does not speak Kriol but sometimes consults members of the Kriol Council in order to make sure she spells a word ‘correctly’. She feels that the Council is strict; and even though she is not a native Belizean, she seems to distinguish the character of Kriol from the character of other standardised written languages.

Given that this interviewee professionally edits and publishes literary and academic texts for a living, it can be assumed that she would not say the same about, say, English or Spanish. It is in Kriol in which ‘it’s not that important’ how to spell particular words.

Even people who are active in creating Kriol literature can be sceptical towards the idea of writing Kriol. The interviewee in Excerpt 8.18 is of Creole descent herself, an elderly former university professor. Although she publishes Kriol poetry, she distances herself from the creators and users of the dictionary.

It is telling that she uses the pronoun ‘they’ instead of ‘we’. She apparently does not feel part of the community who identifies with the language that is fixed in the dictionary. In contrast to some other interviewees, she does not say that Kriol is a language but that it is ‘considered a language’, further distancing herself from the idea.

According to some of the interviewees, the oral nature of Kriol has the effect that the language changes more quickly. The same interviewee as in Excerpt 8.18 argues in Excerpt 8.19 that the dictionary was already outdated at the time of the interview in 2015 (the dictionary was published in 2009).

If language changes very fast, the act of fixing it via writing is less useful. The perception that Kriol changes faster than other languages appeared also in some of the street interviews on language use across domains. Several respondents in this context argued that Kriol cannot be written ‘because it is developing’, referring to an apparently faster form of language change.

In Excerpt 8.20, another interview conversation with two young women (who had an elite education), the argument is made that there is not only diachronic variation but also synchronic variation, and that therefore, it would not make sense to standardise Kriol spelling.

In this short discussion, the two interviewees report that they use different spelling versions for the word girl, namely gyal and gial and say that there is a third version, the spelling gal. Respondent 1 expresses a strong dislike of the dictionary: ‘that is crap’. They discuss different spellings, claiming that a particular spelling leads to an inclination to use an alternative version. Because of these practices, it would be impossible to do examinations in Kriol. One could argue that only one spelling would be more efficient, and yet the freedom to make different choices at the spelling level seems to be important to these speakers. Speakers ‘pronounce it how they spell it in their head’, which seems to be the intuitive authority for the way Kriol words are spelled. Finally, respondent 1 summarises that ‘it’s hard to get a lock on a creole’. The speaker uses the indefinite pronoun in front of the term creole, and therefore relates to not only Belizean Kriol but also to other creole languages. The interviewee describes it as a general characteristic of creole languages that these should not be ‘domesticated’ by standard writing.

Indeed, in group discussions on languages in Belize I had with pupils in Forms 3 and 4 (ages 14–16), even younger pupils showed an awareness of Kriol’s indexical functions of resistance to standardisation (Excerpt 8.21). Many of them were strongly opposed to the notion of establishing Kriol as a written language. They feared that the language could become formal when materialised in writing, which the students clearly disliked.

In this interaction, I first introduced the topic by asking if there is interest in learning Kriol. To make sure that this is not understood as learning Kriol instead of English, I explicitly excluded this option. The pupils first raise the point that learning to read and write Kriol would be ‘too much work’. There already is a language for formal purposes that they had to learn and in which they acquired literacy, and this is English. English is practical as ‘the world already knows it’. Writing formally in English is useful as it is used not only within the confines of Belize. A few minutes later, the discussion continues (interrupted by another teacher who had entered the room to make an announcement), and a student remarks that, if Kriol would become a written language, it would change: ‘people would run into try to make it formal’. The pupils clearly regard this as negative, the phrasal verb to run into has negative connotations, relating to an act of something clashing into something else in an unintentional manner.Footnote ⁹ The pupils fear that ideologies of standard formality, that is, language ideologies associated with Western modernity and colonialism, could impact negatively on creole language culture. Having been raised in a standard language culture myself, with its naturalised concept of standard languages, I found the pupils’ degree of awareness regarding different language ideologies remarkable.

Given this very sceptical attitude towards standardised writing in Kriol, it is not surprising that the Council’s spelling is rarely used in informal forms of writing, such as on social media. Figure 8.6 is a Facebook post from a Belizean musician who regularly presents himself in digital public and very often uses his own version of Kriol spelling.

Figure 8.6 Freestyle orthography

The post is based on Standard English orthography and entails the graphic representation of Kriol in some letters. The term soursop is spelled SOUR SAP, displaying an often found tendency to separate compound words, unlike in other varieties of English. The spelling of sap with an <a> and not an <o> conforms to locally common forms of representing the pronunciation of the vowel. Some words are changed in order to convey the Kriolness of the speaker. The spelling of wat for what and of henging for hanging deviate from standard spelling norms and seem to have the function of expressing pronunciation differences. In the words da for the and Backyaad for backyard, a distinction from (US English) pronunciation norms is expressed. The word Haffi is structurally different from the English have to. The writer uses a verb that is inflected for past tense, found, which is not traditionally defined as typical for Kriol. The word tree is often pronounced as [tʃri] in Kriol, even in more formal contexts but here conforms to non-local Standard English in spelling. Apparently, some features are more salient for expressing Kriolness than others (see Auer (Reference Auer2014) on the notion of salience).

It is important to the speaker to use language as an index of belonging by using spellings that do not conform to official normative standards. The text is a combined effect of the dominance of English literacy and of the important indexical functions of Kriol, which is symbolised via orthographic appropriation. Digital media make such forms much more visible and they are not confined to creole settings, as non-standard digital writing is common also in standardised Western language cultures (see Androutsopoulos Reference Androutsopoulos and Coupland2016, Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Deumert and Storch2020: 291). In this writing practice, regularity and systematicity are not necessarily of central importance so that diffuse practices become more common in digital space.

This section has shown that the aim of making Kriol a written, standardised language is highly ambivalent in the cultural context of Belize. As Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2004: 659) notes, ‘whether or not writing offers opportunities for its practitioners is to be answered by ethnographic and sociolinguistic analysis’. The data collected in this study seem to suggest that the regularisation and standardisation of the language Kriol, in which the material practices of writing play a primordial symbolic role, is met with resistance. Apparently, the affordances of the materiality of writing do not match well with the indexical functions of Kriol and the particular kind of liquidity of Kriol. And while English is associated with discourses on formality and ‘properness’, Kriol is tied to ‘spontaneity’, creativity, and informality.

The following section ends this chapter by giving insight into meta-pragmatic interview discourses about the nature of Kriol, including ideas about ease of acquisition, multimodality, and sound qualities. Language ideological discourses surrounding the idea that Kriol should not be ‘tamed’ in standard writing mirrors ideas on ‘untamed’ spoken realisations of the language.

8.5 The Material Qualities of Kriol

In interviews, there are a number of meta-pragmatic descriptions regarding the specific material qualities of Kriol. For example, pupils have often told me that it is easy to learn and speak Kriol, which is understood as related to the fact that it is not typically used in writing. This included pupils who had learned it after immigrating from Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Honduras, for example, and for whom it was clearly a foreign language. Some interviewees explicitly compared Kriol to English and assumed that it was simply easier to learn Kriol than English.

The perception that Kriol is easier to learn than English is widely shared, and some interviewees explain this by the dominance of spoken Kriol in local (semi-)public and private contexts.

The interviewee, in the first part of Excerpt 8.23, relates the acquisition of Kriol by people who do not use it at home to the frequent use of Kriol in the community. She ends up arguing that ‘it’s really easy fu get to know it’ (fu is a multifunctional particle in Caribbean creoles). First of all, the fact that Kriol is not taught, regimented, or examined in school probably impacts on this perception, as do the highly positive attitudes towards Kriol in the community. Additionally, it is also likely that the language ideologies that make variability legitimate add to the perception of Kriol as ‘easier’. For example, the anxiety of sounding ‘foreign’ or ‘wrong’ may be less pronounced where there is a generally greater acceptance of variation. This does not mean that ‘anything goes’ in Kriol, but that there is a less one-dimensional approach to conventions. In this way, learning the language can be less bound up with the fear of making a fool of oneself as a learner. Finally, the perception of Kriol as an ‘easy’ language has to do with the convention of using Kriol predominantly orally and not in a written materiality. Syntactical structures in spoken language tend to be less complex than in writing and normative, focused rules are less common and so the idea of Kriol being ‘easy’ can also be an effect of oral language culture.Footnote ¹⁰

Another very common argument is that Kriol is produced in a fast fashion.

It would be worth investigating whether Kriol is really pronounced with higher speed than English. My perceptual impression, and an example given in Section 9.3, indicate that this may indeed be the case, but it would require digital technologies and a different data set to provide an objective base for this. Given the argument that Kriol had the function of making communication inaccessible to slave masters (Chapter 7), it cannot be ruled out that the speed of speech may be an effect of this tradition to this day. During participant observation in classrooms, I was often amazed at how pupils managed to communicate across the classroom, even when it was very noisy. It is not only the speed of speaking that makes understanding difficult, but also the general background noise (because of fans, because the walls are very thin, and you can hear the teacher from the next room, and because the school is right next to an airport). One interviewee argued that sound in Kriol functions in a joint and multimodal way with gestures and mimics, and that this is an effect of colonial oppression, where African speakers wanted to keep the content of their talk secret from their slave masters (on embodiment and language, see Bucholtz & Hall (Reference Bucholtz, Hall and Coupland2016); on counterlanguage, see Morgan (Reference Morgan, Mufwene and Condon1993)).Footnote ¹¹ It would be worthwhile studying interaction in Belize as multimodal practice, including the lexical and syntactic level, prosody, rhythm, voice quality, body posture, gesture, and mimic. This would most likely bring a high degree of interactional complexity to the fore, if we study complexity by taking interactional, multimodal, and dynamic aspects into consideration (Mufwene, Coupé, & Pellegrino Reference Mufwene, Coupé, Pellegrino, Mufwene, Coupé and Pellegrino2017: 2). Such a view would clearly counter the idea that creole languages are less complex than ‘normal’ languages (as expressed, e.g. in McWhorter Reference McWhorter2001). In any case, the ability to understand very fast speech is supported by the simultaneous use of several interaction modalities. Related to the apparent speed with which Kriol is spoken is the often heard idea that Kriol words are short.

I was curious to understand if and why the words of English are shortened in Kriol, so I kept asking about it in interviews and classroom discussions. The explanations were mostly not very satisfactory as in Excerpt 8.26, in which a teacher explains to me how to pronounce the two words ‘come here’ in Kriol.

The interviewee’s example is confusing as there is only a very minor vowel distinction in how ‘come here’ is produced in English and in what is presented as Kriol. A phonetic transcription of the words ‘come here’ in English looks almost the same as in Kriol, apart from a slightly more backed vowel in ‘come’. In fact, both pronunciation forms are of the same length.

The argument that Kriol words are shortened also appeared in a classroom discussion, where pupils told me that they pronounced make as mek <m / e / k > in Kriol and god as gaad <g / a / a / d> (which is actually even longer than god). I suppose that the perception that Kriol has shorter words may be an effect of the speed with which Kriol is often used. It may also be related to the fact that English is perceived differently because it is written in standardised script where more letters are spelled than pronounced due to orthographic traditions. Overall, the examples are a clear indication that writing practices impact on how oral uses and words in a language are perceived (Derrida Reference Derrida1974).

Finally, in addition to meta-pragmatic comments about the ease, multimodality, speed, and brevity of Kriol, some interviewees remark on the general qualities of Kriol as opposing the notion of standard, not only in relation to writing but also in oral production. In Excerpt 8.27, this is explicitly seen as the source of the ‘easiness’ of Kriol.

While one must assume a considerable degree of regularity in Kriol, otherwise communication would be impossible, and while ideological norms about language exist in every community (Cameron Reference Cameron1995), this interviewee assumes that Kriol has ‘no discipline’, which allows for greater variation to the point where ‘you can’t correct anything’.

Given that Kriol involves resistance to colonial ideologies by resisting standardised language culture, a welcoming attitude towards variation, together with a critical attitude towards the regularisation of Kriol through the creation of spelling systems, grammar books, and dictionaries, is not surprising. In this context, it is enlightening to return to Excerpt 7.15. I repeat the excerpt to analyse how material aspects of language here come into focus. The young female villager argues that

The interviewee argues in favour of a non-standardised use of Kriol and says that the essential character of Kriol is ‘to have no standard’. In comparison to the idea that writing gives ‘solidity’ and legitimacy of Kriol, as discussed in Section 8.4, Kriol is here described as ‘very phonetic’. The different modes of sound and visuality are juxtaposed. The sounds in themselves seem to play a role and it is the level of sound that makes the language what it is. The perception that ‘nothing is set’ implies that one can be ‘much more creative with the language’ and the speaker believes that this runs counter to the idea of having ‘one’ (standard). Finally, it is fascinating to observe that the speaker performs what she is talking about. Her account of Kriol is produced in a rhythmically ordered fashion, displaying her linguistic competences in producing language that is a form of verbal poetry.

In this chapter, we have seen that material language practices, discourses on the materialisation of language, and language ideologies interact, and that the way in which language is realised in different material modes and artefacts is not culturally universal. Thus, culturally specific material practices, and ideas about them, interact with the way language and social relations are conceptualised. This means that dominant Western epistemologies that regard the development of standardised writing as a ‘normal’ and teleological process are not culturally universal; nor is the idea that language will be legitimate and prestigious only when it is standardised and fixed through visual forms. A closer focus on material language phenomena can help us to understand how speakers discursively construct languages in different cultural and technological contexts. This can inspire a critical questioning of the epistemology of language in a multimodal, culturally informed sense, and shows that material and immaterial practices interact. The theoretical consequences of this will be further discussed in Chapter 10.

Practices that adhere to standard language ideologies and concepts such as English or Spanish can be interpreted as an effect of specific historically grounded material–discursive systems. In order to avoid applying culturally specific concepts – such as standard languages – where they do not fit, it is important to understand the local, emic logics of language practices (see also Blommaert Reference Blommaert2004). In the next chapter, locally specific construction of using English in public in Belize – that only partially adhere to Western standard language ideologies – are therefore inspected.