What eventually needs to be clarified and explained, through the analysis of sociolinguistic processes, is society and how humans operate in it and construct it.
In this chapter, I summarise what can be learned from the observations made in the previous chapters in terms of how languages come into being and the culturally specific and material practices we should consider in this process. On these grounds, I develop critical perspectives on linguistic theories that take European modernist concepts of language as universal. I first discuss how language categories are discursively constructed in the complex Belizean setting observed, arguing that the lack of a hegemonic centre brings about polycentric language ideologies. Constructions of belonging and prestige are therefore intertwined with several languages at the same time. Material practices of orality and literacy intersect with this polycentricity; a complex situation that overall leads to linguistic diffuseness. At the same time, different material traditions bring about different axes of differentiation, which produce different cultures of normativity. Creativity and innovation may be constructed as crucial, specifically where orality is a valued practice, so that coherence and regularity are not axiomatically a core value. This makes visible the essentially liquid character of language. Languages do not necessarily appear in stable grammatical systems, but specific social and material conditions may lead to the freezing of linguistic form. This implies that there is no teleological path to standard language – such an approach is part of European colonial epistemologies and should be critically questioned in order to open up linguistic theorising to a wider range of language cultures.
10.1 Multiple Indexicalities in Polycentric Belize and the Inadequacy of Binary Models
As we have seen in the previous chapters, in Belize, Kriol, Spanish, and English can all be used to express belonging and prestige. It is not one language that indexes belonging and another that indexes prestige. Rather, one language can have different indexical functions. In the context observed in this study, however, speakers activate different repertoires depending on social environment or genre, or based on individual social relations or conversational functions in specific situations. It is therefore not possible to give a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of what English, Kriol, and Spanish socially index in Belize, but it is only in relation to empirically grounded local contexts that we can describe their indexical functions (in the sense of Eckert (Reference Eckert2008)).
The visualisations in Figures 10.1–10.3 display discourses (not language practices!) with which the languages English, Spanish, and Kriol are associated in the local village context. The figures do not indicate the actual extent to which the languages are spoken. They are approximations to depict general trends – they do not do justice to subtle differences in indexical meaning that may emerge in particular conversational contexts. Although each language is shown in a separate figure, the discourses coexist in the same social space and may become relevant in the same speech event.
Figure 10.1 Belonging, prestige, and materiality in relation to English in the village
Figure 10.2 Belonging, prestige, and materiality in relation to Kriol in the village
Figure 10.3 Belonging, prestige, and materiality in relation to Spanish in the village
Discourses of belonging, prestige, and materiality are here used as a grid to analyse the local indexical functions of English, Spanish, and Kriol. English, as shown in Figure 10.1, is generally perceived as having a high formal prestige, which is associated with its frequent use in written standardised forms. It rarely expresses local affiliation but can refer to a transnational anglophone level and a colonial legacy. In this function, English can express national positioning, especially when speakers use it to distinguish themselves from non-Belizeans (especially Central American neighbours). Kriol, in contrast, has a crucial function in expressing national belonging for Belizeans (Figure 10.2). It also indexes transnational belonging through its links to other Caribbean creole-speaking areas, and, for some, also to Africa, or some urban contexts in the United States (Chapters 6 and 7). Kriol is rarely used in written formal media and can be positively associated with being ‘a sound’ (Chapter 9). Kriol as a sound practice is linked to a discourse of reputation, in which resistance to the modernist cultures of standardisation of the coloniser is implied (see Chapter 8), although Kriol is sometimes used orally in formal settings. Finally, we see that Spanish in Figure 10.3 is represented with overall shorter arrows. This expresses the more marginal role of Spanish in the villages’ discourses – despite the fact that Spanish repertoires appear frequently in language practice. Spanish is discursively linked to the local community, which regards itself to be traditionally Spanish-speaking (Chapter 6). It is not understood as a national language but links the local environment to indigenous traditions as well as to a transnational context in which Spanish is spoken as a standardised and written code. Therefore, the material manifestations of Spanish include writing, as Spanish also functions as a formal language whose ‘complicated’ grammar is taught in school. However, Spanish is generally considered to have low prestige, which can be attributed to the political situation of Belize within the Central American context.
The situation cannot be grasped with binary models like those of diglossia, overt and covert prestige, or with the linear continuum from formal to informal. This has, first, to do with the fact that we are dealing with a multilingual social space with more than two languages to consider. Second, it is not only the national level that is relevant for understanding how languages are imbued with social meaning. Overt prestige is attached to English, but it is not just because of the national framework that English is defined as ‘official’ or ‘correct’. The prestige of English is linked to various national and transnational centring institutions. These are based on colonial history, popular media, and the current economic and political dominance of the United States in the region. In addition, the English-speaking international tourism industry reinforces the role of English in the local sociolinguistic economy. While Kriol can have covert prestige, it is an expression of belonging to the national community, and many speakers identify overtly and positively with it. Yet, it is not generally materialised as a written, standardised language. At the same time, since its emergence, Kriol has been part of a global cultural value system in which it is always in a comparative relationship to English (Mühleisen Reference Mühleisen2002: 74). All in all, it is several intersecting social spaces and different social discourses that simultaneously affect the indexical values of the local languages.
A binary model of covert versus overt, which takes national discourses as a frame of reference, with non-standard languages representing subgroups of the nation, is therefore inadequate for understanding the social indexical meanings of language in this multilingual and transnationally embedded context. As can be seen from the visualisations in Figures 10.1–10.3, the relationships between the indexical functions of the three languages observed are not of the Russian-doll type, where covert prestige is subordinated to and embedded within a standard language in a nation-state context. Instead, we can describe the intricate, kaleidoscopic patterns of ‘H’ and ‘L’ indexicalities as ‘an infinitely fractal system of normativity’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2018: 36). Figures 10.1–10.3, indicating the indexical functions of belonging, prestige, and materiality, approximate such complex relationships in multilingual contexts. This shows that languages do not have to come about in neat packages, linked in a monadic, monolithic way to national or subnational groups, nor do they necessarily represent specific domains, genres, or styles. It requires specific conditions to produce languages as stable entities and as unquestioned symbols of belonging for large territorial groups.
10.2 Linguistic Freezing as a Social Process in Contexts of Political Hegemony
Indexical complexity is a traditional element of the sociolinguistic economies of the Caribbean, which are historically linked to multiple cultural spaces, including the various cultures and languages of those colonised and the culture and language of the coloniser. Contrasting the indexical complexity of polycentric settings with monolingual standard language culture, it can be argued that in the latter, indexical functions are simpler. In European discourses, national ideology successfully constructed the linguistic repertoires of national elites as a centripetal point of orientation and thus erased liquidity and complexity (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) – at least on the level of discourse but to a certain extent also in language practice. This erasure and production of a national standard language culture, that is, the creation of frozen non-liquid language, depends on the existence of hegemonic language ideologies. The term hegemony (Overbeek (Reference Overbeek, Badie, Berg-Schlosser and Morlino2011); see also Gill (Reference Gill1993) on Gramsci) has been defined as a dominant, central social force that is met with ‘general consent … regarding subordination’ (Schenoni Reference Schenoni and Sandal2019). In other words, cultural leaders secure their hegemonic position when subordinated groups accept the elites’ status, norms, and values. In the case of language, hegemonic language ideologies imply that non-elites embrace and accept language norms of the elite. In classical definitions of the term speech community, it is the acceptance of a shared standard norm, irrespective of language practice, that defines the community (e.g. Gumperz [1968] Reference Gumperz and Duranti2001). Thus, it is subordination to a hegemonic norm that creates linguistic focusing.
In European history, the era of nationalism led to the creation of hegemonic power structures and to the sedimentation of monolingual grammars. The national elite became representative of a territorial sociopolitical construct and, simultaneously, the inhabitants of the nation were able to identify themselves as members of the national community (Anderson Reference Anderson1985). They accepted the elite’s language as an unmarked ‘voice from nowhere’ (Gal & Woolard Reference Gal and Woolard2001), profited from using this language in the job market (Bourdieu [1980] Reference Bourdieu and Burke2000), and shifted towards more homogeneous, more monolingual language practices. The situation in colonial settings has always been different. Mufwene assumes the colonial economic system to be a key factor in explaining the lower relevance of monolingualism for colonised speakers:
The political dynamics that since the 19th century have sought to unify European nation-states around a common national language have not worked the same way in countries of the Global South, owing largely to the non-emergence of an expanding and integrated formal economic system that would offer employment to the large majority of the national population and incite them to become monolingual in the language it operates in, rendering knowledge of ethnic languages superfluous.
In Belize, due to ongoing hierarchical transnational patterns that imply persistent racism, constructions of economic exclusion, and limited opportunities in the national job market, it is unlikely that either English or Kriol will follow the idealised development path of European national languages. Given the indexical simultaneity of different discourses attached to languages and the ongoing transnational hierarchical social ties, it is unlikely that a single hegemonic language ideological discourse will emerge that produces a language that is imagined as coherently representing the national community of Belize.
We should be wary of interpreting the rise of creole prestige that has been observed in various Caribbean settings (Chapter 2) as implying a straightforward path to the national hegemony of specific creole languages. While European linguistic models in the past tended to interpret a change in attitudes as teleological trajectories, with one and only one language indexing formal social prestige, the study documented in this book illustrates that different types of prestige may exist side by side. Assuming national ‘centres’ as the only hegemonic points of prestige orientation is based on epistemological framings that take national world orders for granted (for a critique, see Wimmer & Schiller (Reference Wimmer and Schiller2002), Pries (Reference Pries2008)). The indexical patterns described in the preceding chapters are indicative of more complex social structures, in which various local, national, and transnational discourses coexist. These are likely to become more common also elsewhere in the age of contemporary globalisation and digitalisation. Clearly, ‘the monolingualism of European nation-states appears to have been an evolutionary trajectory toward a likely outcome rather than a fait accompli’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene2017a: 18). As a consequence, uniformity and standardisation appear as a maybe rather short-lived European fantasy.
This also implies that grammatical stability depends on specific social conditions and is not ‘natural’. In the social context studied, we do not observe unquestioned hegemonic power relations. There are different normative ideas about appropriate language use, and language ideologies are enregistered differently by different speakers. This can lead to individualised and only partially shared language ideological orientations and one individual can have access to a range of different ideologies. This leads to linguistic performances that are liquid, in the sense that they are oriented to different norms to different degrees, as illustrated in the analysis of linguistic features in Chapter 9. In other words, where social discourses are diffuse, linguistic units are diffuse, too (see also Le Page & Tabouret-Keller Reference Le Page and Tabouret-Keller1985, Benor Reference Benor2010: 175) – but speakers still understand diffuse performances as representing categories (i.e. not only diffuseness but liquid languages).
Such observations lead to the more general argument that social discourse, via the language ideological level, is crucial in explaining both linguistic homogeneity and heterogeneity (compare Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Clyne, Hanks and Hofbauer1979, Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Diane Brentari and MacLeod1992b). This ties in with Hopper’s concept of emergent grammar, according to which
there is no natural fixed structure to language. Rather, speakers borrow heavily from their previous experiences of communication in similar circumstances, on similar topics, and with similar interlocutors. Systematicity, in this view, is an illusion produced by the partial settling or sedimentation of frequently used forms into temporary subsystems.
In non-hegemonic and polycentric power structures, ‘previous experiences’ with feature pools and with language ideologies of individuals are diverse. Consequently, there is little sedimentation of frequently used forms and norms and it becomes difficult to produce the illusion of systematicity and monolithic grammars (Mufwene Reference Mufwene1992a, Reference Mufwene, Diane Brentari and MacLeod1992b). At the same time, there can be outright dismissal of fixed structures. For example, Belizean pupils display an awareness of the fact that writing comes along with ‘making things formal’ (Chapter 8) and reject this for Kriol. In the production of sound patterns in formal English, ideologies of linear properness show an impact on the intonational level; and we observe more monotonous pitch sequences. In Kriol, instead, ideals of livelihood and vibrance are indexed via more variable pitch (see Chapter 9). Discourses that value diversity here impact on diverse linguistic realisations.
In contrast, shared norms, grammatical sedimentation, and fixed standardised grammars can eventually emerge where, first, there are cultural ideals of homogeneity, perhaps even stabilised through writing, where, second, there is sociopolitical hegemony of a social group, and where, third, members of a community can positively identify with this group and subordinate themselves to the values of its elites (for further discussion, see also Pennycook (Reference Pennycook2010)). In this light, it seems unlikely that transnational digital cultures, with their non-hegemonic power relations and polycentric discourses, will bring about linguistic uniformity – ‘the notion of a global English with uniform structural features all over the world is a utopia we may as soon forget about’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene and Coupland2013: 47). Yet, new technological advances like generative language models may push the homogenisation of language, and it is currently difficult to say whether they will form a new kind of ‘hegemonic centre’ (this is discussed elsewhere – see e.g. Schneider (Reference Schneider2022)).
10.3 Different Cultures of Normativity: Overcoming Universalistic Models of Linguistic Theorising
The Belizean village population whose language ideologies I have studied has access to multiple indexicalities and lives in polycentric, non-hegemonic sociolinguistic realities. They therefore live in a world in which different normative ideas about ‘good’ language prevail, that is, there are different axes of differentiation. English is the language of the colonial oppressor, but it also functions as the prestige language of power and institutions on an axis of respectability (Chapter 7). Kriol indexes low social status compared to English on this axis. At the same time, because of its historical function of belonging, Kriol’s indexical functions of resistance, its relation to transnational popular culture, and its function to express creativity, make it a prestigious language on the reputation axis. Its prestige is of a different kind from the prestige of English, and it would be inaccurate to define this prestige as only being an opposition to English. Even though there is a hierarchical relationship between Kriol and English on the respectability axis, an anticolonial study of language culture has to consider that not all axes of differentiation are based on national, formal standards.
Uniformly ordered and stable verbal systems are not the ‘normal’ manifestation of human language (Mufwene Reference Mufwene1992a, Reference Mufwene, Diane Brentari and MacLeod1992b) and the respectability axis is not the only way to differentiate sociolinguistic practices. Differentiating language in terms of adherence to stable norms is common in cultures of writing. Writing, writing-based language education, and the associated normative discourses that value regular and stable language shape what speakers understand language to be. Especially print culture, in which language appears in a linear, standardised, and homogeneous form, has had a central influence on European linguistic epistemology (Ong Reference Ong1982, Linell Reference Linell2005). In other words, traditions related to the culture of the printing press, in which language is reproduced in exact and machine-regulated patterns, have left their mark on European language ideologies. Western epistemologies of language are thus tied to specific aesthetic orders and depend on technological practices that are built on ideals of exact reproduction in cultures of industrialism (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs2003). Language ideologies related to the idea of ‘correct’ language, but also concerning regular, systematic language, as common in contemporary linguistics, therefore depend on technological practices that produce specific material semiotic cultures.
Following that, linguistic homogeneity and standardisation cannot be considered a universal cultural value. As the data has shown, language practices can exhibit heterogeneity and messiness (Jones Reference Jones2018), and individuals may produce diverse speech, particularly in settings in which uniformity is not a core cultural value. And yet, in many linguistic traditions, a priori concepts of orderly grammar, manifest in the native speaker, have contributed to assuming that the speech production of an individual, elicited in a specific situation, represents a particular language:
For most of the twentieth century, the notion of languages as homogenous and discrete entities was not challenged by the prevailing models of linguistic descriptions, with many grammars distilling a language from the idiolect of one (in most cases formally educated male) speaker.
Discourses on the cultural values associated with Kriol, which oppose the naturalised ideologies of Western standard language culture, illustrate that individuality and innovation,Footnote 1 and the ability to appropriate language to situational needs, can function as a crucial norm of conduct. So, what is discursively imagined in the contexts documented in this book is not language as a homogenised and static form, programmed into the brains of individuals. It is language as a socially embedded, interactive, and creative activity. In this sense, and in contrast to one of the sociolinguistic most valued axioms, languages are not all the same in terms of shared systematicity – languages do not necessarily emerge as stable monolithic systems that all speakers of the language produce. The emergence of stable and standardised systems depends on specific social and material conditions.
Thus, if we consider languages’ potentially diverse social and cultural functions, the universalistic sociolinguistic axiom of systemic equality may be inappropriate – ‘the hope of a single classification of the cultural world into units for all purposes of comparison must be abandoned’ (Hymes [1968] Reference Hymes and Duranti2001: 42). There are different degrees of alignment with standardised, focused, and hegemonic forms and non-monolithic, liquid grammars are ‘typical of [Pidgins and Creoles] lexified by Indo-European languages, which are typically used in polyglossic polities’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Diane Brentari and MacLeod1992b: 243). And, it is particularly postcolonial settings that are characterised by these conditions:
Could it be the case that high levels of variability – a geringerer Grad in Übereinstimmung [of language form] and thus a ‘deepening’ and ‘co-existence’ of ‘all particulars’ – are especially prominent in colonial contact zones? In other words, could it be that the colonial situation – where ‘cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other’ (to repeat Pratt’s phrasing) – gives rise to new and complex forms of variation and diversity, forms that are the consequence of a sociohistorical context that is shaped by violent encounters of domination and subordination, a context in which emerging norms and stabilities are constantly disrupted and interrupted?
It is important to emphasise that such considerations should not be misunderstood as arguing that creole languages are different in the sense of less complex than ‘normal’ languages (as e.g. in McWhorter Reference McWhorter2001). Creole languages are not intrinsically different from non-creole languages (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Schmid, Austin and Stein1998). Such distinctions are prone to create a distinction that is, due to their embeddedness in centuries of exploitation, subordination, and racism, understood as a distinction in value (DeGraff Reference DeGraff2003, Reference DeGraff2005, Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Deumert and Storch2020). Many of the arguments in the creole exceptionalism debate (Section 3.1; see also Schneider (Reference Schneider2019a)) are based on an epistemological a priori of languages as comparable and stable grammatical systems. This may explain the presentation of creole languages as ‘simpler’. In such essentialist approaches, language production is studied as morphosyntactic form, represented in writing, and regarded as autonomous from its multilingual, social, and material environment. Language in creole settings, however, takes place in highly complex multilingual settings, serves different cultural functions and activities, and is associated with different kinds of embodiment and materialism. Creolisation is part of multilingual, real-life complexities and is, after all, ‘a social, not a structural process’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Neumann-Holzschuh and Schneider2000), where ‘every evolution is local, subject to the specific ecological pressures that operate at a given time’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene2017b: 220). This implies that, to understand interaction and creolisation, local cultural conditions, material traditions, and social pressures need to be studied empirically and impartially, instead of starting from the assumption that stable monolingual cultures are a universal norm and the teleological outcome of linguistic evolution.
It is thus a Eurocentric perspective to assume that ‘normal’ languages index stable social groups and develop under discourses of sedentariness and in the context of specific institutional and material practices. Looking into the potentially multiplex indexical functions of languages and into diverse axes of differentiation, as documented in this study, we may overcome one language–one culture–one territory epistemologies. We may also overcome teleological framings in which languages are thought to ‘naturally’ become more focused and more homogenised in particular national spaces (e.g. E. Schneider Reference Schneider2011). There is no reason to take modernist European concepts as a yardstick against which practices of all other languages are measured. The kinds of complexity that appear in transnational discourse environments and liquid practices, which entail discursive polycentricity and multimodally embodied traditions, have been veiled under modernist Western linguistic epistemologies of the literate age.
Finally, as has been indicated throughout this text, the role of linguists in the formation of focused norms has to be scrutinised critically. The way language is conceptualised in linguistics is linked to the material forms through which language has been held in place, imagined, and reproduced. The work of linguists, and in contexts of colonialism, of linguistically trained missionaries, has been crucial for the emergence of many languages as separate, ordered categories that align with ordered social units (Errington Reference Errington2001a, Reference Errington2008, Makoni & Pennycook Reference Makoni, Pennycook, Makoni and Pennycook2007, Lüpke & Storch Reference Lüpke and Storch2013b). Thus, ‘linguistic research creates its very own objects of studies … grammars and other scholarly products are the birth certificates of languages’ (Lüpke & Storch Reference Lüpke and Storch2013b: 3). The production of grammars and dictionaries is a material practice that has a material and immaterial object as an outcome – a language.
In the work of linguists of documenting/making a particular language, we often find a political bias. It is typically educated uses of language that are regarded as representing national varieties. This supports dominant speakers, and, in the context of postcolonial settings, it normalises institutional education that is based on Western models.Footnote 2 The exclusion of particular cohorts of people as unsuitable data sources (for example, mobile populations or individuals with no access to institutional education), not only produces theoretical and social biases. It is also embedded in a social history in which social elites (among them academically trained linguists) profit in different ways from keeping a border between speakers assumed to be ‘real’ and those considered as ‘inauthentic’. What university students or teachers perform as ‘correct’ language in interviews with linguists is likely to reproduce the norms of governmental educational actors; and yet, these are not necessarily the norms of the whole population (and who is this population anyway?).
At the same time, even though it is problematic to assume regularity without studying it, this does not imply that the discursive idea of language as an entity is irrelevant. Language categories remain important indices of sociality and function as relevant semiotic symbols (Blommaert & Rampton Reference Blommaert and Backus2011). We do not have to presuppose a stable grammatical system in order to describe, for example, Belizean Kriol as a language. There is no reason to imagine language to come about as ‘solids’ (Bauman Reference Bauman2012), and structured systematicity as given in order to argue that languages exist as crucial boundary-making categories that order the human world.
10.4 Liquid Languages from the Global South as Cultural Avant-garde
Assuming that social and discursive complexity are on the rise in times of globalisation, Caribbean cultures like that of Belize can be understood as global avant-garde. Due to polycentric discourses, diverse material practices, and complex, non-hegemonic power structures, speakers have been confronted with different truths for a long time. European modernist imaginations of order do not define the sociolinguistic economy that we observe in Belize, nor are they characteristic of the social realities of contemporary late modernity, where polycentric language ideologies and more openly liquid language cultures are on the rise in globalised cultural settings (see also Silverstein (Reference Silverstein2015: 7), discussed in Chapter 5). Observations on the complex discursive constructions of languages in Belize, therefore, may be used as an inspiration for understanding contemporary and future social orders.
In late modern social orders in Western settings, the nation state can no longer be understood as a hegemonic, let alone as an autarkic socio-economic formation (Beck, Giddens, & Lash Reference Beck, Giddens and Lash1994, Giddens Reference Giddens2002, Castells Reference Castells2010, Bauman Reference Bauman2012). Under the conditions of globally connected economies, the nation state has become one actor among several. It is not only political actors but also economic stakeholders who impact on global social power relations. Especially large technology companies play an increasing role in defining rules and norms – also language norms (Erdocia, Migge, & Schneider 2025). The nation is no independent entity (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2003, Bauman Reference Bauman2012: ch. 1) and national elites’ power to define discourse, in public and institutional settings, is no longer able to construct a hegemonic way of seeing and constructing the world. According to Bauman (Reference Bauman2012), we thus find a division of power between national public political actors and private economic actors. The latter typically act beyond national boundaries. This division of power is characteristic of what Bauman calls liquid modernity, and it results in a situation where different discourses of power and thus different discourses of truth – and different ways of constructing the ‘right’ language – exist simultaneously. The essential liquidity of language categories comes to the fore, and for liquids, as Bauman reminds us (Reference Bauman2012: 2; see also Chapter 1), ‘it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but “for a moment’”. This implies that the development and reproduction of focused, stable, and territorially defined language norms become rather unlikely. It does not mean, however, that power differentials, sociolinguistic hierarchies, and normative ideologies disappear.
Global, non-hegemonic power relations, with their effects of liquefying categories and norms, are co-produced by changing material language practices in digital technologies. Cultures of literacy become visible in their historical specificity. Normalised linear writing and epistemologies that construct language as a territorially based systemic entity are no longer as naturalised as they once were (Tagg Reference Tagg2015). Concepts and practices of national standard languages appear as a culturally specific, non-universal, European provincialism (Chakrabarti Reference Chakrabarti2000). Understanding these as producing ‘normal’ languages (as in e.g. McWhorter Reference McWhorter2001) is based on limited epistemologies that take Western cultural practices as unquestioned, universal norms, which reproduces problematic colonial biases. This does not necessarily imply that languages as categories will disappear as constructs for establishing social order. How languages are constructed in post-national cultures of digital capitalism, and which social structures they index, will be an important area of future sociolinguistics.
In conclusion, as we can learn from studying the language culture of Belize and other postcolonial nations, language is not a phenomenon that can be understood by only looking at grammatical structures as indicative of cognitive structures in the brain. Rather, it is an interactive process whose study must include the analysis of cultural concepts and material practices. Language cannot be understood without an analysis of the cultural, material, and epistemological context in which it is embedded. Cultural materialist studies of language thus deconstruct Western language ideologies that have ignored the interactive, bodily, multimodal foundations of language and that have created social exclusion, based on the ability to conform to ideals of systematicity. They are part of the decolonial endeavour and will be important for understanding diversity and power hierarchies in global language cultures.
