In this chapter, I introduce the voices of Belizean multilingual speakers, focusing on how they construct social belonging by means of language. In order to make local knowledge, in this case the discourses of belonging that prevail in the village, accessible, I start by ‘zooming in’ on the life of the village and present impressions from the visual linguistic landscape.

6.1 Approaching the Island: Linguistic Landscapes and the Tourist Gaze

To follow my path as a non-local researcher, I start with what visitors see on arrival, which tells us something about how the villagers construct language belonging visually. The more touristy part of the island is very busy during the daytime and displays an abundance of public signage, most of which is advertising and information for tourists. English is clearly the most visible resource in this part of the village. Official public signage, such as information from the village council, is written in English. Most shop signs and promotions for the consumption of products are also in English.

A number of signs and shop or hotel names make use of linguistic features that index the use of Kriol. For example, one of the dive shops is called Anda De Wata Tours. An English translation would be ‘Under the Water Tours’. This is presented in eye dialect, using letters that are suggestive of typical Kriol pronunciation. Most prominently, stops are substituted for interdental fricatives (<d> for <th>), and non-rhoticity is expressed by the omission of ‘r’ and the lowering of central vowels at the end of words (<a> instead of <er>). This is not used consistently, as Tours does not represent non-rhoticity.Footnote ¹ The use of Kriol features in the linguistic landscape of the village is not dominant but nonetheless frequent. This may be a marketing strategy intended for tourists, aimed at distinguishing local Belizean entrepreneurs from English-speaking elites, and from people who are regarded as foreign, that is, villagers of non-local Hispanic, North American, European, or Chinese descent. The latter have opened a number of businesses, hotels, and restaurants. Kriol indexes being ‘really’ from Belize, even though business owners of non-Belizean or non-Creole heritage may use language features, colours, flags, or symbols that relate to Creole culture. The graphic representation of phonetic features that index the use of Kriol is part of the construction of local authenticity (on commodification of authenticity, see Heller, Jaworski, & Thurlow (Reference Heller, Jaworski and Thurlow2014)). The fact that these linguistic features are accessible to speakers of internationally recognised Standard English, and that some features are still spelled in Standard English, shows that these uses are often directed at tourists. It can be assumed that, even though the locals are typically not targets of tourism sales strategies, these Kriol forms are also meaningful to the local village population and that such practices may increase the status of the language.

Maya lexical items are also found in the linguistic landscape of the island but much less frequently. These are typically names of products, locations, or restaurants; they are easy to interpret. The most popular Maya word in Belize is the name of the local beer brand called Belikin (‘route to the east’, see also www.belikin.com). References to Maya culture are popular in Belize; they help reconstruct historical ties that have little political currency in contemporary society. Maya people represent a demographic minority and do not actually make claims to political power at the national level. The historically troublesome relationship between Creole and Hispanic people in Belize (see Chapter 5) is untouched by references to Maya culture, as no one denies the historical presence of Maya people on the territory that is today Belize. Besides, the traits of Maya culture, particularly the ruins of Maya cities, attract a large number of tourists.Footnote ²

To an outsider, it is not obvious that for a long time the island has been inhabited predominantly by Spanish and Yucatec speakers (see Section 5.2). There is almost nothing in the linguistic landscape that makes reference to this history, with the exception of some Spanish hotel names, some street names, food items on restaurant menus (which often include, for example, tacos, ceviche, quesadillas), the name of the local Catholic church, and some non-tourist restaurants in less touristy parts of the island. When I arrived in 2015, I knew that, statistically, Spanish was the demographically dominant language in Belize. I was not, however, aware that until the 1970s, Kriol had not been part of the common linguistic repertoire of this particular island that is located in the Belize District, in which the Creole population is dominant (Statistical Institute of Belize 2011). It is rather close to Belize City, where Kriol is the most dominant language. I had not had access to the scarce written resources that give insight into the local history of the island before arriving. It was only afterwards that I realised that the ‘original’ non-indigenous population had been Hispanic/Yucatec. I had mistakenly associated the Spanish signage with immigrants. A tourist map of the island that I found in January 2015 was the first written statement from which I learned that the original permanent settlement consisted of people of mixed Spanish and Mayan descent. Largely because the dominant discourse presents English as ‘correct’ and Kriol as ‘Belizean’, and because of the way this plays out in the linguistic landscape of the village, there are no Yucatec and only few Spanish written signs. The fact that Spanish and Yucatec were the dominant (and perhaps the only) language resources used until the 1960s (Gomoll Reference Gomoll2003) has thus been discursively and visually erased. In contrast, English and Kriol are the languages represented most often and most prominently. This erasure is also evident in my interview data, which I discuss in the following sections, in which the specific and multiple indexical meanings attached to each language are introduced.

6.2 Constructing National and Local Belonging through Kriol

Based on widespread national language ideologies that suggest that nations have ‘their’ language (see Section 2.1) and with Creoles as the socially dominant group, Kriol functions as an index for national Belizean belonging (see Le Page & Tabouret-Keller Reference Le Page and Tabouret-Keller1985 and Chapter 5). Thus, in my interview data analysis, the analytical code Kriol is Belizean/is our common ground is the one with the second-largest number of items in the interview data (63 in total), while closely related codes, with slightly different meanings (Kriol is popular, Kriol is our native language) also appear frequently (47 and 24 items respectively).Footnote ³ Reference to Kriol as positively indexing belonging is the most common topic in the data set.

Despite the particular history of the island, in which Spanish and Yucatec speakers once formed the elite class, Kriol is not only constructed as the national and therefore also local variety in linguistic landscapes directed at tourists. The following quote from an interview with a middle-aged male consultant (of Hispanic descent) is a typical example of how Kriol is constructed as indexing national belonging. He had grown up on the island and was, at the time of the interview, a faculty member at a university in Belize. In this passage, I had asked him whether the fact that Belizeans allegedly seldom use Spanish when they travel to Mexico had something to do with the political relations of Belize with surrounding nations, especially Guatemala. Denying this, the interviewee argued:

In Excerpt 6.1, there is first hesitation, indicated by the repetitive use of the first word of the sentence. The denial of political friction in relation to cultural belonging is common in my data set where interviewees often strictly deny that there are cultural or political conflicts in Belize, for example between Creoles and Hispanics, or between local people and tourists or expats. The term conviviality (Pennycook & Otsuji Reference Pennycook and Otsuji2015: 96), the peaceful coexistence of people of diverse cultural backgrounds, came to my mind various times during the data collection, where I documented a discourse that promoted the idea that there are no ethnic or social rivalries in Belize and that everyone belongs. To me, this discourse appeared to have the purpose of rendering invisible economic and political inequalities that clearly exist, and it is, in this sense, a middle-class discourse that hides class inequality and racist ideologies. At the same time, such a discourse of conviviality may have important functions in the production of solidarity and a common identity in a context of diversity.

The production of a common and national identity is explicitly linked to language in Excerpt 6.1: ‘it’s something Belizean’. The use of Kriol is constructed as essentially tied to the nation of Belize and to national identity. Later, in line 15, the term ‘Belizean identity’ is used to underscore the ideology. The interviewee mentions ‘pride’ in this context, which is typically associated with national sentiment. It is also noteworthy that he reports that he used the language when living abroad. Even though he is very competent in Standard English, which carries more formal prestige, he describes a desire to distinguish himself from speakers of US English, feeling proud to index his national identity linguistically. The interviewee’s emotional ties to Kriol did not stem from his early socialisation as he had grown up on the island with parents whose dominant language was Spanish. His family and given names are Spanish. Nevertheless, he claims Kriol to be his first language. This is not an untypical language biography in the context of ongoing language shift; it gives insight into how national linguistic homogenisation may occur. Kriol has gained the place of an index of national belonging and therefore impacts language choices of individuals. Note, however, that some of the linguistic features in Excerpt 6.1 may reflect influence from Spanish. A zero-preposition structure in line 12 – ‘I was very proud speaking Kriol language’ – is common in Spanish morphosyntax. Also, the use of the article in front of a language name ‘we prefer the Kriol’ (line 13) reminds us of colloquial uses of Spanish where articles can appear before language names (see Chapter 9 for more examples).

On the one hand, the function of Kriol as an index of national belonging is based on the national history of Belize, with Creole people having played a dominant political and cultural role. On the other hand, Kriol is regarded as the lingua franca of a culturally diverse Belize. In my data, Kriol is often described as unrelated to ethnic Creole background. Some of the interviewees use the term ‘the creole Creoles’ in reference to Afro-European Belizeans from the Belize district. The need to distinguish a multi-ethnic concept of Creole from the creole Creoles relates to the fact that the language Kriol has developed an indexical function that constructs national identity beyond mono-ethnic conceptualisations, in favour of cultural diversity.Footnote ⁵

In Excerpt 6.2, a diving teacher from the island shows that the term Creole in Belize can be associated with a multi-ethnic population.

The male, middle-aged villager, who is a strong supporter of the use of Kriol also in formal domains, presents two different interpretations of the term Creole. These are related to race constructions and the racial–religious category of Rastafarian. At the same time, it also displays an inclusive ideology according to which Mestizos, in the sense of ethnically ‘mixed’, are included in the category Creole. Note also the juxtaposition of Rastafarians as ‘full creole’ (line 4) with the sentence below it, ‘Creole is not just Black’ (line 5), does not involve a conjunction that expresses a contrast (such as but). This may be the outcome of community-specific discourse patterns.

The idea that the notion of Creole includes people of mixed Maya, Hispanic, and Mestizo descent is not uncontested. For example, the claim that Afro-European Creoles are the ‘real, authentic’ Belizeans also occurs in some of the quantitatively oriented interviews on language use across domains. However, at least in my data set, the latter voices are not frequent. This may have to do with the fact that the majority of local families have a mixed ethnic heritage and Mestizos are strongly represented. The semantic variability of the term Creole – as meaning either ‘Black’ or ‘racially/ethnically mixed people’ – has a long history. (See Mühleisen (Reference Mühleisen2002) for a historical development of the term; see also Schneider (Reference Schneider2017c) for a more detailed discussion.) Its different readings may be a consequence of discourses of conviviality, as speakers can interpret Creole as suggesting ethnic integration, thus erasing ethnic differences.

The multiplicity of possible semantic interpretations of the term Creole is of theoretical interest as it evokes Derrida’s concept of différance and his critique of Western logocentrism that regards words as having unambiguous meanings (Derrida [1991] Reference Derrida, du Gay, Evans and Redman2000). The use of the term Creole/creole is reminiscent of Derrida’s position in that, in a nutshell, meaning is not immutable; it is always shifting, based on a play of differences where ‘real’ meaning is constantly deferred (hence the pun on différance, a portmanteau of the verbs for differ and defer). A homogeneous and monolithic conceptualisation of the relationships between the signifier Creole and a particular social or linguistic concept, as is typical in Western language ideologies, is not evident in Belize. The distinction between creole, Creole, and Kriol that I use in this book may be accused of being a form of Western appropriation, as I reintroduce distinctions that aim to represent social and linguistic partitions that I am concurrently constructing. I use the terminology out of convenience, in keeping with some tradition in the creolistics literature. The reader should keep in mind that the use of the signifier in many real-life settings relates to a complex of interrelated ideas.

Based on the fact that Kriol is not considered as the language of Creoles (alone) and can be appropriated by non-Creoles, the language is highly popular and enthusiastically used by the majority of people who have grown up in Belize. The discourse on Creole and Kriol has opened a space where ethnic heritage does not necessarily indicate linguistic alignment but where the term Kriol can index a multi-ethnic kind of national belonging. One of the interviewees, a local Kriol language activist, argues, for example, that

The statement was confirmed by my own observations and other data. For example, the pupils I met in a high school strongly identify with Kriol, even though most of them declare Mestizo as their ethnic background. In the data that I collected on language use across domains, they strongly favoured Kriol when speaking among themselves (see Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Most frequently used languages among friends (high school pupils only) (n=60)

Note that Figure 6.1 does not explain which linguistic practices are meant by English, Kriol, and Spanish, respectively. There is a considerable overlap in terms of lexicon and syntax between especially Kriol and English, and it is often impossible to tell them apart (Decker Reference Decker2013). Nonetheless, Figure 6.1 demonstrates the popularity of Kriol.

Consequently, people who are clearly not part of the Kriol-speaking community and who may not actually want to associate with the ethnic community of Creoles may also use the language strategically. This is, for example, the case with Kriol usage by Belizean Mennonite farmers who sell their chicken with a Kriol slogan. The largest poultry production company of Belize is owned by them. As a community, they speak a variety of German and live isolated from all other Belizeans in the west of Belize. Their religious beliefs keep them from mixing with people of different cultural backgrounds. Yet, the slogan with which they sell their products is in Kriol: Dis da fi wi chikin (www.qualitypoultryproducts.com (date of access 16 February 2022)). The slogan is widespread in the linguistic landscape and in supermarkets all over Belize. Its producers construct Kriol as the language of Belizeans and have identified the linguistic resources of Kriol as a strategy to increase their sales. Kriol is directed at the local population, as poultry is not a product that is typically bought by tourists. The Kriol features may not be immediately understood by those who speak only English, because the syntactic structure of the sentence, meaning ‘This [is] our chicken’, is clearly different from English. In Kriol, the marker da functions as a copula and the preposition fi ‘for’ is used as possessive constructions; thus, fi wi means ‘for us’ or ‘our’. Tourist-directed Kriol representations are more aligned with English, but comparable to this, the chicken slogan also aims at visually representing Kriol sounds. The word ‘this’ is represented with a stop at the beginning and the locally strongly fronted nature of front vowels (an influence from Spanish and/or African languages) is represented through <i> where English would use <e> (e.g. we – wi). The use of Kriol to promote poultry among the local population suggests that Kriol functions as an index for national belonging, to which most Belizeans adhere, irrespective of their ethnic background.

The discourse of Kriol as the language of a culturally diverse nation is dominant and widespread in the village; it is actually also attested in other places in the country. This is so despite the fact that many villages and towns host only a minority of Kriol speakers, which sometimes leads to paradoxical interview statements. Excerpt 6.4 is from an interview with the owner of the largest publishing house in Belize, who does not reside in the village. She is in favour of using Kriol as a written language and argues:

The interviewee is of European descent and speaks English, Spanish and Catalan, has been living in Belize for more than two decades and constructs herself as Belizean in saying that Kriol is ‘our’ language. The use of the pronoun shows that she considers herself to be part of the national community of Belizeans and this community has Kriol as its language. At the same time, she explains that she is not able to speak it, as it is not a language that is used in her daily environment in a village in western Belize. Her use of no as question tag is typical of Spanish. Nevertheless, she later confirms the centrality of Kriol to being Belizean, slightly contradicting her previous claims:

The paradoxical nature of her statements is characteristic of the overall Belizean sociolinguistic economy, in which language ideologies and language practice are not necessarily consistent and ideological alignment with particular languages can imply linguistic competence and everyday practice in these – but need not be interpreted this way.

To sum up, Kriol functions as an index of national belonging in the culturally diverse Belize. It is considered the language of Belize. There is a ‘close relationship between language and the social structuring of space’ (Gao & Park Reference Gao and Park2015: 80), and there is a discourse that constructs Kriol as the language of the place Belize. However, in many local places and for many people, Kriol may not be part of actual practice, so it is not a demographic majority that constructs Kriol via practice; it is in discourse about Belize that Kriol is constructed as the language of the place or the local language.Footnote ⁶ Clearly, this may affect language practice. Kriol is used increasingly in areas where Spanish was dominant before (as documented in my data set, see also Balam (Reference Balam2013)). This appears to bring prestige to Kriol (a topic to which I return in Chapter 7). Finally, this also impacts a movement that aims at making Kriol a written language, in other words, at giving Kriol a more solid material reality (Chapter 8).

However, Kriol is not only regarded as a marker of national belonging but also has indexical functions on a smaller scale. In the context of the village, the continuous influx of tourists and the emergence of a category of ‘White’ residents implies that Kriol also functions as an index of local belonging. Kriol has become an in-group language for the ethnically diverse villagers, as it can hardly be acquired without living in Belize or in a Belizean family, given that almost no written resources or books and no language classes exist. Locally, to be able to speak Kriol serves as a way of marking a boundary towards tourists and residents without Belizean heritage. These are generally regarded as foreigners and, in the majority of cases, have at least some financial resources to either simply enjoy island life after buying a beach-front house, or to profit from the tourism industry by managing restaurants or hotels. The divide between the Kriol-speaking locals and the English-speaking locals and non-locals shows some parallels to Labov’s (Reference Labov1963) study of Martha’s Vineyard. In this early study, it was shown that differences from the mainstream pronunciations of English became more marked in those parts of the population that saw an economically inspired need to distinguish themselves from newcomers. Recall that the locals avoid using Kriol in the presence of non-locals. The local tourism economy seems to re-enforce the function of Kriol as an index of ‘authentic’Footnote ⁷ belonging. This contributes to a shift of local speakers from Spanish to Kriol, although the Hispanic population used to be the majority. The apparent desire to use Kriol only among and in the presence of other Kriol speakers, and to not have it recorded or analysed, can be interpreted as an important function of Kriol in indexing a separate in-group in the local context.

At the same time, due to Belize’s transnational ties, Kriol’s indexical functions also reflect language ideology discourses that extend beyond national boundaries. This transnational space relates Belizean Kriol to a wider population of creole speakers, in which constructions of race become relevant. This is the focus of the Section 6.3.

6.3 Kriol’s Racial and Transnational Indexicalities

Besides Kriol’s function as an index of national belonging, its indexicalities intersect with racial constructions of identity. Due to its association with the history of slavery, it is also tied to people who are (partially) of African descent. That this can be part of positive constructions of belonging can be inferred from the following quote, where race is constructed as a central social category. Colonial racist discourse is still active in categorising people on the grounds of skin colour and in defining ‘White’ as a special non-local category. In the multi-ethnic context of Belize, family background is not necessarily central in attributing the categories of White or Black. Thus, it was reported to me that siblings of the same family may declare having different racial identities, partly based on their individual social orientations, partly on their skin complexion. While darker skin tones are, on the one hand, stigmatised (e.g. with the Spanish term Negrito), being ‘White’ is often interpreted as not being Belizean, irrespective of how long one’s ancestors have resided in the country.

Excerpt 6.6 is from an interview with a young female village resident whose skin colour is rather white, which is not too uncommon in Belize. She grew up in Belize City and attended an elite high school founded by US nuns; her repertoire therefore includes Kriol and English with an American accent. As Kriol is linked to racial constructs developed during colonialism, only a non-White skin colour is reported here to be associated with it. In Excerpt 6.6 ‘being white’ is not associated with British colonists but with tourists. Besides demonstrating that Kriol is linked to national identity (‘And I was like “I’m Belizean”!’), the quote shows that the multicultural ideologies of Belize do not necessarily include Belizeans with White phenotypes. Consequently, such Belizeans need to prove their local belonging. One way to do this is by means of language: if you don’t use Kriol, you are ‘automatically a tourist’. The emic racial category Spanish that is used above subsumes Hispanic people, irrespective of nationality; it includes Belizeans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and others. It can have negative or even derogatory connotations (see also Section 6.4), but is associated here with potential Belizean belonging.

The racial indexicalities of Kriol become apparent in a later quote from the same interview, where the interviewee reports her experiences in the (non-elite) primary school in Belize City she attended.

This interviewee attended a primary school in Belize City where the Creole population was dominant. The situation is different on the island, where there is a larger number of Mestizo and lighter-skinned inhabitants. It is, however, safe to say that even on the island Kriol is linked to constructions of race. The interviewee reports using Kriol to demonstrate legitimate belonging to Belize, which indicates how racial and national categorisations intersect in the local context.

While racial associations with Kriol exist within the national context of Belize, they also link the language to a transnational cultural sphere of Black culture that extends from South America and the Caribbean to North America, and spreads across the Atlantic (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993). Even though other creole languages are not used in Belize, the interviewees are aware of the fact that creole languages exist in other countries and sometimes associate the term with a transnational community of creole speakers. Jamaica is worth mentioning in this cultural sphere. Its music is very popular in Belize (for instance on the radio station www.krembz.com) and pupils declared to me that Jamaican creole influences their language practices. Given the small size of the country, few musicians in Belize reach beyond local confines. Besides Garifuna musicians,Footnote ⁸ reggae musicians enjoy prestige and popularity and show very obvious links to Jamaican/transnational reggae culture. For example, Ras Indio is a popular Belizean Reggae musician who demonstrates his fondness for Jamaican Creole by using phrases like Jah man or by using Dread Talk in his songs (e.g. I and I instead of we, see Pollard (Reference Pollard2000) on Dread Talk). Ras Indio often presents himself wearing the colours of Rastafarianism: red, yellow, and green. In line with Rastafarianism (Price Reference Price2009), he evokes a transnational, Afro space and reports on his visits to Ethiopia (https://archive.channel5belize.com/archives/84748 (date of access 07 May 2025)). Such practices contribute to a construction of Black people as forming a transnational cultural community with a common history.

The awareness that creole languages are attested across the Caribbean and beyond adds to the semantic multiplicity of the term creole. In Excerpt 6.8, I asked a citizen of the village who strongly supports the use of Kriol in schools which kind of Kriol he would suggest for official usage. My question was actually intended to inquire about the internal variation of the language, as Kriol differs across Belize (see Salmon & Menjívar (Reference Salmon and Menjívar2014) on Belizean varieties of Kriol) and may be influenced by Spanish in some places. Yet, this interviewee interpreted the question as referring to nationally based variations among creole languages. Based on his response, we can clearly infer that there is an assumption of creole language culture as a transnational phenomenon:

The fact that creole is understood as a hypernym with several national hyponyms becomes apparent in Excerpt 6.8 and the interviewee takes some time to explain to me that there are different kinds of creole language. He considers the language practices of the place of his upbringing – Belize City – to be the legitimate variety of language for the nation of Belize. A link between place and language is made on the national level but the quote also understands the variety of the largest city of the country to be superior.

Some interviewees have quite accurate knowledge of differences among creoles, as in Excerpt 6.9 from an interview with a local teacher who is also a language activist. He is generally interested in language and in linguistic features, which shows in his descriptions of different creole languages.

Like in Excerpt 6.8, the interviewee thinks the term creole encompasses language practices of other Caribbean nations. He aims for a scientific description of linguistic features in talking about stresses on syllables and about the Trinidadian ‘twang’, which he assumes to be an influence of ‘Indian’ ways of speaking. These comments suggest a transnational category of creole, where creole is a superordinate term for different national varieties, which actually mirrors linguists’ discourse on creole languages. In some data, this transnational conceptualisation of creole includes language uses in North America. The poster in Figure 6.2 below is an outcome of group work I encouraged in a high school class while I worked as a substitute teacher. I asked pupils of Form 1 (ages 12–14) to design a poster on one of the languages spoken in Belize (for an analysis of all posters, see Schneider (Reference Schneider2021a)). In this example, pupils decided to focus on Kriol.

Figure 6.2 Pupils’ poster on Kriol (copyright: B. Schneider and pupils)

First, it is interesting to note that the spelling that has been suggested by the National Kriol Council – Kriol – is not found in Figure 6.2. When I asked about this, all pupils agreed that they did not like the spelling with ‘k’. One pupil argued that they did not like it because it was too different from English, which he rejected, because he regarded the connection of Kriol to English to be something positive. The poster evokes local identification by the words Go slow, which is the village’s semi-official slogan. The image depicts the national dish, rice and beans with chicken, which indexes national Creole culture but also relates to transnational creole culture, as rice and beans are common in many places throughout the Caribbean. We find an indexical link between language and nation expressed verbally: ‘Belizeans use the language, we speak it everywhere and everytime’. The use of Kriol linguistic features in the sentences Creole Da Di Best we gat everything fa Dis (‘Creole is the best, we have everything from this’) and Caz we Dope like dat!!! (‘Because we dope [do it?] like that!’) show competence in Kriol. We find a mix of English and Kriol spelling conventions (everything vs dis), while small and capital spelling is irregular, which is common in Belize, also in formal writing.

Content-wise, the sentences may be interpreted as expressing strong personal affiliations with the language, as in the sentence ‘People should know that the language is the people’s culture’. It was surprising to me that the pupils also mentioned that ‘It might be spoken in the USA, and in L.A.’. Clearly, the (to a certain extent covert) prestige of the language is enhanced by saying that it is also spoken in the place that traditionally functions as a host for many Belizean emigrants (Straughan Reference Straughan2017) and that it is typically regarded as ‘leading’ in terms of politics and popular culture. Locally, transnational ties to the United States, and to L.A. in particular, are very established through media and transnational family ties; more than 90 per cent of the pupils in this high school have relatives in the United States. It is not entirely clear whether the pupils refer to Belizean Kriol or to African American Vernacular English, and a general notion of ‘Black English’ at the same time. In any case, the poster indicates that, for them, Kriol expresses belonging in a transnational cultural sphere.

To summarise the indexical functions of Kriol in relation to constructions of belonging, I depict the overlapping indexical meanings visually in Figure 6.3.

Figure 6.3 Kriol and indexical ties to constructions of belonging (the width of arrows correlates with prominence in the discourses)

Figure 6.3Long description

A poster is titled Creole Go Slow. It has the text that reads as follows. Belizeans use the language. We use it everywhere and every time, It might be spoken in the U S A and L A. People should know that language is the people's culture. It has a blurred photo on the right. Some text is written in a foreign language.

6.4 Constructing Non-Belonging: Spanish as a Threat

Despite the stable role of Kriol as indexing local, national, and transnational belonging, there is also a parallel discourse on Kriol as an endangered language. It is a minority language in the overall region of Central America, and the perception that it is endangered stems from the growing presence of Hispanic immigrants in Belize. In Excerpt 6.10, a young female villager had previously elaborated on the history of immigration from Hispanic countries to Belize, which apparently has been encouraged by some Belizean politicians who sold passports to migrants in exchange for money and the promise to vote for them.Footnote ⁹ The interviewee then argues that immigration and language loss go hand in hand:

An anti-immigrant discourse, similar to those in many states all over the world, is brought in line here with the fear of losing Kriol and also with a criticism of politicians who, according to the interviewee, are responsible for Belize now being ‘filled with immigrants’.Footnote ¹⁰ The quote is also interesting language-wise: some features are stereotypically associated with colloquial US English, such as the use of like in line 1 and of High Rise Terminal in line 3 (‘nów’). The consultant sees Spanish, but not English, as a ‘threat’ to Kriol, even though her own language practices display US phonetic features and colloquialisms. English is generally not constructed as a threat to Kriol, although, as the official language, it is by far the most dominant variety in formal and official domains. The construction of Spanish as a threat to Kriol is politically loaded and is related to the troublesome bilateral relationships of Belize and Guatemala (see Chapter 5), and to the fact that Belize is the only country in Central America that has English as an official language. Negative attitudes towards Spanish are widespread, as vividly expressed in Excerpt 6.11 from an interview with a male village resident who grew up in Belize City.

The stress on the word ‘Spanish’ reflects the strong anti-‘Spanish’ sentiments. We also learn that the term seems to function as an insult in some contexts. Spanish here indexes the opposite of belonging.

During the collection of the data on language use across domains (see Section 4.1), several people stated that Spanish was a language of ‘foreigners’. These included Creoles who had come to the island for work purposes, especially in the fishing industry and tourism. On the other hand, the national discourse on Kriol as the language of Belize is so dominant that even people whose families have resided on the island for several generations and who had traditionally used Spanish at home often mentioned Kriol first when asked what language they used at home. Consider the following excerpt from my field notes, which I recorded at the beginning of my stay.

Positive attitudes towards British colonial history and English, as suggested in this note, appear to be related to the negative indexical function of Spanish. Spanish is associated here with foreignness, especially immigrants, who are referred to as ‘alien’ and assigned to an all-Hispanic ethnic category. It surprised me that one of the interviewees actually seemed comfortable in stating later in the same conversation that Spanish was his first and home language. This shows that for some people ethnic affiliation need not be linked to language affiliation, especially in contexts where many different discourses compete with each other.

I can only speculate to what extent negative attitudes towards Spanish and its construction as ‘foreign’ impact actual language practice. Some discourses establish a direct link between linguistic discrimination and language shift, as in Excerpt 6.12 from an interview with a Spanish teacher who grew up in a Spanish-dominant region of Belize. The interviewee reports on experiences of exclusion that involves the emic term Pania, a derogative term, derived from the word Spaniard, and suggests that these are causing people to shift from Spanish to Kriol – ‘I rather speak Kriol’. The literature on language shift usually uses the term shift to refer to a shift from an immigrant language to that of the host country or from a minority language to a dominant one (Fishman Reference Fishman1991, Hamel Reference Hamel1997). Spanish is not a numerical minority language in Belize, and only in some cases is it associated with (recent) immigration. Still, at least in my data set, many people aimed to create a discursive distance to the Spanish language and the Spanish (as a group).

The fact that speakers describe language shift away from Spanish towards Kriol and English, even in a situation where Spanish is a demographically dominant language and is the home language of the local elite, shows that language ideological discourse should not be underestimated as impacting on language practice. Language ideologies therefore have to be considered as crucial in the emergence of languages and homogeneous language practices (see Section 2.1). As mentioned in Chapter 2, in older linguistic studies of Belizean Kriol, the lack of interference from Spanish has been commented upon: ‘Considering the number of Spanish speakers in Belize, however, it is surprising that the BC [Belizean Kriol] grammar should not contain a more considerable portion of Hispanisms’ (Hellinger Reference Hellinger1973: 134). It is indeed surprising how little lexical overlap there also is between Kriol and Spanish, even though I have found various instances in the interview data where Spanish sentence structures seem to have an effect on public English (see Chapter 9).

Another phenomenon that I observed in this context is that linguistic practices that I, as a European observer, would clearly identify as Spanish were not necessarily considered to be so by the locals. I also often heard people speak Spanish while they had told me previously that they were unable to speak it. This was particularly apparent in the kindergarten context, where, during the months of my field stay, I heard more and more Spanish in conversations among mothers, even though the kindergarten teacher had insisted in the beginning that Spanish was not spoken in the environment. When I had asked about language practices in kindergarten in the beginning, the teacher had said that Spanish was only used by immigrant children and their mothers. I was unsure about how to deal with these events, as it seemed inappropriate to suspect interviewees of having lied to me or to suggest that their knowledge of linguistic repertoires, concerning what counts as Spanish and what not, would be distorted. One interviewee of non-local, European descent reported similar experiences.

The anecdote is very similar to my own observations; and I wondered whether we could attribute the denial to be proficient in Spanish entirely to the language ideological discourse of ‘Spanish is a threat’ or ‘is not Belizean’. Or, as the interviewee above suggests, should we consider the contradiction between statements and practice as an ‘identity issue’? While the political–ideological level is certainly central, the denial of using Spanish may also be based on a construction of Spanish as a formal variety that all pupils (irrespective of whether or not they speak Spanish at home) learn at school. Spanish is taught in Belizean schools as a foreign language and, as is typical for the study of foreign languages, grammatical patterns like verb conjugations are an important element. In terms of language ideologies, it is, of course, revealing that Spanish is taught as a foreign language in the Belizean school system. Second, for many, this form of language education represents the only formal grammatical language training in school they ever receive. Neither English nor Kriol are taught in this type of explicit language and grammar instruction. Kriol has no official place in institutional education, and English is the medium of instruction, typically without formal support as teachers expect pupils to know English, irrespective of actual competence. Thus, apart from some English classes that may treat aspects of grammar, Spanish is the only subject in which grammatical patterns are systematically and frequently taught. This may add to a feeling that Spanish is a formal and complicated language that requires formal training in order to, for example, memorise verb conjugations. So potentially, speakers may not consider the Spanish used in informal settings to represent the language. As a matter of fact, some interviewees use the term Kitchen Spanish to refer to the variety of Spanish that is particular for Belize. It is telling that the term has negative, lower-class, and also gendered connotations. This conceptualisation of Belizean ways of speaking Spanish may explain the phenomenon of interviewees claiming to be unable to speak Spanish.

It is fascinating to learn that, despite the anti-Spanish discourse that I have illustrated in this section, many interviewees nevertheless do describe Spanish as a language that is spoken in Belize – even though it is usually not constructed as a Belizean language.

6.5 Spanish as Home Language

As stated above, language ideological discourse and language practice are not necessarily coextensive. We have seen anti-Spanish sentiments that are expressed in discourses in interviews. At the same time, the analytical code I named Spanish is a home language/Spanish is spoken is the code with the largest number of items (65) in the data set, also due to the fact that I did not subdivide the code further (see also Section 6.2, n. 3). In interviews, many report that they used Spanish when they were children, or that their parents, other relatives, or neighbours did. The idea that Spanish is a foreign language and a threat to Kriol, or that local uses of Spanish are not perceived as Spanish does not mean that all speakers of Spanish feel that they have to deny using it. Like the poster in Figure 6.2, Figure 6.4 was created by Form 1 students. The group chose Spanish as one of the languages spoken in Belize.

Figure 6.4 Pupils’ poster – Spanish in my house (copyright: B. Schneider and pupils)

A central paradox in this poster is the declaration that Spanish is, first, a language that is ‘mostly spoken in Guatemala’, Belize’s ‘arch-enemy’ (see Chapter 5). At the same time, it is presented as the language the students use at home and with their friends. The family is described not only as using Spanish but also as using it ‘in my house’ (the use of singular forms may be accidental or shows that only one student actually performed the task). The association of Spanish as a private language not used in the public sphere comes to the fore. There are no linguistic strategies on the poster that would suggest that Spanish can express belonging to the local or national community (our language, the language of X). Spanish is territorially attributed to Guatemala and historically to Spain, even though it is described as being in use in private settings.

The transnational nature of Spanish, associated with Mestizo culture, is apparent in the image that has been drawn on the poster. It depicts a food item, corn tortillas, which is locally associated with Hispanic culture. The table on which the tortillas are placed is a reference to the indigenous way of cooking corn tortillas in the Central American region, on an iron plate heated by the flame under it. The tradition goes back to the precolonial era. For the pupils, there is a cultural link between Spanish and the indigenous food culture.

Overall, there are few instances in my data set in which Spanish is associated with the local community. In this respect, Excerpt 6.14 from an interview with a primary school teacher is striking. Like others above, it displays a contrast between the language ideology discourse and language practice, suggesting incidentally that Spanish also indexes belonging in the village community:

The school encourages the use of Spanish for utilitarian reasons: ‘Spanish is becoming an asset now’. Indeed, a lot of job ads in local newspapers require knowledge of English and Spanish, and this is also important in the tourism industry, because there is an increasing number of Spanish-speaking visitors from countries like Mexico, the USA, or Argentina. The fact that ‘neighbouring countries’ use Spanish is also cited as a reason why children should learn Spanish, without clarifying further why it would be advantageous to them. She creates a position of distance towards Spanish by referring to it with the determiner that: ‘we have that Spanish’. She also says that the children are ‘shy of speaking it’ but that they do understand it, because, as she finally recognises, the village is ‘a Spanish community’. The apparent paradox of describing Spanish as a language of the neighbouring countries but, at the same time, saying that the local village is a Spanish community reflects the sometimes contradictory discourses of the setting where national, transnational, and local histories have brought about different indexical associations with the coexistent languages. Note that the interviewee grew up on the island with Spanish-speaking parents and was aware of the history of the village, which includes Spanish–Yucatec residents.

The construction of Spanish as indexing local belonging can also be inferred from the names that have been given to streets and paths on the island within the last decade. Some of the street names in the village include:

Some of the street names are English while others are Spanish. Given the anti-Spanish sentiments that I had recorded, I was surprised to see the latter names, even though they are rarely used in everyday communication. The streets were so named between 2006 and 2014, and most inhabitants still use the names that were used before that, when only the largest streets carried names, which were (and are) Front Street, Middle Street, Back Street. I asked some of the members of the village council committee responsible for the choice of the names about why some of them were partly Spanish. No one found this fact extraordinary, and they responded that it was ‘because of history’. Several members of the village council are descendants of the Hispanic-Yucatec people who bought the island in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹

In order to represent the forms of alignment with Spanish, the visual depiction in Figure 6.5 below shows the overall indexical field that emerges from the discourses on Spanish and belonging in the village. The simultaneous presence of anti-immigrant, anti-Guatemalan, and anti-Spanish discourses, of a local Hispanic elite, and Hispanic poor immigrants, as well as the increasing importance of Spanish on the job market, contribute to a complex cultural context in which ‘this-as-well-as-that’ cultural logics (Beck, Bonss, & Lau Reference Beck, Bonss and Lau2003) emerge. These may be typical of contexts in which national discourses, which create an image of the world as consisting of clear-cut ‘either–or’ social and linguistic categories, are not hegemonic. While we can assume that settings like Belize may have always been characterised by ‘this-as-well-as-that’ discourses, we may learn from these observations also for Western contexts, where, nowadays, discourses from different settings meet through communication technologies that facilitate increasing discursive complexity. ‘Either-or’ myths from times of nationalism thus dissolve in Western settings, making new perspectives on diversity and liquidity possible. It is not surprising that ‘this-as-well-as-that’ realities, with conflicting and ambivalent indexical associations, are also evident regarding discourses that construct the English language. I discuss this in Section 6.6.

Figure 6.5 Spanish and indexical ties to constructions of belonging (the width of arrows correlates with prominence in the discourses)

Figure 6.5Long description

A poster is titled Spanish, with the handwritten text that reads as follows. Spanish is mostly spoken in Guatemala, and originally comes from Spain. My family speaks a lot of Spanish at my house. And my friends talk Spanish as well. It has a drawing labeled Tortilla, with round items.

6.6 English as a Foreign Language

English is the official language of Belize, and it is safe to say that it is the language that locally and nationally enjoys prestige as the language for formal and public contexts. I will take a closer look at how this prestige is produced in Chapter 7; here I show how the language ambivalently indexes belonging and non-belonging at the same time. English was mentioned very often in the quantitative questionnaire on language use across domains; 57 per cent of respondents indicated that they use English at home. On the other hand, their answers may be influenced by their conception of my expectations. When the respondents said that they used English at home, I replied by asking ‘English?’ in order to ensure that they meant English and not Kriol. Many respondents smiled in response and then said ‘Kriol’. Rather than being offended by my question, many interviewees seemed to be pleased that I was aware they may use Kriol rather than English. They had apparently expected that I, as a tourist-looking foreigner, would be unaware of their linguistic index of belonging. Of course, English is also used in everyday life, but mostly as a written language, in media consumption and institutional/administrative forms of communication.Footnote ¹² And still, the interview data analysis brought about a code termed English as foreign, which occurred forty-seven times. These responses often occur in explanations of when English is used, namely with foreigners and in the context of formal education. This is illustrated in Excerpt 6.15 from an interview with a middle-aged, male villager who did not attend high school.

Such remarks are found in the interviews with villagers but also in an interview with an employee of the Ministry of Education. The fact that English is a language that most people only learn once they start to attend school, and that this evokes problems in schooling, is known to the ministry officials and to language professionals. A Language Policy Mission Report from 1996 (see also Chapter 8) states that, in Belize, ‘English is the language of instruction in schools but not the mother tongue of the children and their teachers’ (Narain Reference Narain1996: 9). In Excerpt 6.16, from a staff member of the primary school, it is confirmed that English does not index the local or national community.

The importance of English is underscored, and the teacher believes that they have to encourage children to use English, which implies that it is not the language that comes naturally to them. The reasons for encouragement are, similar to the views on Spanish in Excerpt 6.14 (by the same interviewee), utilitarian. English is described as important in order to ‘communicate throughout the world’ and because ‘English is the international language’. It may be surprising to see no reference to the importance of English in the local context, as all local schools use only English as the medium of instruction (see Milligan & Tikly (Reference Milligan and Tikly2016) on problems related to using English as the medium of education in postcolonial contexts). The teacher’s use of English does not conform to British or American standard norms. This is obvious from, for instance, the way she uses the definite article in ‘the English’, the progressive without the auxiliary be in ‘We having the English’, and the complementizer that in line 6 (‘that the English is the international language’). Some of the forms seem to reflect influence from Spanish syntax (see also Chapter 9).

Despite knowing that English is not the first language of most Belizeans, I had not anticipated this degree of lack of identification with forms of officially acknowledged Standard English. Not only is this evidenced by excerpts like this but also by the pupils’ posters that displayed English as a topic. In their posters on English, the visual means they chose to represent English showed very clearly that they do not associate the language with the local and national community. Thus, the students did not, for example, select the Belizean flag but used either the American (Figure 6.6) or British one as an icon of the language; in one case, a group chose a photo of a tourist to represent English.

Figure 6.6 Pupils’ poster– English in the United States (copyright: B. Schneider and pupils).

The poster in Figure 6.6 below states accurately that English is spoken ‘for education and being formal’. It then says ‘Mostly all culture learn english at school’. This likely refers to the different cultures within Belize but could also mean cultures of the world. Pupils frequently interact with tourists and know that English is learned worldwide. It also states that English ‘may be spoken with family member from mostly the united states’. The careful wording ‘may be spoken’ indicates awareness that not all family members use English, irrespective of their place of living, as people in the United States may also converse in, for example, Kriol, Spanish, or Garifuna. Another kind of hedging is found in ‘mostly from the united states’. Conversation in English is typical of (some) family members who live in the United States, but, at the same time, there is also a small but influential Belizean elite who use mostly US English as the medium of communication (see also Chapter 7). These may also be family members of some of the pupils. Additionally, due to back-and-forth migrations, the village and the high school host Belizeans who grew up in the United States or elsewhere and have English as their first language. The creators of the poster seem very aware of these complicated entanglements of language, family, society, and territory. And yet, the flag they chose to represent the language is the American one.

Despite the frequent constructions of English as foreign in my data set, I had various conversations about whether Belizean English should become institutionalised (see also Section 7.2). This was mostly rejected as unrealistic and undesirable, because Belizeans are typically proud of living in an English-speaking country and identify positively with speaking what they understand to be an international language.Footnote ¹³ Thus, like Spanish, English is characterised as foreign in some discourses but associated with belonging in others. As a matter of fact, some Belizeans consider it central to their personal identity.

6.7 English as Belizean

Many interviewees do not always or necessarily evaluate the colonial history of Belize negatively. As one individual in the interviews on language use across domains noted, ‘Belize exists because of the English’. In addition, the national narrative on cordial relationships between the British and their slaves is widespread (see Chapter 5). The Battle of St George’s Caye (1798) is considered the most central event in Belize’s history, which includes the national myth that slaves and slave owners fought hand in hand to defend the colony from Spanish invaders. The story is today mirrored in the national coat of arms, where a lighter-skinned and a darker-skinned figures stand side by side, united by the motto Sub Umbra Floreo (‘Under the shade I flourish’). The construction of the Spanish as a threat to anglophone culture in Belize has a long history, and it is against the backdrop of this history and of the surrounding Hispanic dominance that positive attitudes towards English are explicable (see Chapter 5 and Weston (Reference Weston2015) for related observations).

In the case of Belize, it can be English and Kriol that hold the place of expressing a continuing relationship with the English-speaking world. Indeed, many of the interviewees describe Kriol to be a dialect of English; some claim that ‘English and Kriol is the same’. Some of the older interviewees prefer naming strategies that emphasise a link between Belizean ways of speaking and English, as recorded in Field Note 6.3.

Most striking in this field note is the distinction between Kriol and Broken English that some of the older interviewees make. The term Broken English clearly conveys colonial derogatory meanings and is now only rarely heard, but it is the traditional term for referring to mesolectal varieties of Kriol (see also Chapter 3 and Escure Reference Escure1982), in a taxonomy that used the term Kriol/Creole for basilectal forms, at least until the 1980s. The interviewee mentioned in the field note thus expresses his affiliation with less basilectal Kriol. The preference of some interviewees for the terms English or Broken English and not Kriol may be interpreted as demonstrating positive attitudes towards English and the sometimes openly negative attitudes towards Kriol, which seems to be more common with older interviewees (aged 50 and older). My note that for them ‘the British legacy seems important’ relates to the observation that some people I interviewed are clearly proud of their family relationships with the British. One of the interviewees who said he used Spanish at home proudly mentioned his English family name, which he described as proof of his relations to a British colonialist. For many of my interviewees, the role of the English language in terms of belonging is more of a symbolic kind and becomes important in discourses that emphasise boundary constructions towards the Spanish-speaking world. In this context, the term English does not necessarily relate to the use of (internationally recognised forms of) Standard English but can include the use of Kriol features.

However, as noted above, the linguistic repertoire of members of the educational/social elite of Belize does include an internationally recognised variety of English. During my field stay, I met various people who used a variety of English that, on the phonetic level, was very close to US English. Most of these had attended an elite girl’s school in Belize City, founded by American nuns. One of them apologises for her personal emotional attachment to ‘pure English’ in Excerpt 6.17.

As the most dominant current discourse is that Kriol is the language of Belize, this interviewee feels she has to justify the fact that ‘pure English’ is the language of her thoughts. The concept of pure English shows that the speaker assumes the existence of a model variety of English. From her personal history, having attended an American school, her idea of good English is influenced by American language ideologies. I had developed rather close personal ties to this interviewee, and I felt that she otherwise would not have admitted her strong attachment to (US) English. The interviewee’s assumption that English as a personal language is inappropriate can also be inferred from line 3: ‘please don’t judge me too harshly’. She assumes that I believe that Kriol should be her dominant language – but it isn’t. In terms of pronunciation and intonation, her language practice in this excerpt and in the whole interview shows her command of what European and North American speakers would probably consider to be ‘pure English’.

The fact that this speaker feels that she has to apologise is reminiscent of Adejunmobi’s discussion on the role of English for educated Africans, whose use of English has often been characterised as inauthentic by Europeans. Adejunmobi problematises such views as stemming from colonialist essentialist views of African speakers and the erasure of the fact that colonised people appropriate resources of colonisers to resist and create their own voices (Adejunmobi Reference Adejunmobi2004: ch. 1). Considering English to be illegitimate as one’s dominant language, as the interviewee in Excerpt 6.17 does, is thus a reversal of colonial discourses in which the world is divided into those who can become legitimate speakers of an international prestige language and those who cannot. Colonial subjects were expected to reproduce ‘traditional’ cultures and languages, as is illustrated nicely in the following quote in which Nigerian author Soyinka reports:

All in all, the indexicalities of English, depicted in Figure 6.7, entail alignments with non-locally developed forms of English, as well as conflated forms of Kriol and British /US English.

Figure 6.7 English and its indexical connections to constructions of belonging (the width of arrows correlates with prominence in the discourses).

To sum up, this chapter shows that there is no cogent one-to-one mapping of social position, language ideological stance, and language use. All three languages – Kriol, English, and Spanish – have indexical functions that can construct belonging and non-belonging. The official discourse and economic practices related to tourism imply uses of English. This is not necessarily revealing regarding how the languages are used and how each contributes to social belonging for villagers. Here, the language ideology discourses and actual language practices are far more diverse and complex.

Kriol has an important function in indexing national identity; this is the reason why the local and traditional Hispanic elite also affiliates with Kriol. The indexical functions of Kriol also explain some tendencies of national homogenisation, where Kriol, which historically was the language of Creoles, is now an index of belonging in a multicultural nation, to the point where the majority of the population can positively identify with it. Shifts in indexical meaning that allow a larger number of people to claim Kriol as their language may be a relevant factor. This observation is also related to the global spread of English, during and after colonisation, which has to a certain extent been indexically untied from national belonging and has become an index of transnational class belonging (Saraceni, Schneider, & Bélanger Reference Saraceni, Schneider, Bélanger and Kirkpatrick2021). Such shifts in indexical meanings are also relevant to understanding historical processes of language standardisation as they took place in Western nation states.

In Section 6.3, the role of Kriol as representing racial belonging was discussed, tying the language to a transnational cultural space with particular histories and postcolonial positions. The dual status of Kriol as a national and transnational language also indexes a different kind of belonging. This brings about some dissonance in that some Belizean speakers of Kriol belong in the national community, but their racial affiliations exclude them from belonging in the transnational one. Thus, linguistic alignment and racial alignment are not coextensive.

The concurrence of different language ideological positions seems also critical to understanding the contested role of Spanish in the village, which shows interesting and partly paradoxical relations to place. This language is seen as potentially endangering Kriol and is described as being in use in everyday life, but it is not associated with national belonging. Some speakers describe the local community as ‘Spanish’, despite the often derogatory uses of this term. Some interviewees do refer to the variety of Spanish used in Belize with a name – Kitchen Spanish. Significantly, this name does not link the language to the place or the national community. Narratives of language shift with children using less Spanish than their parents are a result of language ideologies that do not construct Spanish as a language of the nation of Belize.

Finally, English is regarded as a foreign and national language at the same time. Whereas it is particularly important in constructing boundaries with Belize’s Hispanic neighbours, and it can subsume Kriol in this function, many speakers use English in a form that hegemonic speakers of British or US English (including some linguists) would not define as ‘English’. Some of those who use internationally recognised types of Standard English typically belong to a social elite and apologise for being English-dominant, in the face of a national discourse that promotes Kriol as the language of Belizeans. The fact that English, and not only its creolised anglophone varieties, can construct belonging has been remarked on by other Caribbean polities, for example in Hinrichs’s (Reference Hinrichs2006) study of uses of Jamaican English and patois in social media, where both can ‘create a sense of “we”’ (p. 132).

A central conclusion from these observations on indexical functions of the languages in multilingual Belize is that language ideologies and language practices do not necessarily match. The presence of different discourses and histories in one social setting creates a multiplicity of social alignments that are often not coextensive. In some cases, discourse is contradicted by practice. This is especially obvious where people do not characterise their ability to speak Spanish as competence in the language. The following chapter shows that this is related to discourses on prestige, which are similarly complex.

Ascriptions of prestige can be quite paradoxical in Belizean cultural contexts. This concerns not only language but also other cultural practices such as food consumption, as in the epigraph to this chapter. Like those of belonging, discursive constructions of prestige impact linguistic behaviour and, in my data, social prestige is the second central factor that influences how people categorise language. In general, prestige is defined as ‘widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality’ (Oxford American Dictionary). Linguistic prestige refers to the social value assigned to particular language repertoires within a specific community, which is often based on the social status of those who are associated with the use of such repertoires. In the history of sociolinguistics, prestige has been conceptualised as either being overt or covert. The former is the prestige that speakers ascribe to language forms explicitly, for example, in saying that language is ‘correct’, ‘clear’, or ‘beautiful’. The latter is prestige that we can infer from the fact that people use forms even though they may deny that these represent status in overt, explicit talk about it – ‘an appeal to covert beliefs helps to explain a social group’s persistence in using a linguistic variety that they are prepared to describe (in overt accounts) as “ugly”, “common”, “coarse”, and so on’ (Coupland & Bishop Reference Coupland and Bishop2007: 75). In Western standard language cultures, covert prestige is mostly associated with informal or non-standard language behaviour and overt prestige with officially recognised formal standards (Labov Reference Labov1972b).

In this chapter, we will see that a dichotomy of overt and covert prestige is problematic in social contexts that are characterised by polycentric social discourses, where various orientations overlap and interact. While linguistic appropriateness is generally a contested manner – hence the early recognition of covert prestige – a deeper insight into empirical data from Belize shows that a binary distinction of overt and covert is not an adequate way of characterising sociolinguistic prestige in a diverse, polycentric setting. In any setting, there can be various different types of prestige – standardised written languages are linguistic forms associated with normativity, but language resources understood as prestigious can also affiliate, for example, with ‘ethno-geographical frames’ (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Lacoste, Breyer and Leimgruber2014) as in minority contexts. In addition, linguistic prestige can be linked to economic status or success, or can be based on the desire to be autonomous and to not assimilate to a norm (see Section 2.4; for a related discussion on constructions of linguistic authenticity, see Schneider (Reference Schneider, Lacoste, Breyer and Leimgruber2014a)).

The definition of linguistic prestige as I apply it therefore is not limited to formal language standards but means the indexical association of language repertoires with social status, irrespective of whether status is based on formality, or on other types of social values. As we will see below, in Belize, the association of language repertoires with social status is not confined to formal prestige. Especially Kriol can be described as valuable and prestigious code, without this being associated with social values of formality, as other social values like creativity, cultural heritage, and resistance are central. Whether or not speakers themselves overtly describe language forms as being prestigious is not the core interest of my study. I focus on linguistic prestige as a diverse, polycentric, and sometimes contradictory phenomenon. In this chapter, I thus discuss the complex and diverse constructions of prestige related to English, Kriol, and to the notion of code-switching, in the postcolonial setting of Belize.Footnote ¹

My decision to treat the prestige of English first in this chapter is not based on the assumption that it is more important than those of the other languages, but, rather, because it is the kind of traditional prestige that outsiders can access easily. So, like in Chapter 6, I start with the presentation of data with a brief summary of my initial impressions as a cultural outsider when I started my field research. Second, I introduce the discourses on the prestige of English, and then discuss the various discourses on the prestige of Kriol. Finally, I look into discourses on the prestige attached to the ability to separate English from Kriol, locally referred to as code-switching. We must bear in mind that Spanish carries prestige too, despite its local low social standing (as discussed in Chapter 6). It is a world language with a written standard that is described as an asset in both the national Belizean and the Central American context. However, discourses on the prestige of Spanish are rather marginal in my data, where its significance is restricted to the educational context and the job market (Schneider Reference Schneider2016). This limited utilitarian prestige of Spanish will not be discussed further in this chapter.

Despite caveats regarding binary models of sociolinguistics, the traditional notion of overt prestige, associated with a national standard, written forms, school curricula, and standardised language in mediated contexts, remains crucial in the setting that I have studied. It must therefore be included in language ideology analyses, and conjures up dichotomous framings to a certain extent. Although a cultural outsider, I could access online data both from Belize and from the transnational sphere of people positioning themselves as Belizeans. Thus, I was able to scrutinise language practices in non-conversational, official, and mediated domains. Before I conducted the on-site field study in 2015, I collected written data from sources such as newspaper articles, school curricula, and official government documents; since 2012 I had also observed online radio stations, television broadcasting, and some Facebook groups. All these data give an idea of what is considered as prestigious language use in written domains. The more formal the context, the more language use is aligned with standard forms as used in the ‘Inner Circle’ of World Englishes (Kachru Reference Kachru1997). Thus, in government documents like statistics, school curricula, and government web pages, Standard English is used with very little or no deviation from British and US English (e.g. www.moe.gov.bz, www.sib.org.bz, www.mfa.gov.bz). It is of course problematic to use British and US English as point of comparison; however, Standard English as constructed in the United States and in the UK is the target of many formal language practices in Belize and is the official norm in education (but see Saraceni Reference Saraceni2015). More details on written language practice will be discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on different discourses regarding the complex types of prestige related to English and Kriol in my data set. At some points, these discourses are compared to the constructions of linguistic prestige found in Western standard language cultures. This is not to say that these are the ‘normal’ ways of conceptualising language. Instead, I want to contribute to provincialising (Chakrabarti Reference Chakrabarti2000) Western concepts by discussing these as culture-specific and not universally valid.

7.1 English as a Globally Prestigious and Foreign Language

Like in most former European colonies, the language of the former coloniser is the official language of Belize. Thus, unsurprisingly, in my interview data, the discursive construct of English is very clearly linked to social status. This valuation of English is not only due to its official status but also linked to its prestige in the transnational sphere. In my data set, sixty passages fall under the code English is better, thirty-seven under the code English for practical purposes, for international communication, and sixteen under the code English to express status difference. There is thus a high number of participants in the interviews that construct English as a formal instrument and also as superior (‘better’).Footnote ²

English is very often characterised as an exogenous means of communication. In Chapter 6, we saw that English can be understood as relating to a social space outside of Belize. One of the pupils’ posters on English, for example (Figure 6.7), represents the American flag. All four pupils’ posters about English tie the language visually to an image that represents an outside context. Besides the US flag on two posters, an image of tourists in another poster, we find a visual reference to the UK in another poster in Figure 7.1.

Figure 7.1 Pupils’ poster. English – the official language for Belize (copyright: B. Schneider and pupils)

English is verbally described as the official language of Belize in Figure 7.1 and, right above it, there is a drawing of the Union Jack. English remains tied to the UK, and the colonial history of Belize still affects present-day orientations. The formal and official language is thus represented visually as something that belongs to the outside, non-Belizean world, and verbally as linked to the national scale of Belize. Related to this interpretation of the status of English as (also) foreign, many interviewees argue that English is an important tool that has to be learned for instrumental reasons, and not because it is a language of the Belizean community. In Excerpt 7.1, from an interview with someone holding a central place in local primary education, I asked about the language resources available to the community. The respondent answered:

The first line was uttered in a rather forthright fashion, very matter-of-factly, slowly, and with emphasis on every syllable. Based on my previous observations on the island, particularly in the local kindergarten, I was a bit sceptical and assumed that the response was not necessarily descriptive of children’s language competence when they start school but possibly influenced by the desire to present the local community as educated. The respondent apparently felt a need to emphasise that everyone has access to the official and prestigious code English. After she had heard my hesitating ‘hmhm’, she relativised the claim and stated that the majority of the children speak English and Kriol. The omission of Spanish is noticeable, as the interviewee then, after several hesitations and repetitions in line 6 and 7, declares that the children are from the Mestizo culture, which is typically associated with the Spanish language. Note that this is the same speaker who says in Excerpt 6.14 that the village is a ‘Spanish community’ (recorded in minute 12 of the interview). It is thus remarkable that the teacher does not mention Spanish as a linguistic resource in a setting in which a large part of the population speaks Spanish and where the historical elite was Spanish-speaking, so that the community is by some referred to as ‘Spanish’. It is characteristic of qualitative interviews that interviewees become more open about unscripted ‘truths’ during the course of interviews, so that the first minutes of the interviews typically contain contents that align more with official positions and also align more with formal standards of speech. The respondent became more open about the fact that it is not always easy for the children to speak English a bit later during the interview. when she argued that English is important because it allows to ‘communicate throughout the world’ (see Excerpt 6.16).

The interviewees often state that English is important for instrumental reasons, where the link to the international economy, particularly in the context of tourism, is emphasised, like in Excerpt 7.2 from an interview with a young female village resident. This speaker had elite schooling and therefore access to an internationally prestigious form of non-local English, strongly influenced by US English as the teachers at the school mostly come from the United States. It is contact with foreigners, involving the potential for economic gain in the tourism industry, which is suggested here as the most crucial factor in learning what is characterised as ‘a proper form of English’. As explained in Chapter 3, the term Proper English is a local, emic one for constructions of formal, ‘correct’ English. Apparently, both British and US English can function as Proper English but the quantity of non-British and non-American features in the production of it can differ individually (see also Chapter 9). Thus, the concept of Proper English seems to be relatively broad, in other terms, liquid, for local speakers.Footnote ³

In Excerpt 7.2, Proper English is described as important for interactions with outsiders of Belize. Although English is the official language of Belize, the interviewee does not describe English as a ‘we-code’ for Belizeans but regards the need to acquire it as based on potential communication with foreigners in the tourism economy. Quite tacitly, however, the passage entails that English is spoken in the local community. She says that teachers ‘push the idea of English speaking as a first language’ – and not as a second (third, fourth, etc.) language. In the case of contact with foreigners, you should not only speak English but Proper English. The image produced is reminiscent of a discourse on ‘what will other people think?’ and that one should be dressed properly or eat properly if others are around. Local forms of speech are indirectly pictured as inadequate means for communication with outsiders and status anxiety here impacts on interaction in transnational contact.

The function of Proper English in the local setting is thus primarily a tool to communicate with people who do not belong to the in-group of Belizeans. This is embedded in a local understanding that English is of higher value in relation to other languages. And clearly, due to today’s global significance of English, being able to use it indicates status in many social spaces and also in Excerpt 7.3 from a female English teacher.

The awareness of the global status of English gives the impression that it is better to speak English than other languages, including Spanish, which is indirectly referred to here by the words ‘our Central American counterparts’. One aspect in this evaluation is the problematic relationship between Belize and Guatemala. As discussed in Chapter 5, Guatemala claims part of the Belizean territory and is regarded as a threat to the anglophone ways of living. Where a culturally different ‘other’ endangers cultural practices developed under colonialism, the ties to the former coloniser are typically regarded as ensuring local identity, so that the language of the coloniser is ‘the lesser of two evils’ (Weston Reference Weston2015: 680).

In Excerpt 7.3, there is a related global-class aspect that comes to the fore. It takes the interviewee a while to formulate what she wants to say, there are several hesitating pauses, and her word choice shows that she has to search for the right words. This is nothing that is part of official and established discourses. She then describes the idea that through English, ‘the official language of this country’, Belize can become part of the English-speaking world and this ‘elevates’ Belizeans above other countries that cannot claim to belong to the anglophone sphere. The use of the verb ‘elevate’ is critical and conveys an image of a globally stratified social world where English serves as a kind of class ‘elevator’. The type of elevation is not stated but we may interpret it in a status-related sense, as it is associated with economic profit and educational opportunity. Blommaert’s (Reference Blommaert2010: 35) notion of ‘scale-jump’ comes to mind here, as the global order of indexicalities allows speakers of English to associate themselves with the upper end of a global hierarchical value scale.

The perception that the world is ordered hierarchically and that English serves to create a higher position, on a national and on a global scale, is also found in Excerpt 7.4. In this longer passage from an interview with a young woman who also had elite schooling in Belize City (but is not the same as in Excerpt 7.3), the interviewee compares the prestige of Kriol with the prestige of English. The function of English to index prestige is openly stated and again linked to a global hierarchy.

The excerpt is an almost poetic account of the indexical values attached to English. In the first two lines, the speaker directly expresses the idea that Proper English is linked to higher social classes and therefore carries prestige. She then elaborates on communication among Belizeans, where Kriol is described as having a discursive function of adorning the speaker with the feathers of authenticity and ‘culture’. Note that reference to ‘culture’, usually in a folklorist sense, is common in marketing discourses that promote Belize (see e.g. www.travelbelize.org). The interaction between ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’ that is depicted here displays an awareness of the tourist gaze, in which the possibility to mark difference or even exoticness is important.

The interviewee strictly distinguishes this performance of ‘otherness’ from the construction of prestige within the national Belizean community. ‘Within the Belizeans, there’s this this social hierarchy’ and this social hierarchy is strongly connected to the ability to produce the right kind of English. The qualitative associations with English link to various positive aspects. Being able to speak Proper English, first, means to be educated. Second, it implies geographical mobility as English is presented as a magical key to a life outside of Belize and leaving Belize implies social mobility: ‘You’re not going to stay here and become just another you know’. Staying in the country is constructed as indexing social stagnation, which is undesirable; leaving the country is associated with being intelligent (‘You’re going to be smart’!), achievement (‘You’re going to get a scholarship’!), and upward mobility. Finally, the interviewee summarises her claims by saying that ‘To locals, it is prestige you can speak English’, which seems like a logical consequence of the life-changing character attributed to the ability to speak Proper English. Interviewees often have a very clear global social hierarchy in mind when it comes to the role of English. English is associated with the outside, and the outside, particularly the United States, is seen as qualitatively better in relation to social status. Belize, as a social construct, is indirectly placed low on this global social ladder.

The global social ladder impacts on internal social divisions also on the national scale. As mentioned in Chapter 5 (n. 9), I accidentally had access to the very small Belizean wealthy upper class through a friend of a family relative who lives in Belize City. The Belizean locals I met in this context spoke English (and, as they claimed, English only), which I, as a non-native speaker of English, could not distinguish from US English. The adults maintained that they would never use Kriol and told anecdotes about how funny they found it that their children were able to speak it. In interviews I conducted in the village, it was also reported to me that the wealthy elite uses English and not Kriol at home.

The interviewee, a local secondary schoolteacher, uses the term Royal Creoles to refer to a particular section of the Belizean economic and political elite. The Royal Creoles, according to his account and according to my observations, regard themselves as speakers of English and apparently do not use language forms that index belonging in Belize. This non-local orientation is also found in other semiotic realms. I participated in some dinner parties and concerts in the Royal Creole social context. After once attending a very pricey charity concert, I noted the following in my field diary:

Thus, the social class divide in Belize does not only work within the national boundaries but extents to a cultural setting that may be regarded as American or, perhaps, a general Western cultural sphere. Divisions of social class can criss-cross political, racial, and language boundaries in ways that may be unexpected to those socialised with the idea that societies materialise in cultural ‘containers’ (Pries Reference Pries2008), based on ethnicity or nationality. And indeed, contrary to my initial expectations, Belizeans do not necessarily feel opposed to the former colonial leaders, as discussed in Chapter 6. Some Creoles, and presumably particularly those that are referred to as Royal Creoles, do not regard themselves as entirely different from the British, with whom they may have family relations. The fact that, at the beginning of my field stay, I had expected Belizeans to positively identify with Kriol language and culture and to reject colonial history proves the racial and cultural stereotypes that unfortunately continue to exist in my own conceptual framework. Excerpt 7.6 illustrates the not untypical conception by some Belizeans that they are at least partly European. It is taken from a conversation I had with an interviewee (female, 23 years old) about features of Scottish English in Kriol, which she had become aware of while watching Game of Thrones.

The Hispanic/Maya and possibly African ancestors of the interviewee, based on her phenotype, do not necessarily lead to the conclusion that she does not have Scottish ancestors. However, her statements ‘where we really came from’, ‘how we got here’ suggest that Belizeans (also) think of themselves as members of a European-derived community. My initial surprise demonstrates (sadly, I have to admit) my participation in a racist discourse that constructs non-White people as being of non-European heritage.

In addition to the ambivalent effects of colonial history, another factor in understanding the prestige of exogenous norms of English and the continuing construction of English as ‘foreign’ is that geographical mobility towards the United States has a strong tradition in Belize (Chapter 5). The transnational migration network has strengthened an orientation towards English, since the acquisition of Standard English helps to gain access to the US job market and educational institutions. In the past, for Belizeans with high school degrees and the intention and means to proceed to higher education, emigration was more the norm than an exception, as is vividly but also critically illustrated in Excerpt 7.7.

The passage is from an interview with a young woman who attended an elite school (same as in Excerpt 7.2 on Belize as a touristic country) and has a college degree. Nevertheless, at the time of my field stay, she worked in the tourism industry, as there were no local jobs available that would allow her to profit from her education. She aptly compares the social, educational, and economic structures of her home country to a house with a leaky roof. Apparently, she feels that little has been done in order to develop an economic infrastructure within Belize that carters to individuals with degrees in higher education. This explains her comparison: instead of ‘repairing their roof’ Belizeans decide to ‘sleep on the couch’ of their ‘neighbour’ (the USA). The metaphorical language also expresses the cultural closeness Belizeans feel towards Americans (as ‘neighbours’) and, at the same time, the precarious status many Belizeans have in the United States (they ‘sleep on the couch’).Footnote ⁵

In the overall situation, English remains strongly associated with cultural spheres beyond national boundaries. Therefore, the idea of a Belizean variety of English is overlooked by almost all of the interviewees. Excerpt 7.8 from a local English teacher illustrates this.

As the official educational norms and parts of the local elite favour British or American cultural standards, it is not surprising that the English varieties of these contexts are points of reference. Interviewees have differing preferences, depending on their own attitudes or upbringing. Excerpt 7.8 shows someone who describes British English as ‘proper’. Given that these metropolitan English varieties are considered prestigious by the Belizean elite, it is quite logical that English that shows local features is generally regarded as low on a transnational value scale, as described in Excerpt 7.9 from a ministry official who was not born in Belize but has lived there for many years.

The evaluation of local Englishes as ‘substandard’ is of course problematic. Note that the interviewee here ‘double-voices’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1981), as he constructs the voice of ‘the people’ who disapprove of local varieties (line 3). An ethnographic approach is in favour of accepting the emic perspectives of the subjects under investigation and I assume that the emic construction of local English as ‘substandard’ and a rejection of the existence of Belizean English has to do with (1) the high prestige of non-local and formal forms of English, (2) a perception of Belize being peripheral and small, and (3) the fact that there already is Kriol that carries the indexical load of expressing Belizean belonging.Footnote ⁶

To summarise this section, Belizeans often evaluate their English performance in relation to external, British or American norms. These prestigious varieties are not overtly conceived of as part of national traditions. Typically, the social space associated with such norms is regarded as culturally ‘outside’, where a transnational hierarchy of countries promotes a discourse of anglophone ways of living and speaking as superior. The global order of indexicalities here intersects with the national scale. Even though English seldom signifies belonging in the national community of Belizeans, the prestige of English as a global language makes it an important symbol to construct class positions also on the national scale. The upper classes seem to be able to identify with speakers of exogenous English. On the other hand, although English is perceived as a foreign language, it is a critical factor in defining boundaries from Belize’s Hispanic neighbours. Thus, overall, English is a highly important resource in Belize and displays complex prestige patterns, intertwined with national and transnational discourses. The situation becomes even more complex if we consider the forms of prestige attached to Kriol.

7.2 Kriol’s Polycentric Prestige

The indexical functions of Kriol are complex and can also vary according to situations (Schneider Reference Schneider2017c). This is evident from the multiple discourses with which the language is associated. The following interpretations represent a simplification of this complexity. Bear in mind that the types of prestige discussed are not in an ‘either–or’ relationship but rather in a ‘this-as-well-as-that’ relationship (Beck, Bonss, & Lau Reference Beck, Bonss and Lau2003), which is connected to the liquidity discussed in Chapter 1. Kriol is the language of Creole elites and is associated with the urban political and cultural centre of the country, even though there is an awareness that Kriol in general does not carry the same kind of prestige as English and has a ‘lower’ status on a global scale. At the same time, Kriol displays internal variation (Salmon & Menjívar Reference Salmon and Menjívar2014, Reference Salmon and Menjívar2016), and there are varieties of Kriol that are understood to be more rural and ‘backward’, which, in my data, are referred to as Raw Kriol. In addition, the prestige of Kriol is associated with resistance to Western hegemony. The following sections serve to provide insights into these multiple indexical functions of Kriol.

7.2.1 Kriol as Language of the Anglophone National Elite

Given the important role of Kriol in indexing belonging to Belize, it is not surprising that positive attitudes towards it prevail. In many social situations, it conveys a kind of covert social prestige. However, I find this characterisation problematic, because the language is nationally shared and part of public and collective awareness and many speakers overtly praise it. It is not only considered to be prestigious within a small social or regional minority of Belize and it is not only used in personal and informal domains. This has to do with the political and social role of the community of Creoles in the history of Belize that was discussed in Chapter 5. As Kriol has developed into an index of belonging to the national community, this indexical role co-constructs social prestige at the same time. Previous linguistic studies have shown that Kriol in Belize carries prestige, and the most prestigious form of Kriol is that of Belize City, the cultural and former political centre of the country,Footnote ⁷ which is regarded as the home of the national elite. As in probably any other country, there is an

urban/rural pecking order in Belize, where it [is] often considered more prestigious to be from town, or better yet, Belize City, than from the village … Thus the other indigenous languages of Belize (namely, Mopan, Kekchi,Footnote ⁸ Yucatec, and Garifuna) have not historically shared the prestige that BC [=Kriol] enjoys in Belize. (Ravindranath Reference Ravindranath2009: 131).

Kriol is tied to the idea of urban ‘modern’ life, which is interesting and, from a European perspective, unusual for a language that is hardly used in writing, as in Western epistemologies, oral languages are typically associated with ‘tradition’ or ‘rurality’ (see Bauman & Briggs (Reference Bauman and Briggs2003) on how this division was decisive in European language ideological history).Footnote ⁹ The status of the mostly oral language Kriol has to do with the fact that it is seen as historically related to the social group of Creoles, who function as the traditional political elite. Most of the interviewees are clearly aware of the prestige of Kriol. At the same time, the Creoles’ elite status is not unchallenged, and Creoles are not an ‘unmarked’ elite, as Excerpt 7.10 indicates.

Excerpt 7.10

1. 1 We know that traditionally the economic, social, cultural power has been Creole

2. 2 So (.)

3. 3 To what extent is the Creole preservation of power dependent upon rejecting anything Spanish

(Interview 19, min. 45)

In Excerpt 7.10, the interviewee (a ministry employee) first considers that the Afro-European Creoles represent the traditional ‘economic, social, cultural power’. The construction of one group of people as ‘first’ settlers or as ‘traditional majority’ has been an important factor in the construction of public spaces in European nation states (Gal & Woolard Reference Gal and Woolard2001), where claims to historical presence serve to justify the status of the national power-holders. However, in the complex setting of Belize, the Creoles are not the unmarked, uncontested, hegemonic national elite. There are various reasons for this: the history of colonial slave trade, Hispanic people are in the numerical majority, Maya peoples have lived in the territory for a much longer time, and Garifuna culture, particularly music, which also plays an important role in representing Belizeanness.Footnote ¹⁰ Additionally, the more prestigious metropolitan and American outside impacts on the local sociolinguistic economy. Therefore, the hegemonic status of the Creoles is not unquestioned. The active efforts of power maintenance, and in particular the struggles with the demographic Hispanic majority, have not been ‘erased’ (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) from national consciousness. One may assume that processes of erasure have been more successful elsewhere, particularly in Europe, where national dominant groups succeeded in naturalising their status (consider, for example, the German notion of Volk, a discursive construction of a ‘biologically’ related group).

‘Rejecting anything Spanish’ is described as relevant in the maintenance of the power of Creoles. We can infer from this that due to the historical role of Creoles in the political history of Belize, they are regarded as linked to power status. On the other hand, their ‘majority’ status needs to be defended. Due to racist colonial histories, speakers of Kriol cannot rely on a historical tradition of being regarded as the social elite. Furthermore, they are surrounded by countries in which Spanish is dominant and a prestigious language of literacy. In this context, Creoles have not reached the status of the unmarked, ‘normal’ dominant group (those who speak with a voice ‘from nowhere’, Gal & Woolard (Reference Gal and Woolard2001); see Chapter 2). Therefore, their preservation of power is here described as based on ‘rejecting anything Spanish’.

The complex and partly paradoxical patterns of social prestige of Creoles intersect with constructions of race and language use. Racism, which stigmatises people with African ancestry, exists in Belize and is apparent in parts of my data set. At the same time, in some contexts, the language of Afro-European Creoles may be indexically related to social superiority, because of how Creoles are racially classified as being of African heritage, as described in Excerpt 7.11.

Excerpt 7.11

1. 1 People tend to try and talk that city Kriol

2. 2 Just to try and prove

3. 3 And for some reason

4. 4 I can’t explain why

5. 5 It’s just like the darker skin tends to be the superior race and you need to prove themselves to them

(Interview 11, min. 54)

It may be surprising in Excerpt 7.11 that ‘darker skin’, as a culturally constructed index of African ancestry, is described membership of a ‘superior race’. It is crucial to note that this interviewee, a young woman, happens to have very light skin and is therefore often taken to be a European or North American tourist. As she grew up in Belize City, she describes her personal experience where she had to ‘prove’ herself to people whose appearance conforms more clearly to the social stereotype of a ‘real’ Belizean. A national social hierarchy with Creole people on top is constructed, which is in opposite to other, more common racial hierarchies. This has to do with the status that the urban Kriol of Belize City carries within the country (Salmon & Gómez Menjívar (Reference Salmon and Menjívar2014); cf. Mufwene (Reference Mufwene2017a: 8) on the status of the urban vernacular Lingala in the Democratic Republic of Congo). Yet, the fact that racial superiority of ‘White’ people is also present in the discourses that the interviewee is exposed to can also be inferred from Excerpt 7.11. The interviewee hesitates, takes time to find an answer – ‘for some reason, I can’t explain why’ – her wording indicates that she assumes the superiority of the ‘darker skinned’ Creoles to be something unusual.

However, it is not only ‘White’-looking individuals who hail Kriol as a language of a superior social group. In the local setting of the island, where the traditional elite used Spanish and Yucatec, people reported to me that language shift from Spanish to Kriol was initiated when fishermen from Belize City arrived on the island in the 1970s.

Excerpt 7.12

1. 1 You have a lot of fishermen (.)

2. 2 That would come from Belize City

3. 3 And then they would set up camp here

4. 4 And even the people that own the big parcel of land would sometimes give them lànd

5. 5 And they work it off by fishing or working the coconùt

6. 6 And that’s how it start to develòp

7. 7 And then more and more Creole people starts coming

8. 8 Because more people from Belize City were coming out […]

9. 9 And Kriol mixed with some Spanish

10. 10 Because even some of the older folks that speak Kriol nów

11. 11 They’re more Spanish-speaking people

(Interview 6, min. 6)

Excerpt 7.12 from an interview with a diving teacher clearly describes a socio-economic hierarchy. The fishermen were given land that they had to ‘work it off by fishing or working the coconut’. It is a pretty unusual scenario: from line 9 onwards, he describes how the local landowners started to accommodate to the language of the incoming, working-class fishermen. How can we explain this shift from an internationally prestigious language like Spanish, spoken by the local economic and political village elite, to an unwritten language whose origins lie in slavery? It may be grounded in Spanish having a particularly ambivalent role in the national context, as language of Belize’s political rival and language of precarious migrant workers, who came in large numbers since the 1980s (see Mufwene (Reference Mufwene, Deumert and Storch2020: 296) and Vigouroux & Mufwene (Reference Vigouroux, Mufwene, Vigouroux and Mufwene2020), for a discussion of the relationship of economy and language). Furthermore, in the historical context referred to (the 1960s and 1970s), to sell fish and lobster to a national and international market, fishermen needed to be able to converse in Kriol on markets and in administration in Belize City (Schneider Reference Schneider2017e) so that Kriol started to carry a positive indexical load – in other words, prestige – also in the local village setting.

The development of prestige of a language often interacts with the role it plays in economic practices. As English is crucial in this context, another aspect in the relatively ‘overt’ prestige of Kriol as an elite language is its links to English. Consider the poster in Figure 7.2, created in a school class during a poster session by pupils aged 12–14.

Figure 7.2 Pupils’ poster – Kriol as a prestigious language (copyright: B. Schneider and pupils)

The pupils here refer to Kriol as Creole.Footnote ¹¹ Note that the drawing on the poster depicts the national dish, rice and beans. The poster raises three points that all indicate that Kriol is a language of status. Kriol is described as (1) ‘the most spoken language’ and ‘every one mostly speak Creole’ – Kriol is constructed as a dominant language, (2) ‘it is related to the english language’ and (3) ‘Creole people speak Creole’. The fact that English and Kriol are related adds to Kriol’s prestige. The links between English and Kriol are considered to be positive and a reason for being proud of speaking Kriol. The links between English and Kriol are, by the way, why most of my interviewees reject the spelling ‘Kriol’ and prefer ‘Creole’, as this, according to interview and other conversational discourse data, shows that it is related to English.

The evaluation of Kriol as an important language of public life is widespread, despite the simultaneous prestige of Proper English. When I asked an interviewee of Catalan descent who runs a publishing house, and is also quite knowledgeable about language use in Belize, whether Belizeans generally would prefer English over Kriol (after we had spoken about a teacher who said that she only spoke English and never Kriol), she said:

Excerpt 7.13

1. 1 Yes but I think you’ll find these more in education

2. 2 You know by teachers

3. 3 And you move into another area (.) that is not education

4. 4 You will find that people speaking Kriol

5. 5 And they I think value the fact that they can express themselves in Kriol

(Interview 21, min. 24)

This speaker assumes that the educational realm is a very particular field that is not necessarily representative of society as a whole. Consider, in this context, for example, Deuber’s work on language attitudes of secondary school pupils in Trinidad and Tobago, which shows that only pupils who plan to attend the sixth form identify themselves as speakers of English, rather than creole (Deuber Reference Deuber, Hoffmann and Sieber2009). Conservative attitudes towards creole languages have also been observed in institutional education in Jamaica and in the Bahamas, where

kindergarten and elementary school teachers were overrepresented among those who equated Jamaican Creole with ‘broken English’ or ‘slang’, and Oenbring & Fielding, in a survey investigating language attitudes among Bahamian college students, discovered that education majors often expressed the most negative attitudes toward and conservative views on the use of the Bahamian ‘dialect’ (2014: 45).

(Hackert Reference Hackert, Seoane and Gómez2016: 92–3, with reference to Wassink Reference Wassink1999: 69 and Oenbring & Fielding Reference Oenbring and Fielding2014)

This shows that the discourses surrounding the prestige of Kriol are contested and may be different in different social contexts, even though creole languages generally may carry positive prestige. The indexical load of this does not, however, only derive from discourses of belonging to a prestigious social group.

7.3 Practices of Fusion and Performing Language Boundaries

Social change in Belize since independence has contributed to making Kriol acceptable also in formal realms, at least to a certain extent. Various interviewees in my study report that Kriol can now be used in public domains where it would not have been acceptable in the 1970s or 1980s, such as in the media and in parliament. My observations of online data since 2012 confirm this: Kriol is also used in, for example, radio shows or television news, where it is never dubbed or subtitled, which is the case for Spanish. It is not so much used by hosts as by interviewees or by the in-calling audience. This is also mentioned in Excerpt 7.16.

Considering debates on the relationships between language and public space (e.g. Gal & Woolard Reference Gal and Woolard2001), which argue that the making of public space goes in line with that of national standard language, it is significant that Kriol has become a language that can be used to co-construct public and institutional domains in Belize. English and Kriol hold places as languages of public space and even though they have different indexical functions, there are social realms in which the use of both is acceptable. Both languages carry prestige and their social spaces overlap. This overlap may reflect changing and still contested ideas of the make-up of the national elite. Additionally, the prestige of Kriol, which is considered an anglophone language or even a variety of English, is linked to the prestige of English. The indexical functions of Kriol and English are therefore not isolated from one another. So, as has been mentioned, even though the language situation shows elements of hierarchy and entails social distinction, this does not imply the existence of a simple dichotomy as in diglossia models, where we would imagine that one code is used for one specific domain.

Whether speakers choose Kriol or English depends on their social relationships and on the social situation, as described in Excerpt 7.17 by a ministry employee who is Belizean but was socialised in the UK.

The speaker assumes that it is appropriate to use Kriol in highly formal settings, referring to the language with a term that would be considered derogatory by many speakers – ‘rawest rural Kriol’. His statement indicates the evaluative hierarchy of Kriol variation, implying a rural–urban divide. He then argues that the use of Kriol indicates a non-hierarchical social relationship, rather than indexing a particular group, social domain, or genre. This is reminiscent of the Tu–Vous distinction in languages such as German and French.

The use of different codes in the same setting, for the same communicative genres, where both codes are evaluated as carrying different kinds of prestige, would imply fused social spaces. It is not surprising that an overlap of social functions is correlated with overlapping linguistic indexicalities. Local speakers report that since the 1970s English and Kriol have moved closer to one another. While the notion of decreolisation is common in linguistic discourse, there may be a kind of ‘de-Englishisation’ happening in Belize, which was also remarked upon by some interviewees. As an outsider, I found it difficult at the beginning of my field stay to distinguish English from Kriol. I often misinterpreted some teachers’ talk to be Kriol at variance with local speakers who claim that teachers typically speak Standard English. What many locals conceptualise as Standard English is thus not necessarily what non-locals from the UK or the USA would evaluate as standard. The yardstick is evidently different. Several features of local public English are shared with Kriol and thus divergent from metropolitan English varieties. These include phonetic features, intonation, lexical elements, and syntactic structures, which are discussed in Chapter 9. The fusion of Kriol and English forms is, apparently, something that has become more pronounced since the 1980s, after Belize became independent and in line with the above-mentioned adoption of Kriol in more formal environments (see Sebba (Reference Sebba1997: 225ff.) on similar phenomena).

Note that in conscious discourse, an increased use of Kriol in public is discussed regularly.Footnote ¹³ Unsurprisingly, the use of Kriol forms in formal contexts is not considered positive by everyone. In Excerpt 7.18, a university teacher who grew up on the island but received postgraduate training outside of Belize talks about the language ideologies of primary schoolteachers, which he finds problematic. According to the interviewee, many primary schoolteachers use Kriol but consider it to be English. Excerpt 7.18 overall has two different interesting aspects. First, it shows that the uses conceptualised as English may be different among Belizeans, depending on whether they have been socialised within Belize,Footnote ¹⁴ or have lived elsewhere or attended one of the few elite schools within the country which use (US) Standard English as medium of instruction. Second, the interviewee suggests that most speakers seem to have the competence to understand American television shows. Their passive competence in exogenous forms of English apparently leads them to conceptualise Kriol as English, too, even though there are considerable differences between them. The conceptualisation of local language use as English can be related to the discourses that reject the existence of ‘Belizean English’. All in all, we can infer that for many speakers in Belize the language category English is wide and of a rather liquid kind. So, despite the continuing prestige of exogenous English, locally influenced and creolised English also is a target for many speakers. In creole linguistics, it has been discussed that Standard English is not necessarily the target of speakers and this has been so since the times of colonialism:

Thus, one should not misinterpret the local conceptualisations of publicly legitimate English as an inability to reach Western, exogenous targets. The latter seem to be ideals mainly for highly educated speakers who have been trained outside of Belize, for school teachers, or in the mentioned elite schools. We should beware of taking for granted language ideologies that exist in Western contexts.

For children growing up on the island, there nevertheless is considerable exposure to internationally acknowledged types of English, for example, in media consumption, in interactions with tourists, in at least parts of the teacher talk, and in explicit training in school. Despite this exposure, most local pupils do not produce exogenous prestige forms of English, neither in speech nor in school writing, often to the detriment of their educational success. One reason for the difficulty of performing Proper English at school may be constant exposure to different but related forms in the same social spaces and such diverse exposure may make the acquisition of an idealised standard difficult (Bryan Reference Bryan2004).

Another aspect is that the competition between the prestige of English and that of Kriol expresses conflicting constructions of social identity. Recall that English is constructed by some as a foreign language, though neither Kriol nor any other language is accepted as a medium of formal education. The school system is particularly conservative and reproduces colonial language ideologies, which reject many pupils’ cultural identity. There is little research to date on the effect of negative emotions and trauma on language acquisition. Scrutinising psychological factors in the context of colonial language contact, Deumert suggests that the discourses and practices of colonialism bring about specific conditions of language learning, which should be taken into account in pidgin and creole studies:

While it would be inadequate to say that all pupils in the village have traumatic life experiences, it should be born in mind that the discourses of colonial racism are still present in the local setting. Children and youths, at least on the island, will be exposed to racist and disparaging comments by tourists, to exogenous forms of English that are reproduced as ‘correct’ at school, and to cultural practices and objects – movies, computers, mobile phones, clothes, music – that are associated with the United States and which are considered more worthy than local ones. Even though I hesitate to say that these experiences are traumatic, it is safe to say that Belizean children grow up with discourses that present the cultural outside, and the United States in particular, as being of higher social status than their own culture. They are thus aware of a global cultural hierarchy in which they take a position at the lower end. In this situation, they also have to cope with ‘the impossibility of remaining themselves’ (Deumert Reference Deumert2017: 206) while maybe not everything but certainly some of the things that define them are ‘denied, devalued and taken away’. Thus, a ‘state of nervous anxiety’ and a torn relationship, striving for Proper English but at the same time rejecting it, may be one explanation for not producing forms that are officially valued in educational settings.

The ‘state of nervous anxiety’ regarding language use appeared frequently in my data set. During the coding process, I developed a code for linguistic insecurity, grouping interview passages in which interviewees who remarked that they or others felt anxious about the way they spoke. This was either because they were afraid that their speech was not ‘correct’ or that it was inappropriate (particularly in the case of Spanish), or because they had difficulties telling apart the languages they were using. Regarding the overlapping indexicalities and fused language practices, some speakers found it difficult to tell whether they were speaking English, Kriol, or Spanish. In Excerpt 6.16, for example, the interviewee reported that children were ‘shy of speaking the English’. During my field stay, I often noted that people felt intimidated by my presence if they knew I was a linguist from Europe, assuming that I was an authority on the question of correct language use. Some interviewees, including teachers, did not want to talk to me and others spoke to me but did not want to be recorded. Although there could be many reasons for this, the discourse of linguistic insecurity and anxiety was widespread, as is evident in Excerpt 7.19 from an interview with the same woman as in Excerpt 7.13 who runs a publishing house and lives outside of the village.

Here again, the interviewee reports that people are unable to tell English from Kriol. People with access to language ideologies that exist on a global higher-order scale (from migration, travel, or education) seem to have an easier time in perceiving/constructing language boundaries according to Western norms. That the distinction is not clear for many locals is not unusual. Wilson (Reference Wilson2017), for example, in a study on language ideologies of choir singers in Trinidad, observes that they do not necessarily distinguish British from Trinidadian varieties of English. In my Belizean data, I have found several instances where interviewees refer to Kriol as English. The lack of boundary distinction and the complex interrelationships of the prestige of Kriol and English also transfer to the naming strategies, as in Excerpt 7.20 from an interview with a secondary schoolteacher.

Her spontaneous reaction to the question which languages she speaks at home is to say that she uses English. When I repeat her answer, thus expressing that I am not sure whether she really means English, she changes her answer and says ‘well Kriol’. In the interactional setting of the interview, my reply indicated that I expected her to mention Kriol, not English, so her utterance is co-constructed by me, the interviewer. She seems to classify Kriol as a type of English and explains that ‘Kriol is a dialect’ (of English). The interviewee, who is a member of one of the ‘original families’, seems to be relaxed and confident about her use of Kriol and regarding the idea that Kriol is English, too. Her utterance confirms that ‘creoles could also be treated as dialects of their lexifiers, at least where their native speakers think so’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Neumann-Holzschuh and Schneider2000: 81). Regarding the need to ‘decolonise’ linguistics (Deumert & Storch Reference Deumert and Storch2020), it is necessary to take speakers’ concepts into account and not to ignore them as uneducated folk linguistic concepts.

Still, it is also common that people with higher education apologise for speaking ‘imperfect’ English, as in Excerpt 7.21 from an interview with a university lecturer:

The interviewee finds it necessary to emphasise that university teaching staff do ‘as much as they can’ in order to present their courses in English. He expresses how much effort they invest, and yet, ‘it’s still not perfect English’. He has exogenous standard ideals in mind and wants to demonstrate his awareness that what people in Belize produce as English does not always conform to these outside norms. Again, Excerpt 7.21 shows that people working in educational institutions seem to display particularly conservative attitudes, while in other contexts, including the above-mentioned parliament discussions, an increased acceptability of Kriol seems to reduce anxiety. Attitudes towards Kriol are not uniform and correlate with specific political and lifestyle ideologies.

The fused forms of English and Kriol have brought about another form of linguistic prestige that is particular to this multilingual context, in which different linguistic resources are used side by side. The ability to differentiate between exogenous English and Kriol, interestingly, has become an index of social status in itself. Various quotes in the interview data construct as prestigious what is referred to as code-switching. The notion of code-switching, in linguistic discourse, refers to people making use of different codes in one conversation (Poplack Reference Poplack1980, Myers-Scotton Reference Myers-Scotton1993, Meyerhoff Reference Meyerhoff2011: ch. 6). In my data, in contrast, code-switching is not constructed as the use of various codes in the same interaction but as the ability to keep codes apart, as in Excerpt 7.22.

In Excerpt 7.22, a female English teacher elaborates on the fact that code-switching is something that ‘we’ – here presumably constructing the national community of Belizeans – are ‘supposed to be able to codeswitch’ and that the ability to do this is ‘a reflection of your class’. Kriol is the ‘common ground’ for Belizeans but then she downgrades the role of Kriol in Belize. Even though it is the language of Belize, ‘we’re supposed to be able to codeswitch’.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, Kriol is necessary to signal belonging to the national community; at the same time, Belizeans should also be able to use English but in a form that is clearly distinguishable from Kriol. Her comment that people are ‘supposed to’ do this implies that Kriol and English are fused in the practices of many speakers, and this is not uncommon in public language. Nevertheless, it remains a marker for ‘the level where you are at, how you’re perceived’ whether or not you can produce distinguishable language forms that keep the distinction of Kriol from English. The many hesitating pauses show that this is not something that is enregistered as collective knowledge or that would be explicitly taught in school.

It is interesting that several interviewees use the academic term code-switching to describe this prestigious language ability. I have no information on the history of adaption of the term into lay usage and its semantic reconfiguration but note that the term is commonly used. The English teacher above, for example, says a minute later that her daughter is ‘an avid reader. So she’s able to codeswitch’ (min. 44) and other interviewees likewise took pride in telling me that their children ‘know to codeswitch’. It is not only a small, educated elite who consider code-switching to be prestigious. In Excerpt 7.23, from an interview with a diving teacher (whose formal education was limited to primary school), I asked whether it was difficult for him to distinguish Kriol from English.

This speaker had spoken at length before about how much he supported the use of Kriol even in formal settings. He also used Kriol with his employees while I was present (see Section 9.2 for an example). I therefore did not think that the question was problematic. And yet, his response showed me that, apparently, my suggestion that it is not always easy to say which is which provoked an emotional reaction, a kind of defence. Like many others, he uses the verb ‘switch’ to refer to the ability to distinguish English from Kriol, and in contrast to his otherwise lengthy and flowery explanations before, he swiftly replies ‘it’s easy’ and ‘there’s no problem’, uttered in a straightforward tone with falling intonation at the end of statements, indicating that my question had not been taken lightly.

On grounds of the analyses of the above data, we can assume that code-switching, emically understood as the ability to keep the boundary between two closely related language varieties, carries prestige. This is based on a social situation where this ability is predominantly acquired in formal education. Everyday practice typically does not display a clearly distinct boundary. We will see in the following chapter that the fusion of English and Kriol is also found in written language.

To sum up this chapter, the discourses that construct language as prestigious are, like the discourses on belonging, of a ‘this-as-well-as-that’ nature (Beck, Bonss, & Lau Reference Beck, Bonss and Lau2003). English, in its exogenous and standardised form, is seen as a ‘proper’ language that holds prestige as a written code and that is particularly important in the educational realm. It indexes social and geographical mobility in a transnational social space, linked to the United States in particular through tourism, popular culture, and emigration. Kriol has prestige as an index of national belonging, important in marking a boundary in relation to the Spanish-speaking surroundings. The prestige of Kriol is on the rise, related to national emancipation from colonialism, in which Creoles hold a central place. On the other hand, given the continuing transnational ties in an age of globalisation, it is unlikely that Kriol will develop into a national language in the way European languages did in the nineteenth century. The national prestige of Kriol, at the same time, is linked to a continuing function of establishing a reputation, a kind of prestige that indexes public power but is not based on the British norms of respectability. In this postcolonial setting, the function of Kriol to connote reputation has, therefore, developed into the indexical expression of resistance towards the standardised language cultures of the Western world (Mair & Sand Reference Mair, Andrea and Borgmeier1998).

This has various effects. First, there is no ideological space for the development of a category named Belizean English. Upper-class status is indexed via Proper English, which is understood as based on exogenous norms. At the same time, Belizean identity is indexed via Kriol, which co-constructs a position of autonomy in relation to Proper English. The fact that locally specific practices of using English have developed has not brought about a discourse that assumes a separate discursive category of a national variety of English. Instead, diverse and fused forms of English and Kriol seem to be common. This, in turn, has led to ‘code-switching’, that is, the ability to tell apart differences between the two, to be an index of education and formal prestige. The multiple discursive orientations, towards and against Proper English and towards and against Kriol, instantiate linguistic liquidity in a social context in which what represents ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ forms with regard to both Kriol and English is not always clear. Marking boundaries between languages can be understood as the social practice of ‘freezing’, which is promoted by educational institutions and is a marker of social distinction. The following chapter explains how sociolinguistic practices that entail fluidity and freezing interact with discourses on the material aspects of language.

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.

In this chapter, I inspect local language practices in formal contexts and public space to answer my second research question, which asks how speakers construct public language in a setting shaped by diffusion (Chapter 1). In ethnographic observation and interview talk in Belize, I was so intrigued by the extent of diversity in the practice of English in formal and/or public contexts that I decided to learn more about this variability. The domains in which standardised, more focused language is expected according to Western traditions, and which I therefore study in the following, are school and in mass media, where I focus on the written form, as well as public broadcasting (news), classroom conversations, and research interviews, where I focus on oral productions.Footnote ¹ The documentation of linguistic variability in these contexts serves to illustrate that, if we take the conceptualisations and practices of speakers seriously, public language, and thus possibly also ‘standard’ language, may be of a liquid character. The ‘feature pool’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene2002b) of what is considered to be ‘correct’ is larger in multilingual and polycentric settings than in monoglot standard language cultures with nationally hegemonic institutions. Linguistic liquidity can therefore be understood as an effect of polycentric contexts that lack a clearly hegemonic centring institution (see Section 2.1).

In the Caribbean and other creole-speaking contexts, variability in formal genres has been studied before (e.g. Shields-Brodber Reference Shields-Brodber and Schneider1997, Patrick Reference Patrick1999, Hinrichs Reference Hinrichs2006). It has been shown that ideas on what constitutes a formal or an informal code may differ individually (e.g. Mühleisen Reference Mühleisen2002: ch. 1, Hinrichs Reference Hinrichs2006, Wilson Reference Wilson2017). Mühleisen, for example, observes regarding Creole speakers in London that

The various language practices in formal settings in Belize, so far, have not been documented. From a decolonial perspective, I refrain from referring to them as Belizean English as it would be unclear which forms should be considered emblematic of a national variety. Apart from the fact that at least the interviewees in this study reject the idea that their use of English constitutes a distinct variety, any choice would be politically charged, supporting a particular practice as representative and co-constructing a methodologically nationalist idea of language. The intervention of a linguist in documenting the practices of some speakers would likely have the effect of influencing what is enregistered as ‘correct’ and imbue these forms with power. Collecting language data from the educated elite, such as university teachers or students, would additionally be problematic in the Belizean case because these forms are very diverse too, with some speakers having been educated in Belize, but only some by US teachers, and others in the United States, or in other Caribbean countries. Many have a Hispanic background, others are proud of their Garifuna ancestry.Footnote ² In the context of Belize, it would be a highly biased decision to study the speech of university students/teachers with a Creole background who grew up in Belize City – a likely choice for the construction of a corpus – as representative of Belizean English.

The researcher’s language background also impacts on the interpretation of the variability of linguistic data. Thus, my own linguistic socialisation and experiences with English influence on what I regard as ‘variable’. English is not a language I acquired in childhood but I use it in my professional and private daily life as an international lingua franca with speakers of many different backgrounds (Schneider Reference Schneider2012). Having been exposed to diverse Englishes, it is now more difficult for me to say which forms are ‘correct’ than earlier in my life when I attended English language courses at university and lived in the UK to learn conventional types of Standard English. To develop an analysis that also considers traditional ideas of ‘correct’ English, a colleague (Tanager, see Section 3.2) whose first language is US English and who works as a professional English–German–Spanish translator classified morphosyntactic variants in interview data according to a ‘standard’–‘non-standard’ distinction. Let me again emphasise that this approach is not meant to argue that forms of English in Belize are a deviation from UK or US norms (for critical discussion of such an approach, see Irvine (Reference Irvine2004: 71)). Yet, non-local standard norms frame the language ideological discourses in Belize in educational systems and it is therefore appropriate to use this official standard as a point of comparison.

As a final disclaimer, the qualitative illustration of the variability of local instantiations of public English presented in the following should not be mistaken for documentation of ‘a language’ but serves as an empirical inspiration to study theoretical arguments in linguistics. As a matter of fact, the observations confirm theories of language contact, namely that ‘variation in [feature] “transmission” and “acquisition” is amplified in contact settings, because the target language and the other languages that it is brought in contact with make concurrent contributions to the feature pool from which the learner recreates their version of the language’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene2002b: 55). Interviewees in my study, who are accustomed to complex language contexts, generally understand linguistic realisations in formal genres as representing Proper English (Chapters 6–8), even if practices diverge considerably from official standards. As ‘the categories and behaviours [of language] cannot be assumed to have been established independently of anyone’s perception of them’ (Irvine Reference Irvine, Eckert and Rickford2001: 24), I abstain from categorising such diverse practices of Proper English as ‘approximations’ of English. They demonstrate that languages are discursive categories, where the social discourses in which these categories are produced impact on their delineation. As Irvine (Reference Irvine2004: 70) notes regarding users of English in a study in Jamaica: ‘it is reasonable to assume that they are also vernacular speakers of English. They are not “acquiring” the standard. Rather, they are speakers of a variety of English that is shaped and is being shaped by their own context and the linguistic groups with whom they share space.’

I start with a macro perspective on formal written language in public space. Second, I give access to linguistic data from interactional settings and from the interview corpus, which I use to analyse morphosyntactic variation. Finally, data on phonetic and prosodic variation in the interviews give insight into the variability of the public formal English, and into the practices of marking language boundaries phonetically.Footnote ³

9.1 Public English: Mass Media and Linguistic Landscapes

In Belizean TV or radio broadcasting in English, there is a high degree of inter-speaker variation and the spectrum spans from variants closely aligned with exogenous standard forms, mostly US English, to variations exhibiting differing degrees of creolisation. Some linguistic practices may pose considerable intelligibility challenges to speakers of European or North American Standard English. In addition, Hispanic features, particularly in pronunciation, are attested. The speech of professional newscasters is mostly aligned with US American pronunciation and intonation (e.g. see Channel 5 Belize on YouTube).Footnote ⁴,Footnote ⁵ Obviously, the editors of the shows do not conceive local forms that do not align with UK/US norms as deviations in the sense that they would dub or translate them. Even where highly creolised forms are used in television news (e.g. see the link in Footnote n. 5), these are not accompanied by translations or subtitles. This indicates that such forms belong to legitimate public repertoires and contrasts with uses of Spanish, which are translated into English or dubbed, and thus constructed as ‘foreign’.

News in (written) online sources or in printed newspapers appears predominantly in US Standard English. Thus, there is a strong difference between oral and written uses of English, where, unsurprisingly, the oral uses display stronger forms of variation. Journalists and newspaper editors are trained to use exogenous norms of English and secure their jobs precisely because of their ability to do so. An interesting type of language use is found in online media, where it is common to present written transcripts of interviews with witnesses or relatives of crime victims.Footnote ⁶ This representation of spoken language in written form almost consistently appears in US Standard English. If the speaker originally spoke Spanish, this is noted in a commentFootnote ⁷ and where the speaker originally spoke what the editor of the transcript considers to be Kriol, this is represented according to official norms of written English. Interview transcripts often come along with a comment such as the following:

I have not found instances where Kriol forms would have become visible in these written interview transcripts. Even though it is safe to assume that such forms do appear in oral interviews, the dominance of exogenous norms is pronounced in the written uses of journalists and renders linguistic diversity mostly invisible in writing. This practice is likely to contribute to a perceptual blurring of boundaries between English and Kriol.

The difficulties of pupils and university students to acquire grammatical structures that are recognised as standard outside of Belize, as discussed in the previous chapter, may be related to psychological aspects (Deumert Reference Deumert2017) and to the proximity of English and Kriol (Siegel Reference Siegel, Lefebvre, White and Jourdan2006). Considering uses of English in public settings, it can also be caused by a more liquid conceptualisation of public language. Grammatical structures that are not understood to be part of standard repertoires in North America or Europe (and neither in official examinations by the Caribbean Examination Council) are found in various formal and institutional genres in Belize. Figure 9.1 depicts a photograph taken in a primary school, which uses the slogan ‘When parents get involve, children do better in school’. The syntactic pattern is part of locally enacted Proper English. Different constructions of publicly acceptable subject–verb agreement are also demonstrated in Figure 9.2.

Figure 9.1 Slogan of primary school (copyright B. Schneider)

Figure 9.2 Village council notice board (copyright B. Schneider)

These agreement patterns are not necessarily or always used; and agreement forms that do adhere to official standards are by no means unusual. We do not observe a singular emerging norm but an acceptable range of variants. A greater flexibility regarding language norms can also be inferred from the photograph in Figure 9.3, in which different orthographic conventions appear side by side. In this example,Footnote ⁸ the sale of bijouterie is referred to in English with the spelling Jeweiry, with the US spelling Jewelry, and with the Spanish term Joyeria. The normative language ideologies of Western cultures, where coherence is regarded as a central value in language use (Cameron Reference Cameron1995), do not apply to the same extent, even though the example shows otherwise carefully drafted letters for display in public.

Figure 9.3 Liquid shop naming (copyright B. Schneider)

We can generally say that the above examples are realisations of language that are not framed in the same kind of standard language ideology that is common in many Western environments. Variation here does not represent deviation but is an unmarked option. Language ideologies of liquidity may also have an impact on spoken language, which I examine in the following section.

9.2 Spoken Language in the Classroom

In my interviews, there are not many examples of informal language use, which is due to the fact that interviews are a formal genre that, in the case of this study, were co-constructed by me (a European foreigner) and not, for example, by a person who resided in the community. And yet, there are many instances in the interviews that do not conform to official norms of Standard English. Forms that are more on the vernacular side tend to be used in interview passages in which more emotional topics are discussed, or for emphasis. Such forms are, for example, consonantal stops where formal Englishes make use of interdental fricatives ([d/t] vs [ð/θ]), monophthongisation ([o] vs [ou]), or zero copula. I do not delve deeper into the conversational functions of more or less standardised forms in interview talkFootnote ⁹ but rather aim at documenting general variability in public language, understanding it as an effect of social diffusion and discursive multiplexity (see Irvine (Reference Irvine2004), Deuber (Reference Deuber2014), for similar approaches). Let me repeat that I do not consider phonetic, lexical, or morphosyntactic forms that do not conform to UK/US traditions of Standard English to necessarily represent Kriol – they are part of Belizean public English. None of the interviewees would argue that they had used Kriol when talking to me.Footnote ¹⁰

Despite these analytical caveats, there are instances in the data that demonstrate influence from Kriol structures. I discuss one illustrative example: during one of my interviews, I recorded a short interaction between the interviewee, an English teacher, and another teacher who had been sitting in the same room. I had asked about social divisions in the village community and the interviewee had explained that there was a neighbourhood that was referred to with the racialised term the Black Community. I asked about its location and the interviewee was unsure and therefore asked her colleague. The two teachers are in a hierarchically equal relationship and socially close. Despite the formal context, a classroom in school, and the relative formality of the speech event, an interaction between teachers at school while pupils and a researcher are present, the language use is clearly different from the way the teacher had spoken when talking to me only. At the same time, the example demonstrates that formal English and vernacular/Kriol forms are used side by side. To get a closer impression, consider the narrow transcript with phonetic symbols and grammatical tags in Figure 9.4.

Figure 9.4 Speech sample 1: In terms of finance and so

Note: The transcript makes use of phonetic symbols in the representation of the interaction, with the effect that it appears to be rather different from internationally acknowledged Standard English, which is represented in the third line in standard orthography (see Chapter 4 for a discussion on the politics of transcription).

Figure 9.4Long description

The text presents five sentences in English with Kriol form, and their grammatical category and standard English translation. The English translation reads. Sentence 1. Where you would say black community L O C. Sentence 2. Like by Yvonne 3 P L. Sentence 3. And she is asking if L O C because it like. Sentence 4. In terms of 2 finance and so. Sentence 5. You would say a poor community.

Figure 9.4 displays basilectal Kriol grammatical particles in the use of da as conditional, dɛ as locative marker, dem as plural marker, and di as aspect marker. Also, the word order aligns with Kriol patterns (Decker Reference Decker2013). The lexical forms, apart from grammatical markers, are the same as in English. Additionally, we find a highly formal construction in the phrase ‘in terms of finance and so’. The use of this formal phrase may be regarded as a form of polite hedging as the speaker refers to the economically precarious situation of some of the villagers, where she may not want to refer to them as ‘poor’ in more straightforward terms. It would be difficult to decide whether this is English infused with Kriol forms, vernacular Belizean English, or Kriol infused with English forms. Considering the fact that in this social setting, both English and Kriol carry prestige and can be used in formal domains, it can also be interpreted as a linguistic outcome of the convergence of social indexicalities. The indexicalities associated with English and Kriol overlap and there is therefore no neatly ordered border between English and Kriol. Instead, we find it is ‘more tolerant of constructions patterned on the acrolect even if these are in conflict with their basilectal patterns’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Diane Brentari and MacLeod1992b: 243).

This does not, however, imply that all teachers necessarily and always use such forms when interacting with each other. Depending on previous access to non-local standards or local forms, on the situation, and on attitudes towards the indexicalities of Kriol, teachers may also use US Standard English in such a context. Note that the speaker in Figure 9.4 had a very positive attitude towards Kriol, and her interaction with the other teacher may have been an opportunity to demonstrate her competence as a locally authentic speaker, and in this sense a slightly stylised performance. It was by no means the case that she would have used creolised forms in all contexts. She had previously explained how she had grown up with Spanish, English, and Arabic as her first languages, but now identified strongly with Kriol, which she had learned while being raised in Belize.

Language acquisition in such an environment, where different forms are used side by side in the same domain, the same genre, and by the same speakers, implies that language learners are regularly confronted with various forms of ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ speech. The grammars produced by such speakers are therefore not monolithic (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Diane Brentari and MacLeod1992b) as there are ‘options for more or less the same communicative functions’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Deumert and Storch2020: 290). Thus, it is not surprising that pupils also make use of converged forms as in the example in Figure 9.5. The sample is from an interaction between two pupils (ages 14–15) in classroom during a geography lesson. Speaker A considers Spanish and Kriol to be his first languages whereas speaker B is one of the few pupils who have been raised with North American Standard English as her first language, due to the migration history of one of her parents.

Figure 9.5 Speech sample 2: Must be two papers

Figure 9.5Long description

The speech reads. Speaker A. mas bi tu p superscript y apas. Verb, mas. Grammatical category. Aux, bi. Number, tu. Noun, p superscript y apas. The translation reads, must be two papers. Speaker B. wel a neva no a mi fogot. Grammatical category. Excl, wel. 1 s g, a. Adv, neva. Verb, no. 1 s g, a. Past, mi. Infl verb, fogot. The translations. Well, wel. I, a. Not, neva. know, no. I, a. Past Mark, mi. Forgot, fogot.

As in Figure 9.4, there is convergence of vernacular (Kriol) and English forms in a semi-formal setting. The utterance ‘must be two papers’ (relating to worksheets for classroom work) does not display the dummy subject ‘there’, which would be expected in official norms of Standard English. The construction could be found in other colloquial forms of English, too. The noun papers carries the Kriol glide in the first vowel but also an inflectional plural marker -s, which is not indicative of basilectal styles of Kriol. Speaker B makes consistent use of the pronunciation [a] (not [ai]) for the first-person singular pronoun and negates her statement by using the Kriol word neva for ‘not’. To mark past tense in the second verb, forget, she applies two strategies: she uses the Kriol preverbal past tense marker mi and additionally conjugates the verb, as in Standard English, with an ablaut, forgot. As we will see in the following, the proportion of forms that are traditionally conceptualised as Kriol or as English in formal genres may differ individually.

9.3 Variation in a Formal Oral Genre: Language in Interviews

Research interviews constitute a formal situation and, as Alison Irvine notes, language use in interviews ‘will also reflect [the interviewees’] own ideas of the “indexical semiosis [that] informs and underlies communicative acts of identity and groupness” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein1998: 407)’ (Irvine Reference Irvine2004: 65). The degree of social distance between interviewer and interviewee is a central factor in determining language choice in this speech event. In my interviews, social distance was not only given through my role as interviewer but enforced through my being considered a ‘White’ foreigner of European heritage, my standardised, non-local use of English, and my position as someone who works at a European university. It is rather safe to assume that interviewees, who all had attended schooling, produced their most formal public language variety in this speech event. I did not conduct the interviews in Kriol. Besides my lack of Kriol competence, interviewees would have considered it inadequate to perform formal interviews in Kriol, or with a large number of creolised features. For outsiders, and especially for White Europeans and Americans, using Kriol is considered a cultural appropriation (which is also discussed in some interview passages not quoted here), and using resources that index creoleness would be awkward in formal interviews. In interviewing Creole and English-speaking interviewees in London, Mühleisen similarly assumes that ‘Standard English would here be the unmarked choice (with a predominantly referential function), whereas switches to Creole would then form the marked choice for more interactional purposes’ (Mühleisen Reference Mühleisen2002: 147). Using the interview corpus as an instantiation of locally enacted public English is thus an adequate choice.

9.3.1 Lexical and Morphosyntactic Variation in Interviews

Regarding the use of lexical items, a central observation is that, with very few exceptions, the interviewees use English lexical items. These exceptions are place names, personal names, and some colloquial terms (e.g. derogatory and racist terms). Again, my use of non-local Standard English will have impacted on the word choice of the interviewees (on accommodation theory, see Giles, Coupland, & Coupland (Reference Giles, Coupland and Coupland1991)). At the same time, lexical elements are consciously accessible unlike, for example, syntactic patterns or prosodic features, of which speakers are typically less aware. It is therefore crucial that, although there is almost no influence from non-English repertoires at the lexical level, we find influences from other languages at the structural level in interviews.

As explained in Chapter 4, I analysed a sub-corpus of the interviews from a grammatical point of view. In ten of the interviews, 1,000 words each were examined for local (‘non-standard’) grammatical constructions. The number of 1,000 words was chosen for practical reasons, on the assumption that a relatively short passage would illustrate the diversity of performances of public English. The parts were taken from the middle of the recording to avoid the beginnings of conversations, which often involve hesitation due to the interviewees’ awareness of being recorded. As the topics of the interviews were similar in content and did not contain passages of strong emotionality (no ‘danger of death’ question involved), there are no strong register differences within each interview. The American research assistant mentioned above selected and counted each occurrence of grammatical forms that she classified as not conforming to US Standard English. The results in Figure 9.6 show that the number of such classified non-exogenous forms differs markedly between interviews. Thus, one interviewee does not use any at all (showing that US standards are part of the local repertoire and can thus be used as point of reference), whereas the number can be considerably higher in the speech of other interviewees.

Figure 9.6 Non-exogenous features in 1,000 words of interview conversation

Figure 9.6Long description

A stacked bar graph. The vertical axis ranges from 0 to 35, in increments of 5. The horizontal axis has ten Belizean speakers. The approximated values are as follows. In a high school teacher, Kriol features 0 and other features 1. In a University professor, Kriol features 0 and other features 2. In a high school teacher, Kriol features 1 and other features 3. In a high school teacher, Kriol activist, Kriol features 2 and other features 4. In a University professor, Kriol activist, Kriol features 3 and other features 6. In a University professor, Kriol features 4 and other features 7. In a dyad teacher, Kriol features 5 and other features 8. In a high school teacher, Kriol features 6 and other features 10. In a high school teacher, Kriol features 7 and other features 16. In a primary school teacher, Kriol features 8 and other features 27.

There is only one interviewee in this sample who does not work in education – a diving teacher who resides in the village (no. 7).Footnote ¹¹ Even though he is the speaker with least access to formal education, he uses fewer non-standard constructions than some of the high school and primary school teachers, which is maybe due to his frequent contact with tourists who speak Standard American English. Another important observation is that the use of local constructions appears to be unrelated to gender. Instead, it seems that, quite paradoxically, the use of local constructions is related to negative attitudes towards them. Interviewees 6, 9, and 10 in Figure 9.6, for example, make use of a comparatively high number of non-standard features. Nevertheless, they have anti-Kriol attitudes, are against the use of Kriol in education, and are proud of their use of Proper English. Interviewee 6 mentions that his daughter is only allowed to watch BBC kids’ programmes as he hopes she will acquire a British accent. Interviewees 1, 2, 4, and 5, on the other hand, identify positively with Kriol in explicit interview discourse but use relatively few features that do not adhere to official norms. They mention that they raise their children using Kriol and are writing in Kriol, or participate in language activism in the support of Kriol. It is therefore difficult to argue that the use of non-standard constructions in formal genres is related to an identification with local uses of speech. Rather, it may be easier for speakers who are able to produce officially and internationally recognised standardised forms – those who are able to code-switch (in the emic sense) – to positively identify with Kriol. They are not socially hindered by lack of access to international prestige norms and can promote Kriol as an index of cultural authenticity.

The data confirms Le Page and Tabouret-Keller’s argument that focusing – in this case, the use of homogeneous forms of English in public – can only develop where speakers

1. 1. can identify groups

2. 2. have both opportunity and ability to observe and analyse the group’s behavioural systems

3. 3. have motivation that is sufficiently strong to impel him/her to choose, and to adapt their behaviour accordingly

4. 4. are still able to adapt their behaviour.

(LePage Reference Le Page1968, Le Page & Tabouret-Keller Reference Le Page and Tabouret-Keller1985, cited in Mühleisen Reference Mühleisen2002: 138)

The degree of linguistic diversity in the setting and the complex language ideologies in which several types of prestige coexist make it difficult to decide which would be the ‘group’ that speakers can identify with. Additionally, non-local Standard English is not accessible to everyone, which lowers the chances of having the ‘opportunity to observe and analyse the group’s behavioural system’. Even though there may be a strong motivation to ‘adapt their behaviour’ to conform to ideals of Proper English, this does not imply that speakers necessarily identify themselves as speakers of non-local Standard English, or are exposed to focused norms, apart from passive media consumption. Some speakers do have access to non-local, internationally acknowledged norms, and are able to produce grammatical boundaries between English and Kriol, in other words, they are able to code-switch in the emic sense of the term. Remember the statement in Chapter 7, ‘We are supposed to be able to codeswitch’, indicating that the ability to keep codes apart is an index of education and social status. In Figure 9.6, there is one speaker who uses grammatical constructions that conform entirely to internationally recognised Standard English. It is crucial to know that this interviewee attended elite schooling with American teachers but has never lived outside of Belize. All other interviewees in this sample have been exposed to more variable uses of English in their educational trajectory. The observation of variable and heterogeneous forms in formal interview speech confirms Le Page and Tabouret-Keller’s hypothesis that focusing depends on specific sociolinguistic conditions. Conditions that allow for focusing are not given in the context analysed here, and focused monolithic norms, in this sense, can be described as a Western European provincialism, based on ideologies of the nation state as culturally homogeneous, territorially bounded entity with a hegemonic, unmarked power elite in cultures of standard literacy (see also Schneider Reference Schneider2019b and discussion in Chapter 10).

Another aspect that is displayed in Figure 9.6 is a differentiation between local constructions that seem to derive from Kriol and other local forms (dark grey = Kriol, light grey = other). There are grammatical constructions that are not explicable as interference from Kriol and possibly interact with Spanish. Below is a list of the constructions that appeared in the interviews with examples from the data set and how I classified them. The classification is an interpretive account, as it is not possible in this highly diverse, liquid setting to make a safe claim on where such features derive from on the basis of this small sample – this is why I added a question mark to the legends in Figure 9.6.

Features defined as Kriol:

• Zero copula (e.g. ‘Belize City mostly Black people, Kriol and Garifuna’)

• Non-standard patterns of subject–verb agreement (e.g. ‘Everybody that speaks Kriol understand English’)

• Non-standard tense marking (e.g. ‘We would transition into our Kriol if we want to emphasise’)

Features defined as other/Spanish:

• Article use with proper nouns and mass nouns (e.g. ‘The older ones who keep the English’ [Spanish: el inglés])

• Pro-drop structure (e.g. ‘the score … we want to be 70’ [no anaphoric pronoun ‘it’ after ‘want’])

• Changed subject–predicate order (e.g. ‘That we tend to do here’ [Spanish: Eso es que hacemos aquí])

• Hispanic semantics (e.g. ‘We started to talk more English’. [‘talk’ used with the semantic range of Spanish ‘hablar’]

Examples that apparently demonstrate structural influence from Spanish are particularly interesting. They contrast with the almost consistent use of English lexical items and with the discourse level, in which Spanish is mostly constructed as a ‘foreign language’ (see Chapter 6). Excerpt 9.1 is from an interview with a schoolteacher who has grown up in the village.

Excerpt 9.1

1. 1 I understand the Spanish very well

2. 2 I speak it a little bit

3. 3 I have to as teacher talk it (.)

4. 4 But it’s (.) I don’t talk it fluently because at home I was not ahm pressured to really speak it

The name of the language is accompanied by an article, which is common in Spanish (Spanish form: ‘Entiendo el español’). There is an instance of non-canonical word order in the third line, with an insertion in the verb phrase, which is not impossible in English but perhaps a bit unusual (Spanish form: ‘Tengo como profesora hablarlo’). Finally, in lines 3 and 4, the verb ‘to talk’ is used in analogy with the semantics of the Spanish verb ‘hablar’, which means the ability to speak and the act of talking. The fact that these forms appear all together in the same quote make it likely that they are an influence from Spanish in this instantiation of public English.

Excerpt 9.2 is another example from the same interviewee which similarly displays article use that would be more common in Spanish than in English.

Excerpt 9.2

1. 1 Majority of our children they speak the English and the Kriol only

The first noun majority often carries an article in English, whereas language names, as in the second half of the sentence, do not. Also, the pronoun ‘they’ is used in a resumptive manner, which is a frequent construction in Spanish. A possible Spanish translation of the sentence would mirror the above construction word by word: ‘Mayoría de nuestros niños ellos hablan el inglés y el español’.

Excerpt 9.3 provides a final example from a Kriol language activist who uses pro-drop structures, that is, the non-use of pronouns, four times during the interview.

Excerpt 9.3

1. 1 We try to make everything very relevant where can

As person marking is implied in the verb in Spanish, so that the conjugated verb form expresses the person whose actions are referred to in the verb, Spanish does not use pronouns to the same extent as English does. In Excerpt 9.3, we see that person is expressed at the beginning of the sentence, ‘we’, but not again in the second part of the sentence. This would be a normal choice in the grammatical constructions of Spanish, as the verb ‘can’ (poder), through conjugation, carries the information on person in Spanish. The sentence in Spanish thus would neither have a pronoun with the first, nor with the last verb in the sentence: ‘Intentamos hacer todo pertinente donde podemos’.

An impact of Spanish on the structural level seems credible, although its impact on the lexicon is almost non-existent. The observation relates to discussions on salience, where it has been argued that lexical items are perceptually more salient than grammatical forms (Auer Reference Auer2014, Kerswill & Williams Reference Kerswill and Williams2000). Lexical elements from Spanish are not reproduced in formal speech, in contrast to syntactical forms, which are less perceptually salient. It could thus be argued that language ideologies, here in the form of anti-Spanish attitudes, influence lexical choices, while language contact processes nevertheless lead to grammatical variation in the production of English. The notion of liquid language serves as a fitting metaphor to describe such fluidity. Still, speakers perceive all the above-documented variations as falling within the realm of English that is appropriate in formal and public contexts. Diverse performances of speech can also be captured in the phonetic domain, as we will see in the following section.

9.3.2 Variation in Phonetic Realisations of Public English

The idea to incorporate a sub-study examining phonetic realisations of public English in this chapter arose from my perception that the manner in which interviewees enunciate sounds in the formal genre of the interview seems to be variable, too. On purely perceptual grounds, it appeared that some speakers produce sounds that are more attuned with US English, some produce more Kriol sounds, and some display more impact from Spanish. I found this particularly marked not only in speech but also in reading tasks that pupils had to perform in their English classes, in which I was present. Each week the pupils had to read out aloud in class, taking turns. I found it remarkable how different the pronunciations were from person to person, which seemed to be based not only on different reading abilities.

Although my research interviews were not originally recorded with the intention of investigating phonetic variation, I found it intriguing to see whether my impression could be confirmed by analysing the data with software designed for sound analysis. This section is an excursion into sociophonetics (Baranowski Reference Baranowski2013). The study of sounds is laborious, and, as above, I do not claim to present the sounds of a particular variety. Rather, I want to systematically analyse sound variability of some of the individuals who spoke in interviews. I chose seven interviewees whose vowel productions were analysed in more detail. These were chosen because they were of a good sound quality with little background noise. Note that I do not study intra-speaker variation and, given the small number of speakers, it is not possible to directly compare the degree of variation that is documented in these seven speakers with variability in other cultural contexts (e.g. see Cheshire et al. (Reference Cheshire, Kerswill, Foxa and Torgersenc2011) on phonetic diffusion in contexts of language contact). The impressions given below, which I realised with the help of colleagues from variationist phonetics, are an illustrative approach, aiming at understanding sound variability in diffuse settings.

To document vowel variation, a research assistant who had been trained to use the software Praat (see www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/) at the University of Boston documented the formants of the vowels appearing in the interviews. As discussed in Trommer (Reference Trommer2007), formants represent the pivotal segments of the frequency spectrum that are activated in the production of a particular sound. In the analysis of vowels, it is mostly two formants that are of interest, formant 1 (F1) and formant 2 (F2), which represent the sound spectres that appear most activated in the vowel production (more detailed information, e.g. on rounding, can be detected by analysing a third formant, F3). In spectrograms, that is, in the visual representations of a sound spectrum, which are produced by a software like Praat, the formants appear as darkened parts of the image. The software represents these darkened parts also as numbers, which represent the hertz frequencies of the formants, allowing us to define the specific height and position of the vowel. Hertz frequencies correspond to the position of the tongue, which is responsible for which sound is produced (Trommer Reference Trommer2007). Vowels can therefore be visualised in traditional vowel charts that define height and frontness of vowel production (on acoustic phonetics, see also Ladefoged & Johnson (Reference Ladefoged and Johnson2015: ch. 8)). The research assistant documented the formants in five to eight productions of the following sounds for each speaker: /i/, /e/, /ɛ/, /ə/, /u/, /o/, /a/, and /ɑ/.Footnote ¹² All examined examples appeared in middle and end position of the respective words.

The results were visualised by Frederic Zähres, an expert in vowel analysis from the University of Bielefeld. First, he normalised the vowel frequencies by using the Lobanov normalisation method (based on Lobanov Reference Lobanov1971). Normalisation is an automatised process that is necessary as speakers may produce different frequencies, for example, based on their age or gender, which are not necessarily telling with regard to socially motivated variations of individual vowel sets. ‘Normalization, ideally, aims at the elimination of physiological differences among speakers, e.g. length of the vocal tract, while preserving all other relevant distinctions’ (Zähres Reference Zähres2016: 27). The normalised data were used to create vowel plots, using the statistics software R (www.r-project.org). The final results are vowel charts which represent the hertz frequencies with which individual speakers produce particular vowels. In the below charts, the vowels are represented with the help of Wells’s lexical set to help gain an understanding of the findings (Wells Reference Wells1982). Wells gives a list of words that contain vowels that represent the production of a particular sound in (British or General US) Standard English, for example, the word TRAP to represent the vowel /æ/. If a speaker ‘uses [a] or [ɛ] in TRAP it is taken that they will use [a] or [ɛ] in all other words which contain this vowel, e.g. BAD, LATTER, SHALL, that is, in the words which comprise the lexical set’ (Hickey Reference Hickey2022).

As we can see in Figures 9.7–9.13, the seven interviewees do not produce vowels uniformly. This does not mean that the production of vowels is random (which would make verbal communication impossible). However, there are systematic differences that can be observed. In all seven vowel charts, no vowels are produced in lower frontal positions, as in, for example, a British Standard pronunciation of the word ‘car’ [a]. On the other hand, there seems to be quite some crowding and overlapping of vowel production in back and low positions.

Figure 9.7 Speaker 1 – Female, born in village (copyright: Frederic Zähres)

Figure 9.7Long description

A vowel plot. The vertical axis ranges from 300 to 700 hertz, and the horizontal axis ranges from 1200 to 2000 hertz. It plots eclipses with the English vowels, fleece, face, goose, goat, letter, strut, dress, lot, trap, and thought. The approximate data are as follows. Fleece at (2000, 350). Face at (1950, 360). Dress at (1800, 500). Trap at (1600, 650). Strut at (1500, 520). Lot at (1400,600). Thought at (1350, 670). Goat at (1300, 430). Goose at (1350, 390). Letter at (1550, 460). All values are estimated.

Figure 9.8 Speaker 2 – Female, born in village (copyright: Frederic Zähres)

Figure 9.8Long description

A vowel plot. The vertical axis ranges from 300 to 700 hertz, and the horizontal axis ranges from 1200 to 2000 hertz. It plots eclipses with the English vowels, fleece, face, goose, goat, letter, start, dress, lot, trap, and thought. The approximate data are as follows. Fleece at (2050, 350). Face at (1950, 400). Dress at (1800, 490). Trap at (1600, 650). Start at (1550, 510). Lot at (1450, 600). Thought at (1400, 620). Goat at (1250, 430). Goose at (1300, 400). Letter at (1550, 510). All values are estimated.

Figure 9.9 Speaker 3 – Male, born in village (copyright: Frederic Zähres)

Figure 9.9Long description

A vowel plot. The vertical axis ranges from 300 to 700 hertz, and the horizontal axis ranges from 1200 to 2000 hertz. It plots 11 eclipses with the English vowels, fleece, face, goose, goat, letter, start, dress, lot, trap, mouth, and thought. The approximate data are as follows. Fleece at (2050, 340). Face at (1950, 400). Dress at (1800, 450). Trap at (1550, 660). Strut at (1280, 410). Lot at (1450, 620). Thought at (1300, 520). Goat at (1270, 430). Goose at (1250, 360). Letter at (1550, 490). Mouth at (1370, 570). All values are estimated.

Figure 9.10 Speaker 4 – Male, not born in village (copyright: Frederic Zähres)

Figure 9.10Long description

A vowel plot. The vertical axis ranges from 300 to 700 hertz, and the horizontal axis ranges from 1200 to 2000 hertz. It plots eclipses with the English vowels, fleece, face, dress, goose, goat, north, mouth, start, thought, trap, lot, strut, and letter. The approximate data are as follows. Fleece at (2050, 310). Face at (1950, 390). Dress at (1820, 480). Trap at (1530, 640). Start at (1570, 580). Lot at (1450, 650). Thought at (1630, 620). Goat at (1250,440). Goose at (1350, 360). Letter at (1550, 520). Mouth at (1350, 510). North at (1250, 510). Strut at (1400, 580). All values are estimated.

Figure 9.11 Speaker 5 (copyright: Frederic Zähres)

Figure 9.11Long description

A vowel plot. The vertical axis ranges from 300 to 700 hertz, and the horizontal axis ranges from 1200 to 2000 hertz. It plots eclipses with the English vowels, fleece, face, dress, goose, goat, thought, strut, trap, lot, and start. The approximate data are as follows. Fleece at (1900, 320). Face at (2000, 390). Dress at (1750, 490). Trap at (1450, 580). Start at (1250, 680). Lot at (1350, 590). Thought at (1500, 480). Goat at (1500, 450). Goose at (1550, 400). Strut at (1450, 510). All values are estimated.

Figure 9.12 Speaker 6 (copyright: Frederic Zähres)

Figure 9.12Long description

A vowel plot. The vertical axis ranges from 300 to 700 hertz, and the horizontal axis ranges from 1200 to 2000 hertz. It plots eclipses with the English vowels, fleece, face, dress, trap, goose, letter, choice, thought, mouth, north, start, and lot. The approximate data are as follows. Fleece at (1850, 370). Face at (1900, 400). Dress at (1650, 500). Trap at (1600, 670). Start at (1250, 580). Lot at (1300, 600). Thought at (1450, 510). Goose at (1500, 390). Start at (1250, 580). Letter at (1600, 430). Choice at (1500, 490). Mouth at (1450, 520). All values are estimated.

Figure 9.13 Speaker 7 (copyright: Frederic Zähres)

Figure 9.13Long description

A vowel plot. The vertical axis ranges from 300 to 700 hertz, and the horizontal axis ranges from 1200 to 2000 hertz. It plots eclipses with the English vowels, fleece, face, dress, trap, strut, letter, thought, lot, goat, and goose. The approximate data are as follows. Fleece at (1800, 370). Face at (1900, 400). Dress at (1800, 470). Trap at (1600, 620). Lot at (1300, 600). Thought at (1200, 560). Goose at (1500, 370). Letter at (1600, 560). Strut at (1600, 490). Goat at (1300, 430). All values are estimated.

I divide the seven vowel charts into two groups. These are not based on social characteristics such as gender, place of upbringing, or education. Instead, the groups are based on noticeable differences in the way speakers articulate vowels. The first group, Figures 9.7–9.10, shows vowel productions that are relatively clearly separated from each other. This means that the hertz frequencies at which a particular vowel is produced do not, or only partially, overlap with the production of other vowels. Nevertheless, there is considerable variation across speakers.Footnote ¹³

The speakers in Figures 9.7–9.9 have grown up on the island and all work as teachers. They are also represented in Figure 9.6 on syntactic variations as speakers 6, 9, and 10. They are all speakers who react negatively to the proposition that Kriol might be used in school, or at the very least, deliberated upon in grammar lessons in order to facilitate the acquisition of English grammar. All say that Spanish is the language their parents speak but say that they themselves do not speak it. One of them has had access to elite schooling (international university degree). The lack of overlapping of vowel spaces of the speakers in Figures 9.7–9.9 may be a sign for the speakers having aimed at a very formal way of speaking in the interview. This is confirmed by my perception of these speakers during the interview, where I found these speakers to behave rather formally. The speaker in Figure 9.10 has not grown up on the island but in a region of Belize in which Spanish is dominant. He says that Spanish is his first language and is thus a more active speaker of Spanish than the other three speakers of this sample. He differs in his overlapping of backed and lower vowels. While the fronted and higher vowels are similar to the other speakers, the production of vowels in words with vowels such as in START, TRAP, THOUGHT, LOT, and STRUT overlap to a large extent. The overlapping in his production of lower and more backed vowels may be an effect of interference from Spanish, here possibly leading to a heightened uncertainty with regard to how lower and backed vowels are produced in English. His overlapping, however, takes place in a relatively small range.

Overlapping is much more pronounced in the set found in Figures 9.11–9.13.

The second group of vowel charts displays the vowels of three speakers whose productions are remarkably different from the above ones. The ranges of vowel production are much greater, meaning that vowels have a wider range of possible places of production. The most likely explanation for this phenomenon is that all three speakers have positive attitudes towards Kriol. At the same time, they have had access to elite schooling and feel safe to produce style variations in a conversation with an educated foreigner – they don’t have to be afraid that their use of more creolised form indicates a lack of competence in official Standard English. While the speaker in Figure 9.11 has grown up on the island, the speakers in Figures 9.12 and 9.13 have not. Only the speaker in Figure 9.13 has parents who do not speak Spanish. My overall impression of the atmosphere in these interviews was that the speakers felt relaxed. Gender may be one factor in the production of a relaxed, less formal speech style (me as interviewer being female, too); however, two of the speakers with a more limited vowel production range (Figures 9.7 and 9.8) are also female. It is remarkable that speakers 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6, even though I have classified them into distinct groups based on vowel production, engage in daily conversation with one another. The divergence of vowel articulation thus does not seem to relate to a lack of interaction.

It is safe to say that vowel performances in public English in this setting are not uniform but seem to be influenced by attitudes towards the production of Kriol speech, attitudes towards performance of formality, possibly social distance between interviewer and interviewee, linguistic insecurity, access to education, type of school attended but, apparently, not so much by location of upbringing, and only partially by language background. This implies that children growing up in the community are confronted with a wide array of different possible productions of vowels sounds that are legitimate in public genres. This makes local public English variable and liquid. Furthermore, it shows that approaches that consider speech samples of individuals as representative of territorial communities/languages are generally problematic. Additionally, to comprehend the sociolinguistic factors driving sound variation, we have to identify a multitude of social attributes beyond place of upbringing and social background (as has been realised in some strands of sociolinguistics, e.g. Patrick (Reference Patrick, Chambers, Trudgill and Schilling-Estes2002), see Rampton (Reference Rampton2000b) for problematisations of ‘the speech community’).

Figure 9.14 shows an overview of the productions of vowels of all seven speakers together. The figure does not represent the vowels of ‘Belizean English’ but indicates the range of possible realisations of vowels in the way English is spoken in public by seven Belizean speakers, which is affected by diverse social, conversational, and ideological factors. In contrast to other studies on the production of sounds of the Standard/acrolect in Caribbean creole-speaking societies (e.g. Irvine Reference Irvine2004, Hänsel & Deuber Reference Hänsel and Deuber2019), the above-depicted methodological approach does not make it possible to understand which vowel productions are perceived as indexing Kriol, Spanish, or public English forms, or degrees of formality. A more detailed study of sounds and their potential conversational and social indexical functions would be needed to establish whether such indexical functions are firmly enregistered or whether this is also subject to diffusion. It has been argued in the past that the production of sounds may not necessarily be indicative of social positioning in creole-speaking contexts. Thus, Escure argued already in Reference Escure1982 that ‘[p]honological features … offer relatively little indication of the segment of the [creole] continuum selected in a given social situation’ (Escure Reference Escure1982: 242), here under the assumption that there is a creole continuum). A general lack of focusing with regard to the production of public English sound is therefore likely.

Figure 9.14 Overview: vowel productions of all speakers (copyright: Frederic Zähres)

Figure 9.14Long description

A vowel plot. The vertical axis ranges from 300 to 700 hertz, and the horizontal axis ranges from 1200 to 2000 hertz. It plots eclipses with the English vowels, fleece, face, dress, trap, lot, strut, thought, goat, goose, mouth, north, choice, start, and letter. The approximate data are as follows. Fleece at (2000, 350). Face at (1900, 400). Dress at (1800, 490). Trap at (1550, 620). Lot at (1300, 600). Thought at (1350, 550). Goose at (1450, 370). Letter at (1600, 480). Strut at (1450, 520). Goat at (1300, 440). Mouth at (1400, 520). North at (1300, 510). Choice at (1500, 500). Start at (1350, 570). All values are estimated.

9.3.3 Prosodic Variation: Marking Boundaries through Intonational Patterns

We have seen that speakers in this study display diffuse performances of public speech. At the same time, speakers continue to categorise their language practices as representative of specific languages. The question arises whether boundaries between languages can be marked in other ways, and not (necessarily) through phonology, lexicon, and syntax. This is particularly relevant in relation to the boundary between Kriol and English, as the two are closely intertwined at the lexical and syntactic level. At the beginning of my time in Belize, I often conceptualised speech as Kriol when speakers conceptualised it as English. After a few weeks, I began to notice differences between Kriol and English and felt that these were mostly based on different sound practices. This is reminiscent of the interview passages that were discussed in Chapter 8, in which interviewees describe Kriol as being faster and speakers perceiving words to be shorter, which they interpret as related to their understanding that Kriol is ‘undisciplined’ and that Kriol is ‘a sound’ and ‘very phonetic’. It is therefore possible that prosody and voice quality play an important role in marking the boundary between Kriol and English.

The analysis of prosody is not overly prominent in sociolinguistics but there has recently been a growing interest in embodied sociolinguistics, which aims to refocus on the body as ‘the locus of the speaking voice and the listening ear’ (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz, Hall and Coupland2016: 173). This leads to new perspectives on sound production as a kind of bodily practice. Intonation, the activation of words through the variable use of tone and pitch, is an important aspect of the production of social stances as ‘voice phenomena, like all linguistic acts, in the first instance perform specific cultural and interactional functions (Nielsen Reference Nielsen2010, Sicoli Reference Sicoli2010, Podesva Reference Podesva2013), yet in so doing they also come to be ideologically associated with specific social categories (cf. Ochs Reference Ochs, Duranti and Goodwin1992)’ (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz, Hall and Coupland2016: 179).

I again use interview recordings as corpus to give an impression of different patterns of intonation, which suggest that it would be worthwhile to study sound production, apart from phonetic features, in more detail to understand the indexical semiotics of embodied speech (as realised in, for example, Levon (Reference Levon and Holmes-Elliot2024)). Even though the recordings were not originally conducted for this purpose and cannot be used for a statistically accountable analysis, the data serves well for a qualitative inspection of sound practices.

In Figures 9.15 and 9.16, there are two spectrograms that have been created with the software Praat. The white lines show the pitch (i.e. the specific highness or lowness of tone), produced through different rates of vibrations of the vocal cords. Figure 9.15 displays a passage where an interviewee speaks to me in the interview conversation. Figure 9.16 shows a passage in which the same interviewee speaks to a colleague during the interview. The genre of interviewing elicits a particular way of speaking that is rather formal and monologic. This is relevant in the inspection of pitch differences in the spectrograms in Figures 9.15 and 9.16. In Figure 9.15, the interviewee shares his perception of how Kriol words are fused with each other (‘there’s some words that you say together’).

Figure 9.15 Pitch in interview conversation in public English (white line)

Figure 9.16 Pitch in interview conversation in peer speech (white line)

The pitch is rather low in total, with some marked risings, particularly at the end of the phrase, where the speaker produces a high-rising terminal (Guy & Vonwiller Reference Guy, Vonwiller and Collins1989), which has become popular in many varieties of English. It has conversational functions in narration, such as the indication that a speaker aims to continue their narration (Warren Reference Warren2016: ch. 3). The low and relatively steady pitch, with only some rises, contrasts with the pitch pattern in Figure 9.16, where the same speaker starts to talk to a colleague to discuss work-related matters.

We see the speech of only one speaker in the spectrogram in Figure 9.16 – the speech is presented as overlapping in the transcript as the speed of pronunciation here is indeed faster than the speed of speech in the interview conversation (as an interviewee suggested in Excerpt 8.24). Note that both Figures 9.15 and 9.16 show 6.57 seconds. It was not possible to produce a readable transcript without overlapping lines in Figure 9.16. Overall, the pitch is higher (meaning, the speaker produces a higher F0 than when speaking to me). The first ‘yeah’ is pronounced with a rise and already within the pronunciation of this single word, there is a marked pitch modification. The following phrase ‘yeah yeah two set then Ah come up’ (‘yeah yeah, two sentences and then I come up’) shows the shortened word ‘set’ for sentences, which is consistent with some respondents’ perception that words can be shortened in Kriol (see Section 8.6). In contrast to interview conversation, the pitch is characterised by a marked up-and-down pattern, which gives the speech a particular rhythmic melody, with stress on the raised ‘two’, the raised ‘Ah’ and the raised ‘up’. Another marked raise appears in ‘wrap’ in the phrase ‘I’ll wrap this up’ (‘I’ll finish soon’). The first-person singular pronoun is transcribed as ‘I’ in this case as the speaker here produced the diphthong (‘Standard’) form [ai]. There is an up-and-down curve within the word ‘wrap’, which again gives the speech a dynamic character.

Although it is methodologically impossible to make general claims based on these two examples, it is highly interesting that the two genres of speech, interview conversation and informal interaction, show such markedly different pitch patterns. Content-wise, the interviewee describes his affinity towards Kriol during the interview. As he later confirmed when I asked him, he perceived his interaction with his colleague to take place in Kriol and not in English (Figure 9.16). This suggests that non-referential, sound-related, and suprasegmental variations should not be ignored when studying the difference between Kriol and English and how it is enacted and enregistered in this social context.

Finally, the pitch in the more formal conversation (Figure 9.15) is in an iconic relationship to discourses on standard language. It is relatively ordered, steady, and linear. The pitch in Figure 9.16, in contrast, is iconically displaying livelihood, playfulness, and a particular rhythm, evoking metaphors of musicality. It is likely that the observed differences in prosodic practices are not accidental but are embedded in and expressive of local cultural and historical discourses. In these, English is associated with ideologies of properness and order, Kriol with being ‘undisciplined’ and with resistance to colonial power relations (see Section 8.6). Thus, these pitch distinctions are also reminiscent of the dichotomy between respectability (Western norms of prestige based on ‘proper’ behaviour and order) and reputation (public performance of vitality, liveliness, witty speech), which has been discussed in postcolonial theory (see Section 6.3 and Wilk Reference Wilk2006: 79).

The theoretical claim emanating from the observations made in this chapter is that language is not a phenomenon that can be understood by looking at grammatical structures alone. Rather, grammar is the result of an interactive and complex practice out of which shared conventions may emerge and whose study needs to involve an analysis of cultural concepts and material practices. There is reason to assume that language ideologies impact on the more conscious but also on more subtle levels of speech, from the lexicon and morphosyntax to prosodic features. We have seen that language practices in public contexts, for example, in TV news broadcasting, or linguistic landscapes, can carry elements that would be regarded as non-standard in many European or North American settings but can be legitimate for public language uses in the observed context. In morphosyntactic patterns, the number of non-standard features may be variable on an individual level, which seems to be linked to individual socialisation trajectories. A closer analysis of some of the non-standard syntactic patterns shows that, even though there are hardly any influences of Spanish on the lexical level, there seem to be traces of Spanish syntax in the speech of some of the interviewees. This can be interpreted as an effect of social discourses impacting on speech practice in a context where Spanish is a frequently used but stigmatised code. Features associated with Spanish thus do not appear in levels of language that are easily accessible on a conscious level but do have an impact on the less salient structures of morphosyntax.

The analysis of the sound level of language has demonstrated that individual variation is found in the production of vowels. Individuals have different vowel sets, which may be a consequence of diffuse social categorisations and an effect of distinct individual socialisation trajectories. Sound variants are not necessarily enregistered as representing specific social personae. Alison Irvine (Reference Irvine2004: 70) makes comparable observations on the /t–d/ distinction that freely varies in Jamaican English because it does not index ‘bad English’; similarly there are psycholinguistic studies that document highly individualised language practices with little social meaning, particularly among elderly bilingual speakers (Keijzer & Schmid Reference Keijzer and Schmid2016). As we have seen, the most variable vowel forms are produced by the most educated speakers, who, as I hypothesise, can produce both, Kriol and internationally recognised Standard forms; in other words, they can perform what is locally understood as code-switching. Other speakers, in contrast, stick to a smaller range of vowel productions in formal interview talk. Speakers with less access to non-local English aim at the production of stable forms of speech in public situations, which, however, do not necessarily conform to official standards. We may interpret this behaviour as an indication of their orientation towards formality. Some of the elite speakers, on the other hand, produce more variable forms and display positive attitudes towards Kriol. Performing Kriol authenticity is, as it seems, more profitable for speakers who can choose to disengage from it by switching into officially accepted norms of English. This is reminiscent of what cultural anthropologist Hannerz discusses for the social persona of the cosmopolitan, whose privileged positions allows them to ‘choose to disengage’ from their culture of origin (Hannerz Reference Hannerz and Hannerz1996: 104). Multiple indexical, polycentric orientations, and several concepts of how to speak appropriately are more attractive for speakers whose repertoires comprise internationally recognised and formally acknowledged standards, as ‘you have to be able to codeswitch’ (Excerpt 7.22) in order to mark social status.

Finally, a brief look at prosody suggests that pitch variation may be an important field for understanding the enregisterment of social difference in speech practice, and maybe this is particularly so where structural, grammatical fusions are common. Interestingly, prosodic variation seems to be in an iconic relationship to social discourses with a long history of marking social difference and producing specific sociocultural values in colonial times.

Similar variations in practices of public Englishes in other settings are likely. The data has shown that multiplex social contexts without focused hegemonic centres result in complex linguistic practices. We thus can infer that, if we want to understand language variation in diverse settings, an in-depth ethnographic access to the historical, social, and discourse–ideological level is necessary to interpret linguistic behaviour (Blommaert & Rampton Reference Blommaert and Rampton2011a). It is on such grounds that we can hope to overcome implicit linguistic presumptions embedded in national and colonial epistemologies. These presumptions often perpetuate the myth of one language – one culture – one territory, and often imply teleological frameworks in which languages are assumed to ‘naturally’ become more focused and more uniform over time.

In the following and final chapter, I develop a meta-perspective on these findings. I discuss what the interrelated analyses of discourses on belonging, prestige, materiality, and of language practice imply for understanding how language is constructed as a discursive entity, for an adequate treatment of creole linguistic practice, and for understanding language as intrinsically interwoven with the materiality in which it appears.