Language variation and dimensions of prestige in Belizean Kriol

Abstract

This paper provides a preliminary report on attitudes toward varieties of Belizean Kriol in coastal Belize. We used a verbal-guise test with 141 participants, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data in Belize City and Punta Gorda, and we found that the variety of Kriol spoken in Belize City is rated more highly in general along several dimensions than the variety spoken in Punta Gorda. We also found that BC Kriol was rated more highly by male participants from both test sites. This paper is the first installment of an ongoing project, which investigates the linguistic prestige system(s) in place with respect to Kriol by region and among individual ethnic groups in Belize.

Language Ideology, Gender, and Varieties of Belizean Kriol

“…In her essay on gender and prestige-language use in the Belizean Kriol context, Escure (1991) writes, “Few linguistic studies have dealt systematically with sex differentiation in language use, and none in the context of Creole societies” (p. 595). 1 Winford (1991) notes the dearth of language attitude studies in general in the anglophone Caribbean, with this state of affairs reaffirmed some two decades later in Salmon and Gómez Menjívar (in press). 2 In the present article, we report on a contemporary study of language attitudes and gender with respect to Belizean Kriol and so make a contribution to both of these vastly understudied topics.…”

“…We begin with Tables 2 and 3, which are taken from Salmon and Gómez Menjívar (in press). In these tables, we show ratings of individual speaker characteristics, with all Belizean men combined into a single group and all Belizean women combined into a different group.…”

“…In general, Salmon and Gómez Menjívar (in press) find that residents of Belize City and Punta Gorda hold Belize City Kriol to be more traditional and prestigious. They also present strong ethnographic evidence that the people of Belize consider this Kriol to be the most “authentic” having been told many times that if they “wanted to hear real Kriol, [they] needed to go to Belize City and to the villages” (Salmon and Gómez Menjívar, in press). We follow Salmon and Gómez Menjívar in the present article in considering the Belize City variety of Kriol to be of higher prestige than the Punta Gorda variety, and we present evidence of this below in Tables 2 and 3.…”

“…In the next section, we introduce the Kriol language and the Creole people of Belize. This section also includes a discussion of previous work on language attitudes in Belize and the larger anglophone Caribbean, as reported in Salmon and Gómez Menjívar (2014, in press). Then, we present our fieldwork methodology, followed by results and a discussion in subsequent sections.…”

“…If language attitude studies of English-based creoles in the Caribbean are rare, language attitude studies toward regional variation within Caribbean creoles are practically nonexistent. Salmon and Gómez Menjívar (2014, in press), for example, provide the first such preliminary attempts at describing a regional attitude system of this type in two test sites in Belize: that is, Belize City and Punta Gorda. This has provided a useful starting point for the present article; however, Salmon and Gómez Menjívar (2014) make no mention of gender differences at all, while Salmon and Gómez Menjívar (in press) provide only a cursory account of gender attitudes and no consideration of the data across the two test sites.…”