Cover not available
Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 31:2 (2016) ► pp.316–360

Language variation and dimensions of prestige in Belizean Kriol

| USA
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.
Published online: 21 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.31.2.04sal
References (81)
Belize National Standards and Curriculum Web for Language Arts, 2008. [URL]. (3 March, 2013.)
Belize Population and Housing Census, 2010. [URL][URL]. (25 October, 2013.)
Bonner, Donna. 2001. Garifuna children’s language shame: Ethnic stereotypes, national affliation, and transnational immigration as factors in language choice in southern Belize. Language in Society 301. 81–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Katherine. 2009. The nature of sociolinguistic perception. Language Variation and Change. 211. 135–156. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. Sociolinguistics and perception. Language and linguistics compass 41. 377–389. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Katherine. et al. 2013. Language attitude surveys. In Christine Mallinson, et al. (eds.). Data collection in sociolinguistics, 142–16. NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Charles Li & Sandra Thompson (eds.), Subject and topic, 25–55. NY: Academic.Google Scholar
Cooper, Robert. 1975. Introduction to language attitudes II. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 61. 5–9.Google Scholar
Craig, Dennis. 2006. From vernacular to standard English: Teaching language and literacy to Caribbean students. Miami, FL: Ian Randle.Google Scholar
Creber, Clare, & Howard Giles. 1983. Social context and language attitudes: the role of formality-informality of the setting. Language Sciences 51. 155- 162. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davis, Roy. 2004. Anansi party: Belizean folktales and poems. Belize City, Belize. Factory Books.Google Scholar
Decker, Ken. 2005. The song of Kriol: A grammar of the Kriol language of Belize. Belmopan, Belize: The National Kriol Council, House of Culture. 2nd Ed. 2009.Google Scholar
Deuber, Dagmar. 2014. English in the Caribbean: Variation, style, and standards in Jamaica and Trinidad. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deuber, Dagmar & Valerie Youssef. 2007. Teacher language in Trinidad: A pilot study of direct and indirect creolisms in the verb phrase. In Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics 2007 Conference.Google Scholar
Devonish, Hubert. 1978. The selection and codification of a widely understood and publicly useable language variety in Guyana, to be used as a vehicle of national development. York: University of York dissertation.Google Scholar
. 1991. Standardisation in a Creole continuum situation: the Guyana case. In Jenny Cheshire, (ed.), English around the world, 585–594. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2000. On the writing of normative grammars for Caribbean Creole languages: The case of Guyanese Creole. In Thomas Acton & Morgan Dalphinis, (eds.), Blacks, gypsies, and language: Languages without a written tradition and their role in education, 52–58. London: Whiting & Birch.Google Scholar
Dodsworth, Robin. 2011. Social class. In Ruth Wodak et al., (eds.), The SAGE handbook of sociolinguistics, 192–207. Los Angeles: SAGE. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duncan, Quince. 1991. Cuentos de Hermano Araña. San Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial Nueva Década.Google Scholar
Edwards, Joyce Anglin. 2002. Anancy in Limón. San Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica.Google Scholar
Edwards, Walter. 1975. Sociolinguistic behaviour in rural and urban circumstances in Guyana. York: York University dissertation.Google Scholar
. 1984. Socializing the continuum: Guyanese sociolinguistic culture as social networks. Paper read at the March 1984 Meeting of the International Linguistics Association (ILA).
Escure, Genevieve. 1981. Decreolization in a creole continuum: Belize. In Arnold Highfield & Albert Valdman, (eds.), Historicity and variation in creole studies, 27–49. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Google Scholar
. 1991. Gender roles and linguistic variation in the Belizean Creole community. In Jenny Cheshire, (ed.), English around the world, 595–608. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1997. Creole and dialect continua. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2008. Pidgins/creoles and discourse. In Silvia Kouwenberg & John Victor Singler, (eds.), The handbook of pidgin and creole studies, 567–592. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Charles. 1964 (1959). Diglossia. In Dell Hymes, (ed.), Language in culture and society, 429–439. NY: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Garrett, Peter. 2010. Attitudes to language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gómez Menjívar, Jennifer. Cybertopias: Global markets, technology, and Mayan identities in Guatemala. Ms. University of Minnesota.
Greene, Laurie. 1999. A Grammar of Belizean Creole. NY: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hackert, Stephanie. 2004. Urban Bahamian Creole: System and variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haynes, Lilith. 1973. Language in Barbados and Guyana: attitudes, behaviours and comparisons. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University dissertation.Google Scholar
Herrera, Yvette, Myrna Manzanares, Silvaana Udz, Cynthia Crosbie, & Ken Decker. 2007. Kriol-Inglish dikshineri/English-Kriol dictionary. 4rth Printing, 2010. Belmopan, Belize: The National Kriol Council, House of Culture.Google Scholar
Himmelfarb, Samuel. 1993. The measurement of attitudes. In Alice H. Eagly & Shelly Chaiken, (eds.), The psychology of attitudes, 23–87. Fort Worth: Harcourt.Google Scholar
Holm, John. 1977. Miskito words in Belizean Creole. Belizean studies 51. 1–19.Google Scholar
. 1989. Pidgins and Creoles. Volume II. Reference survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Huygens, Ingrid, & Graham Vaughn. 1983. Language attitudes, ethnicity, and social class in New Zealand. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 41. 207–223. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kristiansen, Tore. 2009a. Investigating language in space: experimental techniques. In Peter Auer & Jürgen Schmidt (eds.), Language and space: Theories and methods, 528–49. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
. 2009b. The macro-level social meaning of late-modern Danish accents. Acta linguistica hafniensia 411. 167–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. Attitudes, ideology, and awareness. In Ruth Wodak et al., (eds.), The SAGE handbook of sociolinguistics, 265–278. Los Angeles: SAGE. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 191. 273–309. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2001. Principles of linguistic change: Volume 2. Social factors. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lambert, Wallace, Richard Hodgson, Robert Gardner, & Samuel Fillenbaum. 1960. Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 601. 44–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, Richard. 1971. Dialect perception: a critical review and re-evaluation. Quarterly Journal of Speech 571. 410–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
LePage, Robert. 1992. You can never tell where a word comes from: language contact in a diffuse setting. In Ernst Jahr, (ed.), Language contact: theoretical and empirical studies, 70–101. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Liberman, Mark. 2003. Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen??? Language Log posting. [URL]. (10 November 2013)
Liberman, Mark, & Geoffrey Pullum. 2006. Far from the madding gerund: And other dispatches from Language Log. Wilsonville, OR: William, James, & Co.Google Scholar
Loureiro-Rodriguez, Veronica, May Boggess, & Anne Goldsmith. 2012. Language attitudes in Galicia: using the matched-guise test among high school students. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 341. 136–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milroy, Lesley. 1980. Language and social networks. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Mosby, Dorothy. 2003. Place, language and identity in Afro-Costa Rican literature. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.Google Scholar
Mühleisen, Susan. 1993. Attitudes towards language varieties in Trinidad. Unpublished MA-Thesis, FU Berlin.Google Scholar
. 2001. Is ‘bad English’ dying out? A comparative diachronic study on attitudes towards Creole versus standard English in Trinidad. Philologie im Netz 151. 43–78.Google Scholar
Oenbring, Raymond, & William Fielding. 2014. Young adults’ attitudes to standard and nonstandard English in an English Creole speaking country: The case of The Bahamas. Language, Discourse, and Society 31. 28–51.Google Scholar
Osgood, Charles, George Suci, & Percy Tannenbaum. 1957. The measurement of meaning. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Ramclan, Adler & Kirkland Smith. 2004. Anansi ton wahn oal man. Belize City, Belize: Belize Kriol Project.Google Scholar
Ravindranath, Maya. 2009. Language shift and the speech community: Sociolinguistic change in a Garifuna community in Belize. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Google Scholar
Reisman, Karl. 1970. Cultural and linguistic ambiguity in a West Indian Village. In Norman Whitten & John Szwed (eds.), Afro-American anthropology, 129–144. NY: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Rickford, John. 1985. Standard and non-standard language attitudes in a creole continuum. Society for Caribbean Linguistics, Occasional Papers, 161. St. Augustine, Trinidad. [Reprinted in Nessa Wolfson & Joan Manes (eds.), Language of Inequality, 145-160. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
. 1991. Sociolinguistic variation in Cane Walk. In Jenny Cheshire, (ed.), English around the world, 609–618. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salmon, William. 2011. Determiners, parentheticals, and projectability: An experimental approach. Proceedings of Chicago Linguistic Society 471.Google Scholar
. 2014a. Attitudes in the classroom, attitudes on the street: The effects of setting on a verbal guise survey in Belize. Paper presented at NWAV 43. Chicago, IL.
. 2014b. The contrastive discourse marker ata in Belizean Kriol. Lingua 1431. 86–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Soukup, Barbara. 2012. Current issues in the social psychological study of ‘language attitudes’: Construction, context, and the attitude-behavior link. Language and Linguistics Compass 61. 212–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 1972. Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich. Language in Society 11. 179–195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Udz, Silvaana. 2013. Improving Kriol language attitude and English accuracy: An exploratory study, 1-29. Paper presented at the Belize International Symposium on Education, January 2, 2013.
Vargas, Giselle Chang. 2006. Cuentos tradicionales afrolimonenses. San Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica.Google Scholar
Voorhees, Mara & Joshua Brown. 2008. Lonely planet: Belize. Oakland, CA: Lonely Planet.Google Scholar
Wassink, Alicia. 1999. Historic low prestige and seeds of change: Attitudes toward Jamaican Creole. Language in Society 281. 57–92. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Webster, Cynthia. 1996. Hispanic and Anglo interviewer and respondent ethnicity and gender: the impact on survey response data. Journal of Marketing Research 331. 62–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilk, Richard. 1993. Beauty and the feast: Official and visceral nationalism in Belize. Ethnos 531.1–25.Google Scholar
Winford, Donald. 1976. Teacher attitudes toward language varieties in a Creole community. Linguistics 1751. 45–75.Google Scholar
. 1991. The Caribbean. In Jenny Cheshire, (ed.), English around the world, 565–584. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. 2008. When islands lose dialects. Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 21. 2–13.Google Scholar
. 2011. Fieldwork methods in language variation. In Ruth Wodak et al., (eds.), The SAGE handbook of sociolinguistics, 296–311. Los Angeles: SAGE. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wolfram, Walt & Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1998. American English Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn Ann. 1989. Double talk. Bilingualism and the politics of ethnicity in Catalonia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Young, Colville. 1973. Belize Creole: a study of the creolized English spoken in the city of Belize in its cultural and social setting. York: University of York dissertation.Google Scholar
. 2002. Language & education in Belize. 3rd Edition. Belize City: Angelus Press.Google Scholar
Youssef, Valerie. 1996. Varilingualism: The competence underlying codemixing in Trinidad and Tobago. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 111. 1–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (9)

Cited by nine other publications

Hänsel, Eva Canan & Philipp Meer
2023. Comparing attitudes toward Caribbean, British, and American accents in Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, and the United States. World Englishes 42:1 ► pp. 130 ff. DOI logo
Meer, Philipp & Robert Fuchs
2022. The Trini Sing-Song: Sociophonetic variation in Trinidadian English prosody and differences to other varieties. Language and Speech 65:4 ► pp. 923 ff. DOI logo
Oenbring, Raymond & Matthias Klumm
2022. The trappings of order. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 43:1 ► pp. 66 ff. DOI logo
Schneider, Britta
2021. Creole prestige beyond modernism and methodological nationalism. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 36:1 ► pp. 12 ff. DOI logo
Wilson, Guyanne & Michael Westphal
2021. Attitudinal research into Caribbean Englishes. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 42:2 ► pp. 175 ff. DOI logo
Meer, Philipp, Michael Westphal, Eva Canan Hänsel & Dagmar Deuber
2019. Trinidadian secondary school students’ attitudes toward accents of Standard English. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 34:1 ► pp. 83 ff. DOI logo
Rickford, John Russell & Elizabeth Closs Traugott
2019. Symbol of Powerlessness and Degeneracy, or Symbol of Solidarity and Truth?. In Variation, Versatility and Change in Sociolinguistics and Creole Studies, ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo
Salmon, William & Jennifer Gómez Menjívar
2019. Setting and Language Attitudes in a Creole Context. Applied Linguistics 40:2 ► pp. 248 ff. DOI logo
Salmon, William
2017. Language attitudes, generations, and identity in coastal Belize. African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 10:3 ► pp. 299 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.