Belize
Posted on July 15th, 2008 by aj
In July we bounced down to Belize to do some diving. Its only a 3 hour flight from Dallas over the Caribbean and loads of untouched Yucatan forest. Living in brown California it was pleasing to see so much dense greenery again.
Belize has an incredible ethnic mix for a nation the size of Massachusetts. While historically Mayan, it was conquered by the Spanish on their way to Guatemala but not occupied with enough gusto to prevent later colonizations by British pirates. Now there’s a great mix of Mayan, Spanish, English, African, Carribean Natives and even German Mennonites. All of them seem live in a fair amount of harmony and most people have a little of all of that ancestry in their blood. There are some organizations that take urban American youth down to Belize just to immerse them with people of different skin tones getting along as if it were no big deal. The broad range of brown and gold skin and hair with various degrees of kink and blond do make for some pretty people.
The various ethnicities have carried their own languages to Belize as well. Officially the language of the nation is English and there’s a lot of Spanish. But most people speak a creole descendant of an English, mixed African and Caribbean pidgin that’s similar to Jamaican. Its more difficult than you might think to understand. I’m guessing at this, but it seems to me that Kriol has a rhythm and meter as part of its structure. If you can’t fit what you want to say into the meter, you pepper your speech with repetition, stock filler phrases (‘jah love, you know?)’ and ‘mon’ until it does. Kriol and the Caribbean English is spelled phonetically in signs when appealing to a common audience. There’s a minor movement to get Belizian Kriol recognized as a full language of its own. There’s even a “Bileez Kriol Glassary an Spellin Gide“.
Leave a Response