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Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 32:2 (2017) ► pp.339–364

Language shift, endangerment and prestige

Kriol and Garifuna in Hopkins, Belize

| University of Rochester |

This paper examines a scenario of possible language shift in the multilingual village of Hopkins, where the two most commonly used languages are both ‘minority’ languages: Garifuna, now endangered in many of the communities where it was once spoken, and Belizean Creole (Kriol), an unofficial national lingua franca in Belize. It offers a qualitative examination of beliefs about the three primary languages spoken in the community (Garifuna, Kriol, and English) with data gathered from sociolinguistic interviews and surveys in four rural Garifuna communities in Belize. It situates these findings on the social evaluation of Garifuna and Kriol socio-historically by examining them alongside the recent history of language planning for Garifuna and Kriol in Belize.

Keywords: Garifuna, Kriol, Belize, language shift, language maintenance, language planning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Community
  • 3.Kriol and Garifuna language planning in Belize
    • 3.1Kriol prestige and status planning
    • 3.2Garifuna language planning
  • 4.Changing evaluations of Kriol and Garifuna in Hopkins
    • 4.1Positive identification with Garifuna
  • 5.Results of teacher survey
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.32.2.05rav
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