Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Introduction ⇫ ¶

Belizean Creole (autoglossonyms: Kriol, broken English) is the creolized variety of English spoken by some 70,000 speakers in Belize, on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan peninsula of Central America. There is a large diaspora community in the United States (especially in New Orleans, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles and New York City) and to a lesser extent in other Central American countries (especially Mexico and Honduras). Diaspora speakers may amount to as many as 80,000. Belizean Creole is the lingua franca of the several ethnic groups that co-exist in Belize (while English is the official language), and there is a wide language continuum that ranges from basilect to acrolect.

Map 1.

2. Sociohistorical background ⇫ ¶

In spite of its small size (13,000 square kilometres), and low population (312,971 according to the 2010 Population Census), Belize, the former British colony of British Honduras, exhibits both multiculturalism and multilingualism. Such diversity is due both to its pivotal geographical position at the juncture of Central America and the West Indies, and to its tumultuous history. The Bay of Honduras was for a long time a subject of dispute between Spain and England. Unlike other Caribbean regions, Belize was not initially a plantation society, but was primarily exploited for its precious woods. It is generally assumed that the slaves employed as woodcutters in Belize were imported (probably in the 1620s) from Jamaica, which was the closest British colony, rather than directly from Africa, but there is no clear record of the time of arrival of the first slaves, or of their origin. Most slaves were probably Akan people of the Gold Coast (Ghana), or came from Senegambia and Sierra Leone, but analysis of the language suggests other influences as well, notably Bantu (Escure 2011).

As the logwood trade was expanded to other British settlements along the Central American coast, such as the Bay Islands of Honduras and the Mosquito Shores of Nicaragua, there were extensive population movements across the area, due to various skirmishes between the Spanish and the British. As the English colonists were forced by the Spanish in 1787 to evacuate the British settlement of the Mosquito Coast, they then settled in British Honduras with their Miskito allies (Miskito kings were crowned in Belize City). The Miskito-Zambo were a mixed black-Indian population who had established commercial links with the British in the early part of the 18th century, conducting slave raids, and selling captives to the British for the Jamaican slave market or foreign settlers on the Miskito Coast. Other evacuees included English Puritans and their slaves who were routed out of Providence Island by the Spaniards, and had found refuge on the eastern Nicaraguan coast. The arrival of the new settlers (“537 free and 1777 slaves from the evacuated Mosquito Shore”) is noted by Burdon (1935: 45). Finally, another Afro-Indian group contributed to the ethnic and linguistic melting pot: The Garinagu (or Garifuna, or “Black Caribs”) were deported after a final failed rebellion by the British from the Eastern Caribbean (St. Vincent) to Central America in 1797 (Escure 2004b). By 1800, Belize’s population numbered 4,000 people, 3,000 of whom were slaves. Only 300 whites lived in Belize at this time (Colonial Office 1803). The settlement became a Crown colony in 1862 and gained independence in 1981.

3. Sociolinguistic situation ⇫ ¶

Belize’s population is generally identified as including four major groups: Amerindians, Creoles, Mestizos, and Garifuna, who all speak different ethnic languages. Although the Creole group is now statistically exceeded by Mestizos (who are generally Spanish speakers), Belizean Creole is in fact a thriving lingua franca, constantly gaining speakers thanks to its popularity and identity value even in the non-Creole population (Escure 2004a, 2004b, 2005). Yet, English is the sole official language and the required educational medium, which entails an extensive continuum, ranging between two poles: The creole vernacular is the basilect, whereas the official English norm is the acrolect, and intermediate varieties constitute the mesolect. There is no official orthography for Belizean Creole, but SIL International has attempted to standardize Belizean orthography (Decker 1996). All examples presented below were recorded in spontaneous contexts during fieldwork that I conducted in Belize (primarily in the Stann Creek District) over several years, and illustrate the basilect vernacular.

4. Phonology ⇫ ¶

Belizean Creole has seven monophthongal oral vowels, but /ɔ/ is rare and often represented as /a/, and the central vowel is realized as [u] (but sometimes as [a]), as in [sum] ‘some’ (see Table 1). All oral vowels can be phonetically nasalized before nasal consonants. There are three diphthongs:

/aj/, as in baj ‘buy’ or bajl ‘boil’

/ow/, as in roun ‘round’, but often monophthongized /o/

/ɛa/ as in hɛa ‘here’, ‘hair’, usually in words derived from English words ending in /Vr/.

Note that /aj/ corresponds to a merger of the two English diphthongs /aj/ and /ɔj/. There is an additional ingliding velar in bwaj ‘boy’ (but not in bajl ‘boil’). Some speakers produce /a/ with a palatal onset after /g, k/, as in gjal ‘girl,’ or kjan ‘cannot,’ but this feature is far less common than in Jamaican.

The 22 consonants are shown in Table 2.

Voiceless stops are only occasionally aspirated. Like other English-based creoles, Belizean Creole is non-rhotic. The velar nasal ŋ is often reduced to an alveolar (n). Consonant clusters rarely occur word-finally (e.g. disgos ‘disgust’, aksiden ‘accident’). In word-initial position, two-consonant clusters are common (e.g. stiŋre ‘stingray’), and three-consonant clusters occur as well (skritʃ ‘screech’).

Sentential stress is more evenly distributed across syllables, and thus the prosodic contour of the sentence is totally unlike that of the lexifier. Primary stress is often assigned to the final syllable traból ‘trouble,’ aksidén ‘accident.’ Tone appears to play a role in differentiating certain pairs of words, but research remains to be done in this area.

5. Noun phrase ⇫ ¶

Belizean Creole has a definite article di (e.g. di baadʒ ‘the barge’) that marks specific NPs, and an indefinite article, which is identical to the numeral wan ‘one’ (wan mame ‘a mame (fruit)’). Non-specific generic NPs are marked by a zero article:

There is no inflectional marking of gender or case. Plural number is occasionally marked by /z/ as in the lexifier, especially after a vowel or a liquid (e.g. ajstaz ‘oysters’, pilz ‘pills’). More commonly, number is marked by an adnominal pronoun, either preposed (e.g. dɛm pap ‘puppies’) or postposed, as in (2), which also illustrates double plural marking (pilz dɛm):

Postposed adnominal plural pronouns commonly have a demonstrative function as well:

Another demonstrative, used only in the singular, is the preposed element dat (cf. (4)) (and more rarely dis), which can additionally be combined with a postposed element, specifically the locative adverbial dɛ, as in (5):

Personal pronouns (Table 3) generally do not carry case, and they sometimes use the objective form of the lexifier (mi, im/an), often reduced to a nasalized vowel for im/an and dɛm, regardless of their function in the sentence:

Indefinite pronouns include pronouns similar to their lexifier sources: sambadi, samtin, enitin, natin.

Adnominal possessives are usually formed with a prepositional construction with fi/fu + pro + n, as in fu im hows ‘his house,’ but there is an alternate and more innovative form similar to the English pre-nominal possessive im hows ‘his house.’

Pronominal possessives must be of the prepositional type (with fi or fu):

A similar construction applies to adjectival possessives: fi mi daata hozban ‘my daughter’s husband’.

There are two types of possessive noun constructions: juxtaposition of the preceding possessor and the possessum (di laja sista ‘the lawyer’s sister’), or through a prepositional possessor phrase (with either the fi or fu prepositions) following the possessum:

Adjectives are invariant, and precede the noun when used attributively (e.g. wan big dog ‘a big dog’; di ol ledi ‘the old lady’). In predicative position, adjectives pattern like verbs (see §6).

Comparative adjectives use the non-rhotic suffix -a (from -er in the lexifier), but rarely (if ever) occur with ‘than’. Thus Belizean Creole will not say: ‘A is nicer than B’, but rather the equivalent of: ‘A is nice, B is nicer’ (A najs, B najsa). I have never encountered the pas comparative found in other English-based creoles. There is also a superlative with the post-adjectival suffix -ɛs (due to cluster reduction):

6. Verb phrase ⇫ ¶

Belizean Creole has five regular TMA markers (Ø, de, wan, me and dɛ), and a few less frequent markers, such as stedi and wuda (see Table 4). There are also deontic and epistemic modals (mos, ku, kuda, haftu, hatu, sopoztu, fit), and a counterfactual modality construction that is formed on the basis of the anterior and future morpheme preverbal combination (me + wan).

The simple past is unmarked (using the bare stem), and applies to statives or non-statives (cf. (6) im tɛl mi ‘he told me’). Several English preterites have been turned into unmarked verbs (e.g. brok ‘break, lɛf ‘leave’, as shown in (12)). The same applies to the modal ku ‘can’, which functions as unmarked modal, whereas kyan is its negative counterpart (‘cannot/ could not’). On the other hand, there are exclusively completive perfect forms such as gaan ‘went’ (cf. 11), and hadtu/ hatu ‘had’ (cf. 12) that are only used in past contexts.

The imperfective comprises progressive (or continuative) functions and habitual (or iterative) functions. Both are marked by the same preverbal morpheme de, which occurs regardless of verbal lexical aspect: the progressive occurs with a stative verb in (14), and with an adjective (equivalent to a stative verb) in (15); the habitual occurs with a dynamic verb in (16). Other morphemes can also function as habitual or progressive markers, for example wuda in (17) or stedi in (18):

Although simple past time reference is not marked on the verb, a preverbal morpheme me refers to an anterior past event, a past relative to another past (cf. (19)). The negative equivalent of me is invariably neva, which does NOT mean ‘never’, but instead negates a single past anterior event, and thus includes the combined features negative + anterior (cf. (20)):

The combination me de + verb is representative of a progressive anterior aspect.

The future marker wan is a grammaticalized form of the volition verb want, but the homophonous verb wan ‘want’ also exists with its full lexical value as in: Ju no wan a pul wan fu ju? ‘Don’t you want me to pull one down for you’ (in which there is another homophonous wan, the numeral/indefinite ‘one/a’). In some cases, it is difficult to decide whether the item is the future marker or the full verb, not surprisingly since both refer to some unrealized event, which obviously led to the grammaticalization of the verb.

The future marker combines with the anterior marker to produce a preverbal counterfactual structure (me + wan). This form, which has counterparts in some African languages, captures an irrealis modality that refers to an unrealized event, often conditional to another.s

The special locative verb dɛ functions like any other verb, and can thus be preceded by TMA markers such as me, wan or neva.

The verbal behaviour of adjectives is seen in the fact that predicative adjectives do not occur with a copula, contrary to the lexifier:

Adjectives, like other verbs, can be preceded by TMA markers, such as me or wan:

It is not unusual for the verbal predicate to include a pronominal copy of the subject nominal. In (28) the pronoun i has a topicalizing function:

7. Simple sentences ⇫ ¶

The usual word order is SVO.

There is no passive construction per se, mostly because Belizean Creole has no copula and no past participle form like its lexifier, but there is a quasi-passive construction in which the word order of a lexifier passive sentence is preserved (cf. 30–32). In addition, there is a get-passive (patient + get + bare stem) in (33):

Ditransitive verbs include giv, aks, tɛl and function as in the lexifier, that is to say, with the benefactive recipient preceding the theme object:

There are two types of negation markers: Neva obligatorily occurs in negative anterior and negative counterfactual situations. In this case neva is a substitute for *no me. No is used in all other contexts, including simple past (unmarked verbs). The distinctive treatment of negative as a separate "tense" occurs in Mandinka, but also in Bantu languages, and this suggests that Bantoid (Swahili) as well as Cross River (Ibibio, Efik) substratal influence may have determined this feature, which is not widespread in other Caribbean creoles.

With both negators, preverbal negation cooccurs with negative indefinite no when an indefinite notion is contained in the proposition:

Reflexive constructions are often avoided, but pronouns with the suffix sɛf ‘self’ do occur, often in a peculiar combination with pronominals:

The imperative sentence is formed with clause-initial verb, as in the lexifier (cf. 40), except when it involves a subject other than the second person. In this case the construction requires the initial verb mek followed by the full subject (nominal or pronominal), as in (41).

8. Interrogative, topic and focus constructions ⇫ ¶

Topicalization and focus constructions are extremely common in adjectival as well as other verbal predicates. The particle da (labelled top throughout the examples) is the most widespread, and it can occur in sentence-initial position (whether in declarative as a cleft, or interrogative structures) as well as in predicate initial position (where it appears in copular position, though it is not a copula). There is also a less common topic particle a, which appears to be an older variant of the topic particle da (cf. (44)) (see also Escure 2008).

There is occasional, though rare, usage of the English copula iz (‘is’) in the same sense as the topic particle da in Belizean Creole. This use is more common in mesolectal varieties, but may naturally enter the basilect. The following sentence is clearly basilectal (with resumptive pronoun) in spite of the use of iz:

A full NP can be left dislocated, with pronominal copy in the extraction position:

There is also predicate copying with verb fronting after the da particle;

This particle has essential presentative and expressive value, and is therefore extremely widespread in spontaneous discourse, as is shown in many of the examples ((7), (8), (19), (20), (21)) provided above.

Existential structures constitute another type of focus constructions and are consequently extremely common in Belizean Creole. A variety of structures can be used to introduce a topic, mostly based on forms related to ‘have’ and ‘get’: i gat, ju gat, dej hav, ju hav, ga, hav. Such presentative clauses are often followed by a relative clause.

Interrogative pronouns generally occur sentence-initially (often after the topic particle a/da), but they can also occur in situ as in declaratives: Da me wat? ‘What was that?’

9. Complex sentences ⇫ ¶

Coordinating conjunctions include en ‘and,’ bat ‘but,’ and o ‘o.’

Subordination is most commonly done with the conjunctions dat, fu, or ø, and occasionally tu. Absence of complementizer is, however, more frequent, which often gives the impression of paratactic structures.

Note that in the following sentence with zero complementizer, the embedded subject has the 1sg form:

Serialization is not very common in Belizean Creole, but it does occur to represent a time-ordered sequence of related events that are juxtaposed rather than linked by coordination or subordination. There are both V + V + (V) and V + NP + VNP sequences, as illustrated below. In addition, serial structures can also be partially reduplicated for emphasis as shown in (64);

In most cases of sequentiality, events are connected by a trace coordinator, often reduced to a nasal [n], which is so discrete that the resulting propositions function as if they were paratactic structures, and thus appear to be mere phonetic variants of serial structures:

The relative clause follows its head noun. The relative marker is primarily we (for animate and inanimate antecedents). Hu also occurs but only with human subject referents. The relativizer can be deleted in object position and a resumptive pronoun may occur as well (cf. (68)):