Overview

Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize examines the precarious state of languages in coastal Belize. In the period following the country's independence in 1981, Kriol has risen to the level of a national language. While the prestige enjoyed by English and Spanish is indisputable, a range of historical and socio-economic developments has given Kriol an elevated status in the coastal districts at the potential expense of more vulnerable minority languages also spoken there. Using fieldwork, ethnographic observations, interviews, and surveys of language attitudes and use, Gomez Menjivar and Salmon show the attenuation of Mopan and Garifuna alongside the stigmatized yet robust Kriol language. Language endangerment studies generally focus on the loss of a minority language to a European language. Tropical Tongues presents a fresh perspective on language shift and loss by examining how large-scale economic restructuring can unsettle relationships among minority languages.

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9781469641393

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Jennifer Carolina Gomez Menjivar is an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. William Noel Salmon is an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a resident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

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