Notes on the History and Morphosyntactic Characteristics of Spanish in Northern Belize

  • Notes on the History and Morphosyntactic Characteristics of Spanish in Northern Belize

by Osmer Balam

 

Abstract

The current descriptive analysis provides a socio-historical overview of Northern Belizean Spanish (NBS). It also elaborates on salient morphosyntactic features of this understudied contact variety, as evidenced in the naturalistic discourse of bilinguals/trilinguals from Orange Walk, Belize. In particular, we focus on ‘determiner +uno constructions, bilingual compound verbs, and gender assignment and agreement in NBS. Given the change in the status and use of Belizean Kriol among Mestizos, this paper makes a call for further research on thesegrammatical structures. Future work on NBS will help us not only to better understand the potential cross-linguistic influence of Kriol on contemporary NBS, but it will also contribute toour understanding of grammatical outcomes in non-classic code-switching contexts, where bilingual/trilingual code-switching occurs alongside the pervasive use of a high prestige English- based Creole.

 

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Keywords: Northern Belizean Spanish; code-switching; Belizean Kriol; morphosyntax

 

Suggested APA reference: Balam, O. (2014). Notes on the History and Morphosyntactic Characteristics of Spanish in Northern Belize. Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics 35: 79-94.

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