Lobster, tourism and other kinds of business. Economic opportunity and language choice in a multilingual village in Belize

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the interaction of economic opportunity and language choice. On the basis of ethnographic and interview data, I show language ideologies and patterns of language choice in a multilingual Belizean village to be related to economic activity. In the case in question, fishing, international tourism, transnational trade and work migration are crucial in understanding complex patterns of language ideology and use. The main argument is that economic practice is central in the development of social relations and thus of language ideologies. On a theoretical level, this implies that the discursive construction of a language (as Spanish, English or German) is linked to economic conditions. Where economic and political power structures co-occur, the emergence of clearly defined cultural and thus linguistic categories seems to be more likely.

Dieser Artikel diskutiert den Zusammenhang von ökonomischer Praxis und Sprachwahl. Auf der Basis von ethnographischen Daten und Interviews, zeige ich auf, dass Mehrsprachigkeit und Muster von Sprachwahl abhängig sind von ökonomischen Bedingungen. Im hier gezeigten Beispiel sind Fischerei, internationaler Tourismus, transnationaler Handel und Arbeitsmigration wichtige Faktoren, um komplexe Konstellationen Sprachideologie und Sprachgebrauch zu verstehen. Das Hauptargument des Artikels ist, dass ökonomische Praxis bei der Entstehung sozialer Beziehungen – und daher für Sprachideologie – zentral ist. Auf der theoretischen Ebene impliziert dies, dass die diskursive Konstruktion von einer Sprache (wie etwa Spanisch, Englisch oder Deutsch) verknüpft ist mit ökonomischen Verhältnissen. Das gleichzeitige Auftreten von ökonomischen und politischen Machtstrukturen scheint ein zentrales Element für das Aufkommen von klar definierten kulturellen und daher linguistischen Einheiten zu sein.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism – language ideology – economy – language choice – superdiversity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Britta Schneider is a sociolinguist at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her general research interests are the sociolinguistics of globalisation, multilingualism, language ideology, English and transnationalism, language ideologies and music, language policy, linguistic ethnography and the epistemology of language. She is currently working on language ideologies in Belize and on uses of English in the ‘expanding circle’ to study the symbolic functions of languages in contexts where ethnic communities and language choice are not congruent. She has been working in the field since 2004 and, besides various book chapters and journal articles, her publications include Salsa, language and transnationalism, an ethnographic study on language ideologies in transnational communities, published with Multilingual Matters in 2014, and Linguistic human rights and migrant languages – A comparative analysis of migrant language education in Great Britain and Germany, published in 2005.

Notes

1 According to constructivist approaches to discourse, any discourse is of ideological nature (see e.g. Woolard, 1998, p. 7).

2 Note that terms that here refer to racial classifications are understood as discursively constructed, with a particular problematic but socially meaningful history.

3 The spelling with ‘K’ has been introduced by language activists and refers to the language only. ‘Creole’ refers to the ethnic group of people of Euro-African descent. The historical development of Kriol into a symbol of Belizeaness is described in Le Page’s and Tabouret-Keller’s study Acts of Identity (1985, on the contemporary situation of Kriol, see also Balam, 2013; Salmon, 2015, p. 607).

4 The term is not understood in a derogatory manner. Nevertheless, language activists typically aim at making Kriol as distinct from English as possible to express that it is a ‘real’ language and not a dialect of English.

5 On the Belize-Guatemala case today, see e.g. http://amandala.com.bz/news/guat-passport-offensive/. For the Guatemalan perspective, see e.g. http://www.minex.gob.gt/ADMINPORTAL/Data/DOC/20100929165035248SintesisdelDiferendojunio2010.pdf, 2010.

6 There are no exact data on the number of overnight tourists on the island; however, the overall number of overnight tourists in Belize in 2015 was 341,125 (Amandala, 23.01.2016) and in previous years, 5.8% of all hotel revenues in Belize were made in the village (Belize Tourism Board, 2013). This adds up to about 20,000 tourists a year. The number does not include private (e.g. airbnb) accommodation nor tourists who do not stay overnight (e.g. cruise passengers, whose overall number in Belize was 957,975 in 2015). For ethical reasons, I do not mention the name of the island.

7 Note that these meta-linguistic discourses do not necessarily imply that speakers have stopped using Spanish – the language ideological level impacts on how people consider their own linguistic affiliations and several times I heard people using Spanish who before had declared that they had no active proficiency in the language.

8 Local myth has it that there was a law in colonial times that lobster was to be given to prisoners only once a week (not more) as it was considered unworthy. The selling price therefore seems to have been very low but already very high in the US.

9 E.g. by extending student or tourism visa (Straughan, 2017).

10 Note, however, that the population of Belize City is about 60,000 and that therefore the number of killings is high only in relation to the small size of the city.

11 The construction of ‘non-standardness’ may be somewhat paradoxical. An increase of popularity of a language and its use in mass media, for example, may contribute to its homogenisation, even where it is popular because it indexes non-standardness. This phenomenon may be observed in different contexts worldwide, for the case of a recently instigated West African creole radio service, see e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-38000387 (thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the information).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [Grant Number 1353/2-1].