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

Abstract

The current descriptive analysis provides a sociohistorical overview of Northern Belizean Spanish (NBS), and it 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 these grammatical 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 to our 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.