The data I report on in this chapter are of three types. None of these were collected with a particular research focus on language attitudes, although of course the question of speakers’ attitudes toward Garifuna, English, and Belizean Creole was never far from my mind. These observations come from informal interactions and conversations with villagers, the results of a survey I conducted with teachers in the four rural Garinagu communities, and, during more formal sociolinguistic interviews in Hopkins, speakers’ answer to the question “What is your first language?”
5.1.1 Observations in the community
The first type of data, as I mentioned above, come from informal interactions and conversations with villagers. These ethnographic observations take place in a variety of contexts, and include both comments made directly to me and conversations between others to which I was party. Some of them come from the time I spent observing four families in the village (described in Chapter 2). Direct quotes from speakers and
descriptions of interactions between speakers are included throughout this chapter to illustrate speaker attitudes toward Garifuna and toward BC.
5.1.2 Teacher Survey
The teacher survey (Appendix) was a simple one-page survey designed to be an easy method of eliciting information on primary school students’ first language and on teachers’ preferred language of communication in the classroom. It was conducted in each of the four rural Garinagu communities in Belize: Hopkins, Seine Bight, Georgetown and Barranco24 (see Figure 2.1 for a map of the communities); the sample is shown in Table 5.1. Village N of teachers surveyed N of students represented Total N of students in school Hopkins 14 (all) 339 339 Georgetown 8 (all) 183 183 Seine Bight 14 316 480 Barranco 3 (all) 36 36
Table 5.1: Teacher survey sample
In Hopkins, I took advantage of a teacher workshop day to ask teachers to fill out the survey and afterwards, to explain a little about my project, my interest in what made Hopkins different from other Garinagu communities in terms of its maintenance of the Garifuna language, and my question of whether young people in Hopkins were now
24 Although Libertad, in the northern Corozal district, is also considered a rural Garinagu
community, it does not have a high population of Garifuna speakers and I do not include it in any of my discussion, nor was it included in the communities I surveyed with the teacher survey.
moving away from Garifuna in favor of English or Creole. In Seine Bight, Georgetown and Barranco, where I was less well-known to teachers and the principal, I either asked in advance to spend a day at the school talking to teachers and students (as in Barranco, where I spent a few days in the village), or arrived at the school in the morning and, going through the principal, attempted to talk to each of the teachers before the end of the school day. The day I was in Seine Bight there were a few teachers who were out sick and so I was unable to include all of the teachers in my survey.
Not all the results of the teacher survey are presented in this chapter. In fact, in this chaper I focus mainly on teacher’s comments in the margins and in the comments section of the survey, and show how these comments are illustrative of teachers’ attitudes toward Garifuna, English, and BC, and thus the covert and overt language ideologies that are trasmitted to children in the context of primary school. There are a few children living in Hopkins who attend primary school outside of the village, and this is doubtless true in Seine Bight, Georgetown and Barranco as well, but in each of these villages the vast majority of the children who live in the village full-time also attend primary school in the village. Thus the attitudes that they are exposed to by the teachers and peers in primary school are a predominant factor in developing children’s language ideologies.
5.1.3 “What is your first language”
In the course of formal sociolinguistic interviews carried out with speakers in Hopkins (described further in Chapter 2), I asked speakers, usually in English, what they considered their first, second, third, and, if relevant, fourth language. With children, I also
asked them to tell me about which language they felt they used the most with their parents, and with their friends.
Instead of taking interviewees’ responses to be indicative of their language dominance, which is difficult for anyone to judge even of themselves, I consider their response to this question to be indicative of their language attitudes, following McCarty et al (2006:38), who recognize “that self-assessments of language proficiency are complex and problematic [but that] they are nonetheless important indicators of local perceptions of language use and vitality that have implications for language choices.” Every one of twenty-five speakers25 listed Garifuna, some listed English, and fewer listed Creole as one of their three languages, a finding that I believe reflects differing degrees of prestige of the three languages, rather than a hierarchy of language proficiency or dominance in the community.