Loving Linguistics in Latin America

After nearly six months of travelling through South and Central America, I have experienced a number of distinctly different cultures, from the heavily European influenced Chile and Argentina, the indigenous Quechua communities of Bolivia and Peru, and the indigenous Mayan groups in Mexico and Guatemala, as well as the ´ladino´mix of indigenous and Spanish that exist throughout the entire region. But I recently encountered two completely different and distinct cultural groups in the Caribbean that I found absolutely fascinating.


A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a small town called Livingstone, on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala, close to the borders of Belize and Honduras, and it was here that I first encountered the Garifuna culture. They are black, descended from Africa, and speak Spanish as a second language, with Garifuna as their mother tongue.


I´d never even heard of the Garifuna people before, but they have a fascinating history that has meant they have a unique cultural heritage and identity today. Way way back in the early 16oo´s a couple of Spanish ships carrying Nigerian slaves crashed into the Caribbean island of St Vincent. They then intermarried with the two indigenous tribes from the island at the time and became known as the Black ´Caribs´.


About a hundred and fifty years later, there was a war between the British and the French over the island of St Vincent. Both groups wanted control, and the Black Caribs fought on the side of the French. Eventually the British won and took control of the island, but they had a problem. The island was mostly populated by Europeans who traditionally kept African slaves, and they didn´t want a bunch of free black men running around the island, so they rounded up the Black Caribs and basically shipped them off the an island in Honduras, knows as Roatan, and from there they moved to the coastal regions of Belize, Honduras and Guatemala. They then went on to intermarry with local indigenous Mayan people, and so the culture that developed was an intriguing mix of African, European and indigenous elements, with a strong emphasis on dance and story-telling. The religion is similarly an amalgamation of aspects of all these influences, a mixture of Catholicism with aspects of traditional African religions and Mayan indigenous beliefs as well.


In Spanish speaking Guatemala you might imagine that they would seem out of place, but Livingstone doesn´t really feel like Guatemala. It was such a chilled out place, accessible only by boat, which contributed to the remoteness, and the lazy nature of the town. I only stayed a day, but the town was interesting to me because it was so different from any place I´d seen throughout my travels. I spent a lot of time just people watching on the main street, and honestly, there was some amazingly beautiful people to watch. Both the men and women had poise and grace, they seemed like giants after spending so much time with the indigenous folk in the highlands, and the had the innate rhythm that seems to come with black skin and African roots.


But I was on my way to Honduras, so I didn´t get to stay and experience life in Livingstone for more than a day. My destination was Utila, one of the Bay Islands also off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. As a keen scuba diver, I was determined to make the most of the tropical waters and the beautiful reef and marine life to snorkel and dive to my heart´s content. I hadn´t really read all that much about the island before arriving, all I really knew was that it is the cheapest place in the region to dive, that was enough for me. I hadn´t even thought about the people of the island and the culture.


So I was pleasantly surprised to find a delightful mix of people living on the island. Descended from a mixture of American, English, Dutch and other European settlers, the main language of the island is English, spoken with a charming Caribbean accent. The islands were the property of Britain until the 1870s or so, but the people from the island were left almost completely to their own devices. People from the island look very European, any of them could pass as tourists from Britain, but they, and their parents, even grandparents and great grandparents were born on the island. The current population of the island is around 6000, most of whom have European ancestry.


It was only a few decades ago, when the Honduran government made Spanish the mandatory language of instruction in schools, that the islanders even started to learn the language. Except they speak Spanish with the same thick Caribbean accent that they use to speak English! The younger generations are bilingual, but older Utilans are mostly monolingual English speakers. Although calling it English might be stretching it a bit... Whenever the locals were speaking to me I could understand every word, but when they started speaking to each other it was a different story.


As a linguist, I found their interactions fascinating, and I spent many evenings covertly observing groups of locals sitting around the streets and listening to their conversations. IThe youngsters I found much easier to understand, and I found them linguistically fascinating. They had a wonderful linguistic phenomenon in their speech known as code-switching. As complete bilinguals they would alternate between Spanish and English, and intersperse the two in all their conversations. The older generation I found incredibly difficult to understand, and I had to strain and use my considerable imagination to even guess the general gist of the conversation. I would love to have stayed longer to properly study their intonation and mode of speech and document more of what I observed, because five days wasn´t nearly enough to begin to make sense of it, let along learn to speak it! But I did find myself affecting a Caribbean nasal drawl to my vowels when I addressed the locals, except my attempt at the local accent had me sounding rather cockney, I fear.


All in all, Utila was a gem that I hadn´t expected. I came down with food poisoning on my first night on the island, so I couldn´t dive as much as I had hoped. I spent most of my time lounging around the hotel, relaxing, sleeping, reading, and generally being anything but active, which happened to be exactly what I needed at the time. And through this, I found an even richer cultural experience, as it gave me ample time to observe and interact with the local people of the island. I left feeling charmed by the people, their laid back slow pace of life, and their delightful Caribbean English.