ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates that languages, while typically remaining stable entities in literary texts, have multiplex symbolic meanings and analyses with regards to their local, national, and transnational socio-economic, political, and historical significations that are clearly beyond a simple language and ethnicity nexus. Belize has a contested history in which, amongst others, Maya peoples, Spanish colonists, British buccaneers, enslaved and free people from Africa, and Mexican Mestizo refugees from the Caste War contributed to a complex social and linguistic makeup. Overall, due to the small size and the economically marginal situation of the country, Belizean literature is neither well distributed nor well funded. Beka Lamb is the coming of age story of Beka, a Creole girl who attends a Catholic convent school in Belize City in the 1950s. German vs. English dichotomy is all that remains from multilingual heteroglossic meanings of the original text, where English in German discourse is typically associated with higher education and upper-middle-class prestige.
