ABSTRACT
This chapter presents data from an ethnographic field study on language ideologies conducted in Belize, Central America. It focuses on the fact that all interviewees reject the existence of ‘Belizean English,’ which has to do with transnational social entanglements and with local linguistic complexity. In particular, the role of Kriol as indexing national belonging, in the face of a demographic majority of Spanish speakers, adds to my interviewees feeling no need to develop a national standard of English. In addition, they orient towards international imaginations of English which they do not necessarily project as suppressive ‘coloniser language.’ This leads to a discussion of questioning Western epistemologies of language that typically consider teleological paths towards the stabilisation of language on national levels and often assume postcolonial speakers as developing emic, that is, national norms. The same is not conjectured from, for example, speakers who are classified as ‘foreign language learners’ or as being from the ‘expanding circle.’ Overall, the chapter indicates the relevance of multiple historical and contemporary cultural orientations in understanding complex uses of English in postcolonial but also other settings.
