Belize and Nicaragua cooperate on Creole
It’s the subject of what seems like a never-ending debate. But while the public tries to figure out the role of Creole in our society, the language’s proponents are busy putting pen to paper. Patrick Jones reports.
Patrick Jones, Reporting
They’re not your usual spy or fiction novels; but the excitement over the latest books of Creole stories has members of the National Kriol Council smiling from ear to ear.
Silvana Woods, Belize Kriol Project
“Anansi Tun Wah Old Man”–because once you learn fi read and write Creole, which noh tek you long if you cud done talk it–you wahn things fu read. You only learn to read once. You learn by reading a lot. So we have that, we have “Anansi and the Dumpling Tree”, we have “Lazy Simon”, and a whole new set of books weh di come out. Who write di books? We di hold writers workshop, stories from Crooked Tree, we had an excellent writers workshop in Crooked Tree. People have stories, everybody has a story, but we wah gat a story in wi first language weh really got juice in it.”
And the product of that creative energy is bearing fruits all the way in Bluefields, Nicaragua. Creologist Silvana Woods recently returned from the Atlantic coast of that Central American nation, where she assisted with an orthography development project.
Silvana Woods
“What wi di seh is wi noh di stamp out English. Nicaragua on the Caribbean Coast, they have this very clear, they way ahead of us with their Law 28. Weh deh mi weak with was somebody or a group of people getting together and formalising how dehn wah standardize what dehn read and write so that dehn could create the textbooks which they now di start do, fu put inna di system.”
The Creole exchange programme, now in its third year between Belize and Bluefields, coincidentally grew out of a larger effort to keep another local language alive.
Silvana Woods
“Roy Cayetano of the National Garifuna Council made the contact for us because he and Andy Palacio, they were gong to Bluefields, Orinoco, La Fey, places along the coast, to help retrieve the Garifuna language…And in doing that, the people at URALLAN University said well you know Mr. Cayetano, don’t you know anyone in Belize who is doing the kinda same thing for the Creole language. So he in fact turned us on. So there you go with inter-ethnic harmony with the Kriol Council and the Garifuna Council, you know, want to do the same thing with any council as long as it promotes that which we’re born…we become fluent in by age three, the first language.”
“The coast region anthem, that got done, created and done in Creole. We had contact with La Prensa, El Diario to get going a weekly column the same way The Reporter has a weekly “Weh Wi Gat Fi Seh” column. Because the role is to, what you want to do is to uplift people who have Creole as their first language I di the talk bout is (a) standardize a written system. Wi noh di tell people how fu talk, you want a symbol. So just like how people say “puelto” or “puerto” but they still write “Puerto” in Spanish, the same way you need a standard way to represent the sounds we mek inna Creole.”
But sounding Creole and reading the language are two different things. Encouraged by their victory in the linguistic battle, the National Kriol Council is now focused on getting people in Belize to read and write their first language.
Silvana Woods
“Belize is seen as a leader in orthography development in the region. Jamaica, another wonderful link there with Shirleen Wilkenson at the University of the West Indies, and hopefully Professor Devonish. Our own Enita Castillo was in U.W.I. teaching Garifuna language classes. So yes, you can have a culture without language. Witness Orinoco, the wonderful Garifuna culture there where the language, there is only a few very old people still speaking it, but it’s so much richer. It’s so much richer when you can write down; when you can teach and learn in what yuh ma and yuh pa di tell yuh from yuh small. And so their process of language retrieval, say with the Garifuna language, is as exciting as the Creole orthography process in Nicaragua.”
And while the excitement over the advances in Creole is at an all time high, Woods says it is important to maintain linguistic harmony.
Silvana Woods
“We want to capitalise on this language for educational purposes. Wi noh the stamp out English or Spanish. We do need English. Tambien necesitamos Español. But the way to get to it is not by having the child flounder in the sea a language, but teaching the child to creep, and then to walk and then to swim in the international field.”
Patrick Jones, for News 5.
Woods was in Bluefields from the tenth to the twenty-fourth of August at the invitation of the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. An estimated forty thousand residents of the area speak Kriol as their first language. The National Kriol Council will be taking part in the upcoming Black Summit in Belize City where President Myrna Manzanares will be making a presentation on Sunday, September fourteenth.
