Notes on the History and Morphosyntactic Characteristics of Spanish in Northern Belize

Abstract

The current descriptive analysis provides a sociohistorical overview of Northern Belizean Spanish (NBS), and it elaborates on salient morphosyntactic features of this understudied contact variety, as evidenced in the naturalistic discourse of bilinguals/trilinguals from Orange Walk, Belize. In particular, we focus on ‘determiner + uno’ constructions, bilingual compound verbs and gender assignment and agreement in NBS.