Belizean culture: an English-speaking state with a Spanish-speaking majority

How the census shares have shifted

The Statistical Institute of Belize released the key findings of its 2022 census on 8 April 2024. It counted a household population of 397,483, up 23% from 2010, with a median age of 25 against 21 in 2010. The ethnic question produced this distribution:

Those shares describe a reversal. Creoles, people of largely African and British descent, were the largest group in the colony and the first decades of the independent state. From the 1960s many emigrated to the United States, the United Kingdom and the West Indies, and from the 1980s refugees from the civil wars in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras arrived. Britannica dates the shift to migration since the 1970s and notes that the descendants of those refugees made up about four-fifths of the foreign-born population by the early 21st century. The US census counts Belizeans in its own categories, and the US State Department estimates upward of 100,000 people of Belizean origin in the United States, as Wikipedia records.

The census word Mestizo means something specific here. Britannica defines Belizean mestizos as people of mixed Maya and Spanish ancestry, and the first of them came south from Yucatán in 1847 during the Caste War and settled mostly in Corozal and Orange Walk. Central American immigrants are counted under the same heading, and Wikipedia describes their customs as distinct from those of the Yucatec Mestizos, with dishes such as the pupusas of El Salvador and the baleadas of Honduras. Smaller communities arrived with the colony's labour schemes. The first indentured Indians landed in 1858 to work the sugar estates, and their descendants live mostly in the Corozal and Toledo districts; the 2010 census counted them at 3.9% of the population. Sugar estates also brought 474 Chinese workers in 1865, and the 20th century added settlers from China, Syria and Lebanon, among them families who became prominent in commerce and politics. Belize's citizenship-by-investment programme, begun in 1986, drew many Chinese migrants in the 1990s, including people from Hong Kong seeking a second passport before 1997.

The Maya share covers three peoples: Yucatec Maya in the north and Mopan and Q'eqchi' in the south, chiefly in Toledo District.

Which languages Belizeans speak

English is the only official language, used in government and schooling and in most media. Much of daily life runs in other languages. Belizean Creole, or Kriol, developed during slavery from English with a substrate of West African, Bantu and Miskito languages, and Wikipedia estimates that about 45% of Belizeans speak it; it is used across ethnic lines and even in debates of the House of Representatives. Between Kriol and English runs a continuum of intermediate forms, as happens wherever a creole lives beside the language it drew its words from.

Spanish was banned in colonial schools and is now widely spoken; in the northern districts a mixture with Kriol known as Kitchen Spanish is heard, in Corozal and San Pedro among other places. Three Mayan languages are spoken: Yucatec, Q'eqchi' and Mopan, the last of them classed as endangered. Garifuna, an Arawakan language with many Carib and English loanwords, is spoken on the southern coast. The Mennonite communities speak Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect, about 6,900 of them in the mid-1990s, and use Standard German for reading the Bible; the Old Order Mennonites who came from the United States and Canada in the late 1960s speak Pennsylvania Dutch.

Over half the population is multilingual, Wikipedia records. On literacy the sources disagree by a wide margin. Britannica gives more than nine-tenths of people aged 14 and over as literate, and Wikipedia gives an estimate of 79.7% as of 2010, without either stating the test used.

How the Garifuna held on to their language

UNESCO first proclaimed "Language, dance and music of the Garifuna" in 2001 and inscribed them in 2008 on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, as one element covering Garifuna communities in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Belize. The listing describes a language that "has survived centuries of discrimination and linguistic domination", tales called úraga once recited at wakes and large gatherings, and songs that carry knowledge of cassava growing, fishing, canoe building and the making of baked mud houses, often with a strong streak of satire.

UNESCO's description also records the pressures on it, economic migration and discrimination above all, along with the absence of Garifuna from the school system; the language was then taught in only one village. The elders keep most of the ceremonies and oral traditions.

Garifuna communities in Belize sit along the southern coast at Dangriga, Seine Bight, Punta Gorda and Punta Negra. Their arrival is dated to 19 November 1832, and that date, Garifuna Settlement Day, became a public holiday. The most widely known Garifuna musician, Andy Palacio, who lived from 1960 to 2008, blended traditional Garifuna music with punta rock to stimulate interest in the culture and the language, as Britannica records.

What the churches' shares show

Belize is a Christian country that has stopped being a Catholic-majority one. The data organisation PROLADES counted 64.6% Catholics in 1971; the share was 57% in 1991 and 49% in 2000. The 2010 census, the latest with religion in these sources, recorded 40.1% Catholic, 31.8% Protestant, 1.7% Jehovah's Witnesses, 10.3% other religions and 15.5% with no religion. Pentecostals made up 8.4% of the population, Adventists 5.4%, Anglicans 4.7% and Mennonites 3.7%.

The Protestant share has old and new layers. Anglican and Mennonite churches came with British and German-speaking settlers, while the Pentecostal and Adventist growth belongs to the wider spread of evangelical churches across Latin America. The Mennonite communities, which came from Canada and Mexico from the late 1950s, administer their own local government and run their own schools. Among other faiths, the Association of Religion Data Archives estimated 7,776 Bahá'ís in 2005, and the 2010 census recorded 577 Muslims. Schools themselves are mostly church-run: Britannica describes most as government-subsidised parochial schools, chiefly Roman Catholic.

What Belizean cooking is built on

Britannica names corn tortillas as a staple across every group, along with stewed chicken and rice and beans. Breakfast, called "drinking tea", is built on tortillas or on johnny cakes and fry jacks, which are fried pieces of dough, eaten with refried beans, eggs and cheese. The midday meal is the main one; some schools and businesses close for it.

Each community brings its own dishes to that base. Garifuna cooking relies on fish and cassava cooked with coconut: hudut is mashed green plantain in a fish stew cooked in coconut milk, and ereba is cassava bread. Mestizo and Yucatec Maya cooking gives tamales steamed in banana leaves, escabeche, an onion soup, relleno, empanadas, panades, fried corn shells filled with beans or fish, and chirmole, a black soup made with black recardo. Maya households cook mainly with maize, beans and squash. Creole cooking is known for its stews.

One game dish has a story. The gibnut, a tailless rodent, is listed on many menus as "royal rat" because the British press objected to its being served to Queen Elizabeth II in 1985. Rum, made locally from sugarcane molasses, is often mixed with coconut water. Local beer is common too.

Which days the calendar sets aside

Most public holidays follow the Commonwealth and Christian calendars, and a few are Belize's own. The ninth of March honours Baron Bliss, a British resident who died while on holiday in Belize and left his fortune to build libraries, schools and other institutions, including the Baron Bliss Institute; the day was later renamed Heroes and Benefactors' Day. Garifuna Settlement Day falls on 19 November.

September is a month of its own. St George's Caye Day on 10 September recalls the battle of 1798 against Spain, and Independence Day on 21 September marks 1981; together with Carnival and its Road March, usually held on the Saturday before the tenth, they form the September Celebrations. In some places Carnival is kept at its traditional time before Lent. On Ambergris Caye the San Pedro Costa Maya Festival is held each August.

Belizean folklore keeps its own cast: Anansi, the cadejo, the Tata Duende, La Llorona, La Sucia, the Xtabay, the Sisimite and Lang Bobi Suzi.

How punta and brukdown grew from ritual and work

Two musical forms came out of two histories. Punta is Garifuna music, and punta rock is the hybrid that blends it with soca, calypso, reggae, merengue, salsa and hip-hop. Paranda, slower and more melodic, is a related Garifuna form; the Punta Gorda singer Paul Nabor recorded "Naguya Nei", regarded as an informal anthem of the Garifuna. Brukdown came out of the logging camps, where workers beat rhythms on bottles, tables and cans. Britannica traces it to that percussion and Wikipedia to a logging dance called buru, and Britannica notes it is heard less often than it once was; Wilfred Peters and Leela Vernon were among its best-known performers.

Other communities keep their own music. The marimba carries Mestizo dances such as the Hog-Head and the Zapateado in the north. Reggaeton and banda have grown there in recent years. The Belize National Dance Company, founded in 1990, performs at home and abroad.

The country's best-known novelist is Zee Edgell. Beka Lamb, published in 1982, follows a Creole girl in Belize City during the nationalist 1950s, and Time and the River, from 2007, is set in the slave society of the early 19th century. The National Institute of History and Culture manages archaeological and cultural sites; the Image Factory Art Foundation, founded in 1995, shows contemporary Belizean art, and the Belize City Museum occupies a former colonial prison.

Which sports and papers Belizeans follow

Britain left football and some cricket, and the United States left basketball and softball. Belize joined FIFA in 1986, and each district fields a semiprofessional football side. The national basketball team won the CARICOM championship in 1998 and the Central American Games title in 2001. Cycling has been followed since 1928, and the Holy Saturday Cross Country Cycling Classic is a principal event of the sporting year; La Ruta Maya, a four-day canoe race of 290 kilometres from San Ignacio to Belize City, is held each March. On Easter day Dangriga holds a fishing tournament scored on the size, species and number of the catch, with the results broadcast on local radio. Belize made its first Olympic appearance as an independent country at Los Angeles in 1984, after three as British Honduras.

The press is weekly and partisan. There is no daily newspaper; The Belize Times speaks for the People's United Party and The Guardian for the United Democratic Party, while The Reporter and Amandala are independent. The Belize Broadcasting Network, privatised in 1998, broadcasts in English and Spanish, and those with a television watch mostly foreign programmes: Mexican soap operas and North American sport, in Britannica's description.