Honduras/Bay Islands English

Abstract

Introduction The Bay Islands (‘Islas de la Bahía’) is the smallest of the eighteen departments of the Republic of Honduras. The three main islands of the group, Roatan, Guanaja and Utila, lie between 30 and 64 km north of the mainland, and about 170 km southeast of Belize City. Spanish is the official language of Honduras and the native language of more than 95 per cent of the country's population. Despite constitutional recognition of minority languages since 1995, Spanish is unchallenged as the sole language of the state educational and judicial systems. English does enjoy recognition as the language of an ethnic group – though not as an indigenous language of Honduras. It is listed alongside seven indigenous languages: Garifuna, Miskito and the Amerindian languages Lenca, Chorti, Tolupan, Pech and Tawahka. English is seen as the heritage language of a specific ethnic denomination, the ‘negros ingleses’: people of Afro-Caribbean descent whose English- or English-creole-speaking ancestors came to Honduras in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The last official state census (2001) gives the population of this group as 12,370, making it the fifth largest ethnic group behind Lenca (with an extinct language), Garifuna, Miskito and Chorti. There are two distinct subgroups of ‘negros ingleses’. It is important to distinguish these, as only one has managed to maintain a viable English-speaking community. The first group consisted of emigrants who settled on the Bay Islands in the years following slave-emancipation.

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