Acknowledgments

We are grateful to many people who have assisted us during the course of our fieldwork. This project would not have been possible without our participants in Belize who generously gave their time in answering our many questions. Special thanks to Ms. Leela Vernon and our colleagues in Belize—Yvette Herrera, Anthony Brown, Ubaldimir Guerra, Gillian Flowers, Tracey Sangster, and Silvaana Udz—for invaluable discussions of the language, culture, and history of Belize. Thanks also to Donald Winford at The Ohio State University, to Nigel Encalada at the National Institute of Culture and History in Belize City, and to James Garber in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University in San Marcos. We also wish to thank Osmer Balam, Patricia Cukor-Avila, Geneviève Escure, Carol Klee, Mike Linn, Karen López Alonzo, Ron Regal, and Daniela Salcedo for fruitful discussions and insightful comments as we prepared the manuscript for publication.

We thank the University of Minnesota, especially the Global Programs and Strategy Alliance, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the Institute for Diversity, Equity, and Advocacy for providing financial support for this project. We also thank our respective departments for their ongoing encouragement and enthusiasm for our research, and the University of Minnesota Duluth Geospatial Analysis Institute for preparing the maps of Belize and the Toledo District that appear here. Our gratitude as well to the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota for the Residential Faculty Fellowships that provided us with an intellectually charged space in which to write and reflect on our findings. Early analyses of the data were presented at past annual meetings of New Ways of Analyzing Variation, the Linguistic Society of America, the Berkeley Linguistics Society, the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, the Chicago Linguistic Society, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and at departmental colloquia at Bucknell University, Carleton University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Texas. An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared in the Journal of Creole and Pidgin Languages 31.2 (2016), and an earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in Chicago Linguistic Society 52 (in press).