Sylvana Woods, Myrna Manzanares and Yvette Herrera proudly display their Kriol Dikshineri.
The Belize Kriol Project launched the new ‘Kriol-Inglish dikshineri’ at the House of Culture in Belize City on Wednesday, October 31. The first 1,000 copies of the first edition were printed by Print Belize through funding from the National Institute of Culture and History (NICH) and the Ministry of Education.
In its 474 pages, the ‘dikshineri’ contains over 5,000 kriol words, their English equivalents and meanings, enhanced by the use of the word in a sentence, its etymology, the parts of speech and variants. The first section, some 360 pages, lists the words alphabetically according to their ‘kriol’ spelling, while the second section lists the English word alphabetically with their ‘kriol’ equivalents.
National Kriol Council President Myrna Manzanares welcomed the dignitaries, students and the general public to Wednesday’s launch. The editor-in-chief for the ‘dikshineri’ project was Paul Crosbie of Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) International, who also had some anecdotes to share with the audience at the launching.
The King and Queen of ‘Kriol Kolcha’, Wilfred Peters and Leela Vernon entertained the audience with renditions of Belizean brukdown music, including Vernon’s hit called ‘kolcha’. Vernon also presented specially sculpted bookends, “A to Z”, to the Governor General Sir Colville Young, for his work in keeping the ‘kriol’ language alive. The Governor General did his doctoral thesis on the subject of the Belize ‘kriol’ language, as Minister of Education Francis Fonseca noted when he took the podium to add his thanks and acknowledgements to the National Kriol Council for their achievement. NICH director Yasser Musa also chimed in with a few choice words of praise for the National Kriol Project and the new ‘dikshineri.’
The Ministry of Education is making copies of the ‘dikshineri’ available free of cost to the school libraries of every primary, secondary, and tertiary –level school in the country. The dikshineri retails for $30.00 but was available for the wholesale price of $25.00 per copy at the launching. If you can’t afford your own copy, simply go down to the local library, as every media house, cultural organization, the National Archives Department and the National Library Service were furnished with free copies.
The Belize Kriol Project is where the writing arm of the National Kriol Council meets paper, and it has published some 15 books in the ‘Kriol’ language since it began in 1993, including a ‘Kriol’ grammar book and several translations of bible passages and hymns into ‘Kriol’. The project has also maintained a presence in the local media with its weekly “Weh Ah Gat Fi Seh” column in the Reporter, and online at www.kriol.org.bz
With the publication of the new ‘Kriol-Inglish dikshineri’, the Belize Kriol Council has saved the language from the fate of some 2,000 other languages spoken around the globe which are on the verge of extinction because they are not written languages. Those 2,000 other languages are dying because only the parents and the grandparents of those ethnic groups still speak their language or dialect; the younger generation understands the language but prefers to speak another more widely accepted and written language.
Sylvana Woods and the National Kriol Council are to be congratulated for keeping the language alive as an intrinsic part of our Belizean culture. ‘Nuff rispek’.
