Belizeans of Guatemalan, Honduran, Mexican (including Mexican Mennonites), Nicaraguan, Salvadoran (including Salvadoran Mennonites), and even Cuban descent may speak different dialects of Spanish, but since they grow up in Belize, they adopt the local accent.
[3] In the second half of that century it was integrated into the government of Yucatan in the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
[4] However, few Spanish settled in the area because of the lack of the gold they'd come seeking and the strong resistance of the Maya people.
[5] On 20 January 1783, shortly after the Treaty of Versailles, Britain and Spain signed a peace treaty in which Spain ceded to Britain a small part of Belize, about 1.482 km square[6] located between the Hondo and Belize rivers.
But after thousands of Maya people and mestizos were driven from the area of Bacalar during the Caste War (1847–1901),[7] about 7000 Mexican mestizos immigrated during these years,[8] the Kekchi emigrated from Verapaz, Guatemala, where their lands had been seized for coffee plantations and many of them enslaved in the 1870s–1880s, Mopan returned to Belize around 1886, fleeing enslavement and taxation in Petén, Mennonite Mexicans settled in the north and west of Belize after 1958 (Mexican Mennonites may have intermarried with native-born mestizos and Mexican mestizos),[9] and thousands of undocumented migrants moved to the central and western parts of the country, including approximately 40,000 Salvadorans (including Salvadoran Mennonites), Guatemalans, Hondurans and Nicaraguans immigrated to Belize in this decade of strife in neighboring countries between 1980 and 1990,[10] this, along with a high fertility rate, dramatically increased the number of Hispanics in Belize, causing concern over the rapid growth of the Spanish language in a country where the official language is English.