What Continent is Belize In?

June 15, 2024
by denidimchev@webohub.com +

While the designation of “continent” is not a rigidly enforced term, there is a general consensus that our planet Earth has seven of them. These seven continents are Antarctica, Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa, North America and South America. The issue of continental status matters with Belize because some people’s idea of what makes up North America boils down to “everything below Mexico.” As you will soon read on, this notion is quite erroneous.

Advertisment

As previously mentioned, the definition of continent may have some wiggle room but people generally agree that it includes any large land mass consisting of seven of more countries. The people who discount any country beneath Mexico as being a South American country do a disservice to North America as this means that the continent would only consist of the United States of America, Mexico, Canada and Greenland. Both the region informally known as Central America and the many island nations throughout the Caribbean Sea are considered part of North America. “Middle America” is sometimes used to describe the section of the American landmass comprised of Mexico, the Caribbean and the bridge of Central American countries between Mexico and Columbia.

When you take all of this information into account, it becomes quite obvious that if Belize is part of any continent, it would be North America. This is also amusing when a fair number of people seem to count Mexico as the odd country out for not being an English-dominant nation. Such uninformed people tend to think that all countries south of the United States speak only Spanish, or Portuguese in the case of Brazil, yet the official language of Belize is English, the same language commonly spoken in Canada, The United States of America and even Greenland. For those curious why Belize, a country adjacent to countries like Mexico and Guatemala, does not have Spanish as its official language when those other countries do, it might help you to remember that Belize used to be known as British Honduras and it was a British colony from the 1700s until 1981. While the Spanish considered the British as squatters, the colony continually managed to thwart the efforts of the Spanish Crown to overtake it.

Just to make one final point known, despite being considered a Commonwealth nation, this does not mean that Belize is part of the European continent. Belize has always been part of North America.