Belizean Creole
English-based creole language
Belizean Creole (Bileez Kriol), also known by its endonym Kriol, is an English-based creole language spoken by the Belizean Creole people. It is closely related to Moskitian Creole, San Andrés-Providencia Creole, and Jamaican Patois.
Belizean Creole is a contact language that developed and grew between 1650 and 1930, initially as a result of the slave trade. Belizean Creole, like many Creole languages, first started as a pidgin. It was a way for people of other backgrounds and languages, in this case slaves and English colonisers within the logging industry, to communicate with each other. Over generations the language developed into a creole, being a language used as some people's mother tongue.
Belizean Creoles are people of Afro-European origin. While it is difficult to estimate the exact number of Belizean Creole speakers, it is estimated that there are more than 70,000 in Belize who speak the language. The 2010 Belizean census recorded that 25.9% of the people within Belize claimed Creole ethnicity and 44.6% claimed to speak Belizean Creole and put the number of speakers at over 130,000. In the 2022 census, 180,792 Belizeans reported being able to speak Creole, accounting for 45.5% of the population, making it the third most spoken language in Belize after English and Spanish.
“Belizean Creole” enters the record as english-based creole language. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Belizean, Creole and English-based can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Belizean Creole” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.