Belizean Creole

Common card · No. 283759

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...

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