Belizean Creole

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. However, the vast majority of Creole speakers live in the districts of Belize and Stann Creek on the east coast. It is estimated that there are as many as 85,000 Creoles that have migrated to the United States and may or may not still speak the language. Belizean Creole is the first language of some Garifunas, Mestizos, Maya, and other ethnic groups. When the National Kriol Council began standardising the orthography of the language, it decided to promote the spelling Kriol, though they continue to use the spelling Creole to refer to...