Belizean Creole

Belizean Creole is a contact language that developed and grew between 1650 and 1930, initially as a result of the slave trade.

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.

Belizean Creole is the first language of some Garifunas, Mestizos, Maya, and other ethnic groups.

[2] This is due to the fact that these slaves, more specifically identified as Belizean "Creoles", were taken from Jamaica and brought to what was then known as British Honduras, which was the name of Belize when it was a British crown colony, before gaining independence in September 1981.

By the Convention of London of 1786, the British were supposed to cease all logging operations along the Caribbean coast of Central America, except in the Belize settlement.

[3] Belize Kriol is derived mainly from English but is influenced by other languages brought into the country due to the slave trade.

In the case of Belize Kriol, the pidgin would have developed as a result of West Africans being captured and taken to the Americas as slaves to work in the logging industries, where they would be forced to communicate with slave owners of European descent.

Belize Kriol specifically developed as a result of many West African slaves being subjected to English-speaking owners; and as a result, these people were forced to create a pidgin language using English as a substrate language which was then formed into a creole by their children.

[12] Kriol is the lingua franca of Belize and is the first language of some Garifunas, Mestizos, Maya, and other ethnic groups.

Many of them speak standard English as well, and a rapid process of decreolization is taking place.

As a result, a creole continuum exists and speakers are able to code-switch among various mesolect registers, between the most basilect to the acrolect varieties.

[13] A 1987 travel guide in the Chicago Tribune newspaper reported that Belize Kriol is "a language that teases but just escapes the comprehension of a native speaker of English."

The 1999 Ministry of Education: School Effectiveness Report (p. 84) notes that "Creole is spoken as the first language in most homes."

[13] In recent years there has been a movement to have Kriol used more within the Belizean education system and in government documentation.

The dictionary brought attention to grammar, as well as the definition of common Kriol words, and the dictionary influenced the creation of a few other books that were solely based on Kriol grammar.

Kriol makes use of eleven vowels: nine monophthongs, three diphthongs, and schwa [ə].

The English past tense marker |d| at the end of the verbs indicates acrolectal speech.

[13] The preverbal marker di expresses the progressive aspect in both past and present tense.

However, if the past is not marked overtly (lexically or by using mi), an unambiguous understanding is only possible in context.

In the past progressive, it is possible to achieve an unambiguous meaning by combining mi + di + verb.

The past tense is expressed similarly: instead of employing mi, the lexical item ɡaan is used.

It can be used as a modal in casual requests, in threats and intentional statements, and, of course, like the standard verb "to make".

[13] Plurals are usually formed in Kriol by inserting the obligatory postnomial marker de.

As decreolization progresses, the standard English plural ending -s occurs far more frequently.

Many Spanish, Maya, and Garifuna words refer to popular produce and food items:[13] The construction of sentences in Kriol is very similar to that in English.

The ordering then is noun + pronoun + verb (for instance, "mista filip hi noa di ansa" – Mr. Philip knows the answer).

The morpheme den is employed to form comparative statements: for instance, "hî tɑlɑ dan shee" – He is taller than she.

There are no morphologically marked past tense forms corresponding to English -ed -t. There are three preverbal particles: "mi" and "did" for the past, "di" as an "aspect marker", and a host of articles to indicate the future ("(w)a(n)", "gwein", "gouɲ").

[5] Mufwene (1984) and Gibson and Levy (1984) propose a past-only habitual category marked by /juustu doz/, as in /weh wi juustu doz liv ih noh az koal az ya/ ("where we used to live is not as cold as here").

[17] For the present tense, an uninflected verb combining with an iterative adverb expresses the habitual, as in /tam aalweiz noa entaim keiti tel pɑn hii/ ("Tom always knows when Katy tells/has told about him").