Belizean Creole


Belize Kriol is an English-based creole language closely related to Miskito Coastal Creole, Jamaican Patois, San Andrés-Providencia Creole, Bocas del Toro Creole, Colón Creole, Rio Abajo Creole, and Limón Coastal Creole.
Population estimates are difficult; virtually all of the more than 70,000 Creoles in Belize speak Kriol. In the 2010 Belize Census, 25.9% claimed Creole ethnicity and 44.6% claimed to speak Kriol. Possibly as many as 85,000 Creoles have migrated to the United States and may or may not still speak the language. This puts the number at over 150,000. Kriol is the lingua franca of Belize and is the first language of some Garifunas, Mestizos, Maya, and other ethnic groups. It is a second language for most others in the country.
When the National Kriol Council began standardizing the orthography for Kriol, it decided to promote the spelling Kriol only for the language but to continue to use the spelling Creole to refer to the people in English.

History

Belize Kriol is derived mainly from English. Its substrate languages are the Native American language Miskito, and the various West African and Bantu languages which were brought into the country by slaves. These include Akan, Efik, Ewe, Fula, Ga, Hausa, Igbo, Kikongo and Wolof.
There are numerous theories as to how creole languages form. A language emerged from the contact of English landowners and their West African slaves to ensure basic communication. The Baymen first began to settle in the area of Belize City in the 1650s. Ken Decker proposed that the creole spoken in Belize previous to 1786 was probably more like Jamaican than the Belize Kriol of today. By the Convention of London in 1786 the British were supposed to cease all logwood cutting operations along the Caribbean coast of Central America, except for the Belize settlement. Many of the settlers from the Miskito Coast moved to Belize, bringing their Miskito Coast Creole with them. The immigrants outnumbered the Baymen five to one. The local Kriol speech shifted to become something more like the Miskito Coast Creole.
Today, Belize Kriol is the first or second language of the majority of the country's inhabitants. Many of them speak standard English as well, and a rapid process of decreolization is going on. As such, a creole continuum exists and speakers are able to code-switch among various mesolect registers between the most basilect to the acrolect varieties. The acrolect, much like the basilect, is rarely heard.
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.”

English taught in Belizean schools

English taught in the schools of Belize is based on British English. However, this is often influenced by the teachers' Kriol speech. The 1999 Ministry of Education: School Effectiveness Report notes “Creole is spoken as the first language in most homes.” Kriol is “di stiki stiki paat” that holds Belize together. Belizean people speak English, Kriol, and often Spanish, while learning the English system of writing and reading in schools. It is a slightly different system of communication from the standard forms.

Phonology

Kriol shares phonological similarities with many Caribbean English Creoles as well as to English, its superstrate language. Pidgin languages have a general tendency to simplify the phonology of a language in order to ensure successful communication. Many Creoles keep this tendency after creolization. Kriol is no exception in this point.
Kriol uses a high number of nasalized vowels, palatalizes non-labial stops and prenasalizes voiced stops. Consonant clusters are reduced at the end of words and many syllables are reduced to only a consonant and vowel.
1. Like most creole languages, Kriol has a tendency to an open syllabic structure, meaning there are many words ending in vowels. This feature is strengthened by its tendency to delete consonants at the end of words, especially when the preceding vowel is unstressed.
2. Nasalization is phonemic in Kriol, caused by the deletion of final nasal consonants. The nasal feature is kept, even if the consonant has been dropped.
3. Many Kriol speakers tend to palatalize the velar consonants and preceding. Sometimes they also palatalize alveolar consonants, such as,, and.
4. Like all other creoles, Kriol also has a tendency to reduce consonant clusters no matter where they occur. Final consonant clusters are almost always reduced by dropping the second consonant. Initial and medial occurrences are reduced much less consistently.
5. When occurs finally, it is always deleted. When it occurs in the middle of a word, it is often deleted leaving a residual vowel length.
6. Although its superstrate language, English, makes extensive use of dental fricatives, Belizean Kriol does not use them. It rather employs the alveolar stops and. However, due to the ongoing process of decreolization, some speakers include such dental fricatives in their speech.
7. Unstressed initial vowels are often deleted in Kriol. Sometimes this can lead to a glottal stop instead.
8. Vowels tend to be alternated for the ones used in English, f.i. or becomes, becomes and so on.
9. Stress is evenly distributed across syllables, meaning that the prosody of Kriol is different than its lexifier. It is reserved mainly for content words an appears to only have High and Low tones

Vowel Chart

Consonant Chart

Some of these sounds only appear as allophones of phonemes.

Consonants and vowels

Kriol uses three voiced plosives and three voiceless plosives. The voiceless stops can also be aspirated. However, aspiration is not a constant feature; therefore, the aspirated and non-aspirated forms are allophonic. The language employs three nasal consonants,. It makes extensive use of fricatives, both unvoiced and voiced (. Its two liquids, and, are articulated alveo-palatally. The tongue is more lax here than in American English; its position is more similar to that of British English. Kriol's glides,, and are used extensively. Glottal stops occur rarely and inconsistently. Kriol makes use of eleven vowels: nine monophthongs, three diphthongs, and schwa. The most frequently occurring diphthong,, is used in all regional varieties. Both and can occur, but they are new additions and are viewed as a sign of decreolization. The same is perceived of four of the less productive monophthongs.

Orthography

Unlike most creoles, Kriol has a standardized orthography.
Consonants: b, ch, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, sh, t, v, w, y, z, zh
VowelExampledefinition
/ii/teef"thief"
/i/ɡi, ɡiv"give"
/ee/bayk"bake"
/e/tek"take"
/aa/gaan"gone"
/a/bak"back of body"
/uu/shooz"shoes"
/u/shub"shove"
/oo/boan"bone"
/o/don"done"
/ai/bwai"boy"
/ou/bout"about"

The symbol choices for lengthened vowels come from ways those vowels are spelled in English, not the International Phonetic Alphabet.
There is a dictionary for Kriol with over 5000 entries, including sample sentences for each word.

Morphology

Tense

The present tense verb is not marked overtly in Kriol. It also does not indicate number or person. As an unmarked verb, it can refer both to present and to perfective. The English past tense marker || at the end of the verbs indicates acrolectal speech. However, there is the possibility to mark past by putting the tense marker || before the verb. Overt marking is rare, however, if the sentence includes a semantic temporal marker, such as "yestudeh" or "laas season".
The future tense is indicated by employing the preverbal marker ' or '. Unlike the marking of past tense, this marking is not optional.

Aspect

The progressive aspect

The preverbal marker ' expresses the progressive aspect in both past and present tense. However, if the past is not marked overtly, an unambiguous understanding is only possible in connection to context. ' is always mandatory. In past progressive, it is possible to achieve an unambiguous meaning by combining ' + ' + verb.
Progressive action in the future can be expressed by using ' in conjunction with '. The correct combination here would be ' + ' + verb.

The habitual aspect

Kriol does not have a habitual aspect in its own right. Other creoles have a general tendency to merge the habitual with completive, the habitual with progressive, or the habitual with future. Kriol however, does not clearly merge it with anything. Thus, we can only assume that the habitual is expressed through context and not through morphological marking.

The completive aspect

The completive aspect is expressed either without marking — that is, by context only — or by the use of a completive preverbal marker, such as ' or '.

Mood and voice

Conditional

The conditional mood is expressed through the conditional verbs ', ', and '. The short version, ', is employed only in the present tense; past tense requires the longer forms.

Passive voice

There is no overt lexical marking of active and passive in Kriol. It is only the emphasis of a sentence which can clarify the meaning, together with context. Emphasis can be strengthened by adding emphatic markers, or through repetition and redundancy.

Verb usage

Special verbs

There are four forms of "be" in Kriol: ', two uses of ', and the absence of a marker. The equative form ' is used as a copula. ' is the locative form which is used when the verb's complement is a prepositional phrase. No overt marking is used when the complement is an adjective. ', finally, is used in the progressive aspect.
The verb "to go" is irregular in Kriol, especially when set in the future progressive. It does not use the progressive marker ' but is exchanged by the morpheme and '. In past tense, this is similar: instead of employing ', it uses the lexical item '.
A verb which is used extensively in each conversation is '. It can be used like a modal in casual requests, in threats and intentional statements, and, of course, like the standard verb "to make".

Noun usage

Plural formation

Plurals are usually formed in Kriol by inserting the obligatory postnomial marker '. Variations of this marker are ' and '. As decreolization is processing, the standard English plural ending ' occurs far more frequently. Sometimes, the is added to this form, f.i. in "shoes de" – shoes.
The absence of a plural marker occurs rarely.

Loan words

Many Spanish, Maya, and Garifuna words refer to popular produce and food items:

Syntax

Syntactic ordering

The construction of sentences in Kriol is very similar to that in English. It uses a Subject-Verb-Object order. All declarative and most interrogative sentences follow this pattern, the interrogatives with a changed emphasis. The construction of the phrases follows Standard English in many ways.

Locatives

Locatives are more frequently used in Kriol and much more productive than in Standard English. The general locative is expressed by the morpheme '. It is possible to use ' or ' instead. This is an indication of either emphasis or decreolization. Another morpheme which is more specific than ' is '. It is used in contexts where ' is not strong enough.
Together with the verb "look", however, is not used and denoted as incorrect. To express "to look at", it is wrong to say "luk da". The correct version would be "luk pan".

Noun plus pronoun

In a noun phrase, Kriol can employ a structure of both noun and pronoun to create emphasis. The ordering then is noun + pronoun + verb.

Adjectives

Adjectives are employed predicatively and attributively. They can be intensified either by the postposed adverb modifier ', by iteration, or by the use of the adverb modifier '. Iteration is here the usual way. Comparatives and superlatives are constructed according to morphosyntactic rules. A comparative is made by adding ' to the stem. The morpheme ' is employed to form comparative statements, f.i. "hî tɑlɑ dan shee" – He is taller than she. Superlatives are created by adding ' to the stem. In all cases, the use of the definite article ' is obligatory. The copula is present if the superlative is used predicatively. An example could be: "She dah di taales" – She is the tallest.

Adverbs

Adverbs are used much as they are in Standard English. In almost all cases, they differ from adjectives not in form but in function. There are, however a few exceptions, such as "properli", "errli" or "po:li". Adverbs can be intensified by reduplication.

Conjunctions

Most Kriol conjunctions are very similar to English and employed in the same way. The main difference is that Kriol allows double negation, so that some conjunctions are used differently. Some examples for Kriol conjunctions are: "an", "but", "if", "o:" etc.
Questions usually take the same form in Kriol as they do in Standard English: question word + subject + verb. The "do-support" does not occur here either. The rising intonation at the end of the sentence may increase even more if no question word is necessary. Thus, most declarative sentences can become interrogative with the right intonation. "Which" has various translations in Kriol. If the speaker means "which", he uses ', but he can also use ' for "which one".

Grammar

The tense/aspect system of Kriol is fundamentally unlike that of English. There are no morphological 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 a. These are not verbs, they are simply invariant particles which cannot stand alone like the English "to be". Their function differs also from the English.
The progressive category is marked by. Past habitual is marked by or. Present habitual aspect is unmarked but can be indicated by "always", "usually", etc.. Mufwene and Gibson and Levy propose a past-only habitual category marked by as in
For the present tense, an uninflected verb combining with an iterative adverb marks habitual meaning as in .
Like many other Caribbean Creoles and have a number of functions, including:
The pronominal system of Standard English has a four-way distinction of person, number, gender and case. Some varieties of Kriol do not have the gender or case distinction, though most do; but it does distinguish between the second person singular and plural.
The question words found in Kriol are:
Contrast of Copula Forms
Copula = helping verb forms of “be”
Kriol: Ai da di teecha
English: I am the teacher.
Kriol: Yu da di teecha.
English: You are the teacher
Kriol: Ih da di teecha.
English: He/She is the teacher.
Kriol: Ah da-mi di teecha
English: I was the teacher
Kriol: Yu da-mi di teecha
English: You were the teacher.
Kriol: She/Ih da-mi di teecha.
English: She/He was the teacher.
Kriol: Da huu dat?
English: who is that?

Negation