Belizean Creole (Belize Kriol, 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 Belize 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. 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 the people themselves.

Belizean Creole was developed as a lingua franca for those who were forced to work within the logging industry, and the language itself is linked to many West African substrate languages. 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.

The European 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 Patois than the Belize Kriol of today. 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. 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.

Belize Kriol is derived mainly from English but is influenced by other languages brought into the country due to the slave trade. Its substrate languages are the Native American language Miskito, Spanish, and the various West African and Bantu languages that were brought into the country by slaves, which include Akan, Efik, Ewe, Fula, Ga, Hausa, Igbo, Kikongo, and Wolof.

There are numerous theories as to how creole languages form. The most common and linguistically supported hypothesis indicates that creoles start out as a pidgin languages when there exists a need for some type of verbal communication between members of communities who do not share the same language. 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. For the first generation of people speaking the pidgin language, the pidgin is not fully developed and the grammar of the language is not as systematic as fully fledged languages. When the people speaking the pidgin language begin having children who grow up having no entirely developed language, they will take the partial grammar of the pidgin language their parents speak and use it as a sort of blueprint with which they are able to assign a systematic grammatical structure to the language. It is at this point that the language becomes a fully fledged language, as it becomes a mother tongue for generations of speakers, and the result is a creole language. 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.