Cape Verde

Cape Verde is an archipelago of ten volcanic islands in the Atlantic, some 600 km off the west coast of Africa. It is one of the most remarkable chapters in the spread of Portuguese: here, out of the encounter between European settlers and enslaved Africans, Cape Verdean Creole took shape — the oldest Portuguese-based creole still spoken. Portuguese is the official language; the creole is the mother tongue of virtually the whole population.

An archipelago settled from scratch

Unlike most of the Portuguese-speaking world, the islands of Cape Verde were uninhabited when navigators in the service of the Portuguese Crown reached them around 1460. The first settlement, Ribeira Grande de Santiago (today Cidade Velha), was founded in 1462 and is regarded as the oldest permanent European settlement in the tropics. Its position between Europe, Africa and, later, the Americas made the archipelago a central entrepôt of Atlantic trade — including the trade in enslaved people.

Geographically, the islands fall into two groups according to their exposure to the trade winds: the Barlavento (windward) group to the north (Santo Antão, São Vicente, Santa Luzia, São Nicolau, Sal and Boa Vista) and the Sotavento (leeward) group to the south (Maio, Santiago, Fogo and Brava). The capital, Praia, lies on Santiago, the most populous island. Cape Verde became independent from Portugal on 5 July 1975 and is a founding member of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP).

Cape Verdean Creole

Cape Verdean Creole — kriolu or kabuverdianu in the language itself — arose in the 15th and 16th centuries from contact between the settlers’ Portuguese and the African languages (chiefly of the Mandinka group and of Senegambia) spoken by the people brought to the archipelago. Its lexicon is almost entirely Portuguese, but its phonology and grammar were thoroughly restructured: the complex verb inflection and most agreement fell away, and tense, mood and aspect came to be marked by particles placed before an invariable verb.

Two broad dialect areas are distinguished, matching the two island groups: the Sotavento varieties, with the speech of Santiago (the badiu) as their reference, and the Barlavento varieties, of which the speech of São Vicente (Mindelo) is the best known. The differences between them are heard above all in the vowels and in part of the vocabulary.

Portuguese	Sotavento (Santiago)	Barlavento (São Vicente)
Como estás? (How are you?)	*Módi ki bu sta?*	*Bo ta dret?*
Eu gosto de ti. (I like you.)	*N gosta di bo.*	*N gosta d'bo.*
language / speech	*língua*, *fala*	*língua*, *fala*

Portuguese and creole: a diglossia

The relationship between the two languages is usually described as a situation of diglossia: each has traditionally occupied distinct domains. Portuguese is the language of administration, justice, schooling, the print press and official texts; the creole is the language of the home, the street, music and everyday speech, shared by the whole population regardless of class or schooling.

This division has been softening. Creole has gained ground on radio, on television, in advertising and in literary writing, and its possible official recognition alongside Portuguese has been debated for decades. The Constitution provides for conditions to be created for such parity, but in practice Portuguese remains the sole official language and the main medium of instruction.

Writing the creole: the ALUPEC

For centuries creole was written haphazardly, on the model of Portuguese spelling. To give it a coherent written form, the ALUPEC — Alfabeto Unificado para a Escrita do Cabo-verdiano (Unified Alphabet for Cape Verdean Writing) — was developed, proposed in the 1990s and officially approved as a writing system in 2009. Phonological in basis, the ALUPEC moves written creole away from the etymological spelling of Portuguese: it writes k, s and u where Portuguese would use c/qu, ç/c and o — for example kaza (“house”), sukre (“sugar”), nu (“we”).

Its adoption is neither uncontested nor universal — many speakers still write creole “the Portuguese way” — but the ALUPEC established, for the first time, a reference standard, especially in education and publishing.

Language, literature and identity

Awareness of creole as a mark of identity was cultivated by the journal Claridade (founded in 1936 in Mindelo), around writers such as Baltasar Lopes da Silva, Manuel Lopes and Jorge Barbosa. Baltasar Lopes, besides being a novelist (Chiquinho, 1947), was also a linguist: his study O dialecto crioulo de Cabo Verde (1957) is a founding reference.

In music, the morna — a melancholy genre sung in creole, of which Cesária Évora became the worldwide ambassador — carried the language to stages across the globe and was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2019. The morna and the coladeira make creole, more than a means of communication, an emotional symbol of the Cape Verdean nation and of its vast diaspora, which today numbers more Cape Verdeans abroad than on the islands themselves.