Guinea-Bissau

Among the countries where Portuguese is the official language, Guinea-Bissau is the clearest case of a gap between the language of the state and the language of everyday life. Portuguese is the sole official language and the language of school, administration and law; but ordinary communication — at the market, in the street, at home — happens mostly in Kriol, the Portuguese-lexified creole that serves as the true national lingua franca. In this country of some two million people, Portuguese has a very limited base of native speakers.

From colony to republic

The Portuguese presence on the coast of what was called Guinea goes back to the 15th century, tied first to trade and then to the slave trade, working out of coastal trading posts and praças. Effective occupation of the interior, however, came only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Portuguese Guinea then became the theatre of a long war of liberation led by the PAIGC of Amílcar Cabral; independence was declared unilaterally in 1973 and recognised by Portugal in 1974. As in Angola or Mozambique, the new state inherited Portuguese as its official language — a choice made in the name of national unity across a territory of great ethnic and linguistic diversity.

Portuguese: official, but native to few

Unlike Cape Verde or even Angola, colonisation never implanted spoken Portuguese on a large scale among the Guinean population. Fluent speakers of Portuguese are today a minority — by various estimates, little more than a tenth of the population — concentrated above all in Bissau, in the civil service and among the schooled. For the great majority, Portuguese is a language learned at school, with widely varying command, and rarely the language of the home. It is, nonetheless, the language of writing, of the official press, and of access to the wider Portuguese-speaking world.

Kriol: everyone’s language

Kriol (also kriyol, Guinea-Bissau Creole) is a creole with a Portuguese lexical base, formed from contact between Portuguese and the African languages of the region over the centuries of colonial presence. It belongs to the group of Upper Guinea creoles, related to Cape Verdean Creole and to the creole of Casamance (in Senegal). Spoken as a second language by nearly the whole population and as a first language by a growing share — especially in the towns — it is Kriol, not Portuguese, that secures communication between Guineans of different ethnic groups.

Its grammar is typically creole: little inflection, fixed word order, and preverbal markers for tense and aspect. The lexicon is largely Portuguese, though often unrecognisable at first sight.

Portuguese	Kriol	Meaning
casa	kasa	house
menino	mininu	child
falar	papia	to speak
obrigado	obrigadu	thank you
água	iagu	water
ficar	fika	to stay, remain

The African languages

Beneath the Portuguese–Kriol pair lives a mosaic of African languages, each the mother tongue of an ethnic community. The main ones belong to the Atlantic and Mande families: Balanta (the country’s largest ethnic group), Fula, Mandinka, Manjak and Papel, among others. These are languages of largely oral transmission, and it is partly on them that the substrate of Kriol itself rests.

Diglossia and language policy

The Guinean situation is often described as diglossia (or even triglossia): Portuguese occupies the high, written functions, Kriol the functions of general communication, and the ethnic languages the domestic and community sphere. This arrangement poses the school an old problem — teaching literacy in Portuguese to children who arrive speaking Kriol or an African language — and feeds a recurring debate about the role Kriol should have in education.

An official language still taking root

A founding member of the CPLP (1996), Guinea-Bissau keeps Portuguese as its link to the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world and as the language of the state. Its future in the country depends less on the colonial inheritance than on the school and the media — and on the still-open relationship between an official language with few native speakers and a Kriol that is, in fact, the national language.