São Tomé and Príncipe

São Tomé and Príncipe is a small archipelago in the Gulf of Guinea, off the west coast of Africa, and the second-smallest state in the CPLP. Its importance for the history of the Portuguese language is, however, out of all proportion to its size: it was here, in the early sixteenth century, that some of the world’s first Portuguese-based creoles took shape. Today Portuguese is the sole official language and the mother tongue or lingua franca of almost the entire population, yet it coexists with three native creoles — Forro, Angolar and Lung’Ie (Principense).

Empty islands, a plantation society

Unlike almost every other Portuguese-speaking territory, the islands were uninhabited when Portuguese navigators reached them around 1470. The effective settlement of São Tomé began in 1493, and the island swiftly became the first great Atlantic laboratory of the sugar plantation economy, driven by enslaved labour brought chiefly from the Niger Delta and from the Congo–Angola region.

Out of this abrupt encounter — Portuguese settlers, enslaved people of widely different linguistic origins, and the immediate need for a common tongue — a proto-creole arose over the course of the sixteenth century. From it descends the whole family of Gulf of Guinea creoles.

The Gulf of Guinea creoles

The four creoles of this family share a single matrix and form a genetically coherent set, even though they are not all mutually intelligible today:

Creole	Where	Speakers
Forro (*Santome*)	São Tomé island	the most widely spoken
Angolar (*Ngola*)	southern São Tomé	the Angolar community
Lung'Ie	Príncipe island	highly endangered
Fa d'Ambô	Annobón (Equatorial Guinea)	outside the archipelago

Forro, or Santome, is the creole with the widest reach. Its name comes from forro (ultimately from Arabic, via Portuguese carta de forria, “manumission”), because it was the language of freed slaves and their descendants. Angolar is spoken by the Angolar community in the south of São Tomé island, traditionally associated with escaped slaves; it is set apart by a particularly dense layer of Bantu (Kimbundu) vocabulary. Lung’Ie — literally “the language of the island” — is the creole of Príncipe, now in steep decline and classified as endangered.

What they inherited from Portuguese and from African languages

The basic vocabulary of these creoles is largely inherited from Portuguese — often preserving sixteenth-century forms. But their grammatical structure has moved far from the European model: tense, aspect and mood are marked by preverbal particles rather than by endings, and the substrates of languages such as Edo (from the Niger Delta), Kikongo and Kimbundu have left audible traces, alongside a rich nasality.

The relationship with Portuguese nonetheless remains one of recognisable lexical closeness: a Portuguese speaker will pick out many words even without grasping the sentence.

São-Tomean Portuguese

Alongside the creoles, a distinct variety of European Portuguese has developed — São Tomé and Príncipe Portuguese — now the mother tongue of a growing share of the population, especially the young and urban. It arises from centuries of coexistence with the creoles and shows distinctive phonetic, lexical and syntactic traits, sharing some tendencies with other African varieties of Portuguese.

Independence, in 1975, consolidated Portuguese as the language of the state, of schooling and of the media. According to the 2012 census it is spoken by roughly 98% of the population — one of the highest rates anywhere in the Portuguese-speaking world.

An even wider mosaic

To this native picture the twentieth century added Cape Verdean Creole, brought by the thousands of contract workers on the cocoa and coffee plantations — one of several Portuguese-based creoles now heard on the islands. The result is one of the densest linguistic ecosystems in the Portuguese-speaking world: within a tiny territory, official Portuguese overlays an archipelago of sister creoles, all of them, in the end, children of the same language.