Tupi and African Loanwords

Alongside its Latin, Arabic and Germanic layers, Portuguese absorbed, from the 16th century onward, two great bodies of words of non-European origin: the Tupi loanwords (tupinismos), drawn from the Indigenous languages of South America, and the Africanisms (africanismos), brought by the languages of the peoples enslaved across the Atlantic. Both stem from maritime expansion and the colonisation of Brazil, and both gave the language much of the vocabulary with which it names a tropical world that Latin had never known.

Two contacts, two routes

The Tupi loanwords entered chiefly through the língua geral, a Tupi-based speech that, in the colony’s early centuries, served as a lingua franca among settlers, missionaries and Indigenous populations along the coast and inland. The Africanisms arrived by two distinct routes: an older one, in Lisbon and southern Portugal, where a large enslaved African population already lived in the 16th century; and a far more substantial one, in Brazil, to which the transatlantic slave trade carried, over more than three centuries, millions of people, most of them from Bantu-speaking west-central Africa.

Tupi loanwords: naming nature

Most Tupi loanwords designate features of the South American natural world — plants, animals, landforms — that the colonisers found without a name in the European languages. From Tupi come words such as mandioca (cassava), tapioca, caju (cashew), maracujá (passion fruit), jacaré [ʒɐkɐˈɾɛ] (caiman), tatu (armadillo), piranha, capivara (capybara), tucano (toucan), arara (macaw), jaguar and jabuti (a land tortoise). Many now belong to the common vocabulary of every variety of Portuguese, and several spread into other European languages through Portuguese.

This morphological transparency rests on a small set of highly productive roots: ita (‘stone’), ‘y (‘water, river’), caá (‘woodland, leaf’), pirá (‘fish’), guaçu / açu (‘big’) and mirim (‘small’). Recognising them lets one read the meaning of many compounds — and, above all, of a vast body of place names.

Tupi place names

Much of Brazil’s toponymy is of Tupi origin and, read literally, describes the place. Pará and Paraná carry the idea of ‘great river, sea’; Paraíba is the ‘river hard to navigate’; Itamaracá, the ‘stone that rings’; Ipanema, ‘worthless water’. The suffix -tiba / -tuba expresses abundance, as in Ubatuba (‘place of many canoes’). This Indigenous layer covers the map of Brazil from end to end and is the most visible trace of the língua geral.

Africanisms: the Bantu legacy

The African contribution is dominated by Bantu languages — above all Kimbundu and Kikongo of Angola and the Congo, and Umbundu. From them come words now in everyday use such as caçula [kɐˈsulɐ] (‘youngest child’), moleque (‘boy, urchin’), cafuné (a tender caress of the head), samba, batuque (drumming), fubá (maize flour), quitanda (market stall), quitute (a delicacy), marimba, muamba, senzala (slave quarters), quilombo, bunda (‘backside’) and cachimbo (‘pipe’). The semantic range is telling: they cluster in music and dance, cooking, domestic and affective life, and the organisation of communities — the domains of daily life in which human contact was most intense.

Word	Origin	Original sense
caçula	Kimbundu kasula	youngest child
moleque	Kimbundu mu’leke	boy, lad
quilombo	Kimbundu/Umbundu kilombo	encampment, settlement
fubá	Kimbundu fuba	flour
quitanda	Kimbundu kitanda	market, stall
samba	of Bantu base	dance

Some older Africanisms entered Portugal directly, still in the 16th century, or through African trade that predated Brazil — such is the likely case of inhame (yam) and banana, plant names carried into the Atlantic world from West African languages.

The Afro-Brazilian religious lexicon

A distinct layer comes from the languages of West Africa, especially Yoruba, and is tied to the Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé. To it belong orixá (‘deity’), axé (‘life force, blessing’), Iemanjá, Oxum and Ogum (names of deities), and terms of ritual cooking that passed to the ordinary table, such as acarajé, vatapá and abará. It is a vocabulary of great cultural vitality, though of more regional circulation.

A vocabulary unevenly shared

Tupi loanwords and Africanisms are present today in every variety of Portuguese, but with very different densities. European Portuguese retains chiefly the names of tropical products that entered trade — ananás, banana, tapioca, caju, cachimbo — whereas many words of daily life and culture, such as moleque, cafuné or quitanda, are common in Brazil and little used in Portugal. This uneven distribution is itself a historical document: it shows where, and how strongly, each contact language marked the community that received it.