Cape Verdean Creole

Cape Verdean Creole — in its own name, kriolu or kabuverdianu — is the mother tongue of virtually the entire population of Cape Verde and of a vast diaspora spread across Portugal, the United States, the Netherlands and elsewhere. With well over a million speakers, it is the most widely spoken of all the Portuguese-based creoles and one of the oldest creoles still in use anywhere. It is neither “broken” Portuguese nor a dialect of Portuguese: it is an autonomous language, with its own phonology, grammar and lexicon, even though its vocabulary comes overwhelmingly from Portuguese.

A creole born in the Atlantic

Cape Verde was uninhabited when Portuguese navigators reached the archipelago around 1460. The settlement of the island of Santiago, from 1462 onward, brought together Portuguese colonists and captives taken from the Guinea coast — speakers of languages such as Mandinka, Wolof and Temne. From sustained contact between sixteenth-century Portuguese (the superstrate, or lexifier) and those African languages (the substrate), a new language of communication quickly took shape and became native over the generations that followed.

Because it arose so early, Cape Verdean is often cited as the oldest Portuguese-based creole with a continuous record, and it has served as a model for understanding how a creole language is born.

Leeward and Windward

The archipelago divides, linguistically too, into two island groups. The Sotavento (Leeward) varieties — Santiago, Fogo, Brava, Maio — tend to keep unstressed final vowels and are generally regarded as more conservative; the Barlavento (Windward) varieties — São Vicente, Santo Antão, São Nicolau, Sal, Boa Vista — reduce or drop those vowels and show other innovations. The badiu of Santiago, the speech of the most populous island and of the capital, functions as the reference variety.

Portuguese	Sotavento (Santiago)	Barlavento (S. Vicente)
*filho* (son)	*fidju*	*fdj* / *fy*
*olho* (eye)	*odju*	*ej*
*menino* (boy)	*mininu*	*mnin*
*dinheiro* (money)	*dinheru*	*denher*
*homem* (man)	*ómi*	*óm*

The palatalisation of Portuguese -lh- to -dj- (filho → fidju) and the loss of unstressed vowels in Barlavento (menino → mnin) are among the features that set the two groups apart at once.

How the grammar works

Cape Verdean morphology differs sharply from Portuguese. The verb is, in practice, invariable: it is not conjugated for person or number, and tense, mood and aspect are expressed mainly by preverbal particles and an anterior suffix -ba.

• ta marks the habitual present or the future;
• sta (or sata) marks the progressive, “to be doing”;
• the bare form of a dynamic verb serves as a simple past;
• the suffix -ba marks the past/anterior.

The personal pronouns are likewise distinctive: N (I), bu/bo (you sg.), e/el (he/she), nu (we), nhos (you pl.), es (they). Note the polite/plural nhos, from Portuguese vós, and the subject N [n̩] , reduced to a single syllabic nasal consonant.

Negation uses preposed ka (N ka sabe, “I don’t know”), and possession uses di (kaza di nha mai, “my mother’s house”). None of this follows Portuguese grammar: they are fresh solutions recombined out of Portuguese material on new principles.

A Portuguese lexicon, a new language

Nearly the whole Cape Verdean vocabulary is reckoned to be of Portuguese origin, often from the Portuguese of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But phonetic and semantic change has carried many words far from their etymon: txeu “much, many” comes from cheio (“full”); odja “to see” from olhar; labanta “to get up” from levantar. Onto this base sit loans from African languages, above all in the vocabulary of daily life, food and music — as in the morna and the funaná, genres sung in kriolu that carried the language to the world.

Writing and status

For centuries Cape Verdean was an essentially oral language. To fix it in writing the ALUPEC (Unified Alphabet for the Writing of Cape Verdean) was proposed, approved in 1998 and institutionalised in 2009 as the reference system. Its spelling is largely phonological — hence kaza, kriolu, fazi — unlike the etymological orthography of Portuguese.

Cape Verde lives in a state of diglossia: Portuguese is the sole official language — of administration, schooling and formal writing — while kriolu is the language of daily life, of intimacy and of speech. Its officialisation “on a par with Portuguese” is set out in the Constitution as a goal to be achieved, and remains a subject of ongoing public debate.

Why it matters

Cape Verdean is at once a national emblem of identity, a central case in creole studies, and the most vital face of the Portuguese linguistic legacy in the Atlantic. To study it is to see, in a single living language, how Portuguese was transformed in its encounter with other peoples — and how something wholly new can grow out of it.