Creoles of Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe

Beyond Cape Verde, Portuguese left another set of Portuguese-lexified creoles in both insular and mainland West Africa: Kriol, of Guinea-Bissau, and the four Gulf of Guinea creoles, three of which — Forro, Angolar and Principense — are spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. These are autonomous languages, with grammars and phonologies of their own, not dialects of Portuguese, even though they draw most of their vocabulary from it.

Two groups, two histories

Although all of them go back to contact with the Portuguese of the 15th and 16th centuries, these creoles do not form a single family. They belong to two distinct genetic groups, which arose at different points along the Atlantic coast:

• the Upper Guinea group, comprising Cape Verdean Creole and Guinea-Bissau Kriol (with its Casamance variety, in southern Senegal). Both descend from one proto-creole formed around the old trading posts of the coast and the Cape Verde archipelago;
• the Gulf of Guinea group, formed on the islands of São Tomé, Príncipe and Annobón from the late 15th century onward, which gave rise to Forro, Angolar, Principense and Fa d’Ambô (the last on Annobón island, today part of Equatorial Guinea).

The substrates differ accordingly: Upper Guinea draws on Atlantic and Mande languages (Mandinka, Balanta, Fula, Papel); the Gulf of Guinea on Kwa and Edo languages of the Niger Delta and on Bantu languages (chiefly Kikongo and Kimbundu).

Guinea-Bissau Kriol

Kriol (also Kiriol, Guinean) is the true vehicular language of Guinea-Bissau. Although Portuguese is the sole official language, it is Kriol — not Portuguese — that serves as the lingua franca among the country’s dozens of ethnolinguistic communities, and the number of its speakers, counting first and second language together, keeps rising. It is a mother tongue above all in the urban centres, such as Bissau and Bolama.

Its vocabulary is overwhelmingly Portuguese, but its structure is that of a creole. The pronouns are short and invariable, and tense, mood and aspect are expressed by particles placed before the verb rather than by endings: ta for the habitual, na for the progressive, and the suffix -ba for the anterior. Negation is formed with ka before the verb.

The Gulf of Guinea creoles

São Tomé and Príncipe is home to three creoles of the same stock, but no longer mutually intelligible without effort:

• Forro (self-named lungwa santome, “language of São Tomé”), by far the most widely spoken, the tongue of the forros — the descendants of formerly manumitted slaves — and the main creole of São Tomé island;
• Angolar (lunga ngola), spoken by the Angolar community in the south of São Tomé island, traditionally descended from runaway slaves; it stands out for a heavier Bantu substrate;
• Principense, or Lung’Ie (“language of the island”), native to Príncipe island, today severely endangered, with a few hundred speakers, almost all elderly.

Creole	Where spoken	Genetic group
Kriol	Guinea-Bissau (and Casamance)	Upper Guinea
Forro (Santome)	São Tomé island	Gulf of Guinea
Angolar	southern São Tomé	Gulf of Guinea
Principense (Lung'Ie)	Príncipe island	Gulf of Guinea

The kinship with Portuguese shows at once in the lexicon, even when heavily reshaped by creole phonology: Forro ke “house” comes from casa, plemã “first” from primeiro, ngê “people, person” from gente. There are also many words of African origin, especially in the domains of farming, wildlife and religious life.

Shared creole features

Despite their separate histories, all these creoles display the analytic grammar typical of creole languages: no verbal inflection for person, tense-mood-aspect systems built on particles, plural marked by a pronoun or particle (not by -s), and predominantly subject-verb-object word order. The nasal vowels of Portuguese were preserved, and the vowel systems of Forro and Principense are, on the whole, simpler than that of European Portuguese.

Vitality and threat

The situations contrast sharply. Guinea-Bissau Kriol enjoys great vitality and is expanding. Forro retains a sizeable number of speakers, although its transmission to younger generations is weakening before Portuguese. Angolar survives in a small community, and Principense is among the most endangered languages of the Portuguese-speaking world, the object of revitalisation efforts. In São Tomé and Príncipe, as in Guinea-Bissau, Portuguese is gaining ground as an urban mother tongue, in a movement of decreolisation that draws the speech of these creoles closer to the European norm without making them disappear.