Portuguese-based creoles

Portuguese-based creoles (or Portuguese-lexified creoles) are creole languages whose vocabulary comes mainly from Portuguese, but whose grammar reorganised itself independently through contact with other languages. Born of the maritime expansion from the 15th century onward, they are the oldest known European-lexified creolisations, and they stretch today from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Indian Ocean and the China Sea.

What a creole is

A creole is a full mother tongue that has emerged from the stabilisation and nativisation of a pidgin — a reduced communication system created between speakers with no language in common. A Portuguese-based creole is therefore not broken Portuguese nor a dialect of Portuguese: it is a distinct language, with its own phonology, grammar and norm, even though the bulk of its words (its lexical stratum) goes back to the Portuguese of the 15th to 17th centuries.

The grammatical reorganisation runs deep. Latin verbal inflection typically gives way to pre-verbal particles marking tense, mood and aspect; gender and number are expressed analytically; and word order and syntax often follow patterns close to the African substrate languages.

Origins: the Portuguese expansion

The first creoles took shape in the trading posts and islands that Portugal occupied along the African coast from the mid-15th century — first of all in the Cape Verde archipelago, settled from 1462, and on the island of São Tomé, from the 1490s. These territories held a heterogeneous population — European settlers and enslaved Africans of diverse linguistic origins — for whom a Portuguese-based pidgin quickly became the common medium and, in the next generation, the mother tongue.

From these Atlantic nuclei, and along the routes to the Indian Ocean and the Far East, a constellation of creoles arose that long served as a lingua franca of maritime trade.

The Atlantic creoles

The African creoles fall into two main branches:

• Upper Guinea — Cape Verdean (kabuverdianu), by far the most widely spoken of all, the mother tongue of nearly the entire population of Cape Verde; Guinea-Bissau Creole (kriol), a vehicular language across much of the country; and the creole of the Casamance, in southern Senegal, a relative of the former two.
• Gulf of Guinea — Forro (or Santome) and Angolar on São Tomé, Lung’Ie on Príncipe, and Fa d’Ambô on Annobón (Equatorial Guinea), a set of island varieties with a Bantu substrate.

The Asian creoles

The Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific gave rise to a second group, today far more endangered:

• Indo-Portuguese creoles — spoken at points in India (Korlai, Diu, Daman) and in Sri Lanka (the Portuguese creole of Batticaloa), almost all in sharp decline.
• Papiá Kristang — the creole of Malacca, in Malaysia, kept up by a small Catholic community of Eurasian descent.
• Patuá — the creole of Macau, once the language of the Macanese community, now critically endangered, with only a few dozen speakers.

An overview

Creole	Where	Situation
Cape Verdean (kabuverdianu)	Cape Verde	Vigorous; ~1 million speakers
Guinea-Bissau Creole (kriol)	Guinea-Bissau	Vehicular language; expanding
Forro / Santome	São Tomé	Alive, but pressed by Portuguese
Fa d’Ambô	Annobón (Equatorial Guinea)	Community language; endangered
Papiá Kristang	Malacca (Malaysia)	Severely endangered
Patuá	Macau	Near extinction

Vitality is thus very uneven: while Cape Verdean is the full language of an entire society, several of the Asian creoles rank among the most endangered languages in the world.

Status and recognition

For centuries nearly all of these creoles were languages without prestige — spoken but not written, in the shadow of official Portuguese. That situation has been changing: Cape Verdean has a unified alphabet (the ALUPEC) and a growing literature, and in both Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau the creole is, in practice, the language of daily life, alongside Portuguese, which remains the official language of schooling. The study of these languages is now a central chapter of contact linguistics and an inseparable part of the history of Portuguese in the world.