Angolan Portuguese

Angolan Portuguese (português de Angola) is the variety of Portuguese spoken and written in the Republic of Angola. Inherited from the colonial period, it long ago ceased to be merely the language of a lettered elite: today it is the country’s sole official language, the chief means of communication between communities of different mother tongues and — for a growing share of the population, especially the urban young — a genuine first language. Out of this nativisation an Angolan norm, with a physiognomy of its own, is gradually emerging.

An official language in a multilingual country

Angola is a deeply multilingual territory. Alongside Portuguese live several African languages of the Bantu family — Umbundu (the most widely spoken, on the central plateau), Kimbundu (in the Luanda region), Kikongo (in the north), Chokwe, Nganguela and Oshiwambo, among others — together with Khoisan languages in the far south. None of them, however, holds official status: that role falls to Portuguese, chosen after independence (1975) as the language of administration, schooling and national unity, precisely because it was not identified with any one of the country’s ethnolinguistic groups.

According to the 2014 census — the first held after independence — about 71% of Angolans speak Portuguese, a proportion that in Luanda approaches the whole population. The decisive fact, though, is qualitative: for many Angolans born in the cities, Portuguese is no longer a second language learned at school but the language of the home.

From a Lisbon norm to a Luanda norm

For historical reasons, the reference standard in Angola remained, after 1975, close to European Portuguese: that is the variety taught in school and used in formal writing. Actual speech, however, has drifted away from it, along a continuum that runs from cultivated Portuguese — very close to the European — to the popular Portuguese of the musseques (Luanda’s outlying districts), where intense contact with the Bantu languages has restructured the language more deeply.

How it sounds

The most salient phonetic feature of Angolan Portuguese is the lesser reduction of unstressed vowels. Where European Portuguese deletes or centralises unaccented vowels — making speech “compressed” and hard to follow for the uninitiated — the Angolan variety tends to pronounce them more fully and openly. A word such as menino (“boy”) sounds [meˈninu] in Angola, against European [mɨˈninu] . The result is a more syllable-timed rhythm, which many listeners describe as more “sung” and more distinct.

Intonation, the realisation of certain consonants, and the prosodic influence of the Bantu languages round out an accent instantly recognisable across the Portuguese-speaking world.

Lexicon: the angolanisms

It is in vocabulary that the Angolan variety most visibly asserts itself. Contact with Kimbundu and Umbundu has given Portuguese words for local realities — dishes, music, social relations — and many others in everyday use:

Word	Origin	Meaning
candengue	Kimbundu	child, kid
kota (or cota)	Kimbundu dikota	an older person; parent
maka	Kimbundu	problem, argument
camba	Kimbundu dikamba	friend
funje	Kimbundu	flour porridge, a staple dish
kizomba	Kimbundu	party; a music genre
bazar	Angolan slang	to leave, to clear off

Some of these words have travelled the other way and settled into the youth slang of Portugal: bué (“a lot”), bazar (“to clear off”) and cota (“dad” or “an older person”) are now common in Lisbon, carried there by communities of Angolan origin.

Grammatical tendencies

Popular Angolan Portuguese shows restructurings typical of situations in which a second language is acquired on a mass scale, some of them shared with Mozambican Portuguese: variation in number and gender agreement, distinctive prepositional government (for instance, ir na escola instead of ir à escola, “to go to school”), and shifts in the placement of clitic pronouns. These features are more frequent in informal speech and rarer in cultivated writing, which stays close to the European standard.

A norm in the making

The rise of an Angolan Portuguese is not only a fact of speech: it is also a cultural project. Literature played a pioneering role here — José Luandino Vieira, in Luuanda (1964), wove the syntax and lexicon of Kimbundu into Portuguese prose, and writers such as Pepetela, José Eduardo Agualusa and Ondjaki have carried that creative appropriation of the language forward. Among Angolan linguists, debate is growing over codifying a norm of its own — one that would recognise the national variety without severing it from the common diasystem. In that sense Angolan Portuguese is a language ceasing to be merely inherited and becoming, fully, Angolan.