Portuguese creoles (Portuguese:crioulo) arecreole languages which havePortuguese as their substantiallexifier. The most widely-spoken creoles influenced by Portuguese areCape Verdean Creole,Guinea-Bissau Creole andPapiamento.
Portuguese overseas exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries led to the establishment of aPortuguese Empire with trading posts, forts and colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Contact between the Portuguese language and native languages gave rise to many Portuguese-basedpidgins, used aslinguas francas throughout the Portuguese sphere of influence. In time, many of these pidgins werenativized, becoming new stable creole languages.
As is the rule in most creoles, thelexicon of these languages can be traced to the parent languages, usually with predominance of Portuguese;while the grammar is mostly original and unique to each creole with little resemblance to thesyntax of Portuguese or the substrate language.[citation needed]
These creoles are (or were) spoken mostly by communities of descendants of Portuguese, natives, and sometimes other peoples from the Portuguese colonial empire.
Until recently creoles were considered "degenerate" dialects of Portuguese unworthy of attention. As a consequence, there is little documentation on the details of their formation. Since the 20th century, increased study of creoles by linguists led to several theories being advanced. Themonogenetic theory of pidgins assumes that some type of pidgin language — dubbed West African Pidgin Portuguese — based on Portuguese was spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the forts established by the Portuguese on the West African coast. According to this theory, this variety may have been the starting point of all the pidgin and creole languages. This may explain to some extent why Portuguese lexical items can be found in many creoles, but more importantly, it would account for the numerous grammatical similarities shared by such languages, such as theprepositionna, meaning "in" and/or "on", which would come from the Portuguese contractionna, meaning "in the" (femininesingular).
The Portuguese word for "creole" iscrioulo, which derives from the verbcriar ("to raise", "to bring up") and asuffix-oulo of debated origin. Originally the word was used to distinguish the members of any ethnic group who were born and raised in the colonies from those who were born in their homeland. In Africa it was often applied to locally born people of (wholly or partly) Portuguese descent, as opposed to those born in Portugal; whereas inBrazil it was also used to distinguish locally bornblack people of African descent from those who had been brought from Africa as slaves.
In time, however, this generic sense was lost, and the wordcrioulo or its derivatives (like "Creole" and its equivalents in other languages) became the name of several specific Upper Guinean communities and their languages: theGuinean people and theirKriol language,Cape Verdean people and theirKriolu language, all of which still today have very vigorous use, suppressing the importance of official standard Portuguese.
The oldest Portuguese creole are the so-calledcrioulos of Upper Guinea, born around the Portuguese settlements along the northwest coast of Africa. Portuguese creoles are the mother tongues of most people inCape Verde and theABC Islands. InGuinea-Bissau, the creole is used as lingua franca among people speaking different languages, and is becoming the mother tongue of a growing population. They consist of two languages:
Another group of creoles is spoken in the Gulf of Guinea, inSão Tomé and Príncipe andEquatorial Guinea.
Many other Portuguese creoles probably existed in the former Portuguesefeitorias in theGulf of Guinea, but also in the Congo region.[citation needed]
Portuguese pidgins still exist inAngola andMozambique.[citation needed]
The numerous Portuguese outposts in India and Sri Lanka gave rise to many Portuguese creole languages, of which only a few have survived to the present. The largest group were theNorteiro languages, spoken by theNorteiro people, the Christian Indo-Portuguese in the NorthKonkan. Those communities were centered onBaçaim, modernVasai, which was then called the “Northern Court ofPortuguese India” (in opposition to the "Southern Court" atGoa). The creole languages spoken inBaçaim,Salsete,Thana,Chevai,Mahim,Tecelaria,Dadar,Parel,Cavel,Bandora (modernBandra),Gorai,Morol,Andheri,Versova,Malvan,Manori,Mazagão, andChaul are now extinct. The only surviving Norteiro creoles are:
These surviving Norteiro creoles have suffered drastic changes in the last decades. Standard Portuguese re-influenced the creole of Daman in the mid-20th century.
The creoles of theCoast of Coromandel, such as ofMeliapor,Madras,Tuticorin,Cuddalore,Karikal,Pondicherry,Tranquebar,Manapar, andNegapatam, were already extinct by the 19th century. Their speakers (mostly the people of mixed Portuguese-Indian ancestry, known locally asTopasses) switched toEnglish after the British takeover.
Most of the creoles of theCoast of Malabar, namely those ofCananor,Tellicherry,Mahé, Cochin (modernKerala), andQuilon) had become extinct by the 19th century. In Cananor and Tellicherry, some elderly people still spoke some creole in the 1980s. The only creole that is still spoken (by a few Christian families only) isVypin Indo-Portuguese, in theVypin Island, near Kerala; the last native speaker of the language, William Rozario, died in 2010, but the language is still spoken and understood to some degree by the Luso-Asian community ofKochi.
Christians, even inCalcutta, used Portuguese until 1811. A Portuguese creole was still spoken in the early 20th century. Portuguese creoles were spoken inBengal, such as atBalasore,Pipli,Chandannagore,Chittagong,Midnapore andHooghly.
Significant Portuguese creoles flourished among the so-calledBurgher andKaffir communities of Sri Lanka:
Bengali Portuguese Creole was spoken by Luso-Asians and Roman Catholics in Bangladesh until its extinction in the late 19th to early 20th century. Bangladeshi Luso-Asians who spoke Bengali Portuguese Creole were concentrated inChittagong, in the old Portuguese settlement ofFiringi Bazar, formerly the capital of the Portuguese Empire in Bengal. A smaller but still significant population of Bengali Portuguese Creole speakers was located in the smaller Firingi Bazar of Dhaka; the wordFiringi is derived from the Persian wordfarang meaning foreigner.
In the past, Portuguese creoles were also spoken inMyanmar andBangladesh.[citation needed]
The earliest Portuguese creole in the region probably arose in the 16th century inMalacca,Malaysia, as well as in theMoluccas. After the takeover of those places by the Dutch in the 17th century, many creole-speaking slaves were taken to other places in Indonesia andSouth Africa, leading to several creoles that survived until recent times:
Portuguese was present on the island ofFlores,Indonesia since the 16th century, especially inLarantuka andMaumere; it probably became extinct in the late 20th century, its traces in the local Malay-based creole language, if any, do not survive (seeLarantuka Malay andMaumere Malay).[5]
Portuguese creoles were spoken in the Bangkok neighborhoods ofKudi Chin andConception, which were former Portuguese colonies settled by Luso-Asians, and in theSagaing Region of Myanmar.
Thai Portuguese Creole was spoken by Luso-Asians in the Bangkok neighborhoods ofKudi Chin andConception, which were former Portuguese colonies settled by Luso-Asians. The Luso-Thai communities of Kudi Chin and Conception still exist, numbering around 2,000, but the language has not been recorded for centuries.
In Myanmar, Burmese Portuguese Creole was spoken by theBayingyi people, a Luso-Asian group descended from Portuguese mercenaries and adventurers to Burma in the 16th and 17th centuries who were enlisted into the Burmese army and settled there. The Bayingyi community still exists, but the language has not been recorded or spoken for centuries.
The Portuguese language was present in Portugal's colonyMacau since the mid-16th century. A Portuguese creole, Patuá, developed there. Macanese is primarily derived fromCantonese and Portuguese, with influence and vocabulary fromMalay andSinhala. It is nearly extinct in Macau, being spoken by an estimated 50 people in 2007, but more Macanese speakers likely exist among the diaspora.
A few Portuguese creoles are found in South America:
There is no consensus regarding the position ofSaramaccan, with some scholars classifying it as Portuguese creole with an English relexification. Saramaccan may be an English creole with Portuguese words, since structurally (morphology and syntax) it is related to theSurinamese creoles (Sranan,Ndyuka andJamaican Maroon), despite the heavy percentage of Portuguese origin words. Other English creole languages of Suriname, such asParamaccan orKwinti, have also Portuguese influences.[citation needed]
Although sometimes classified as a creole, theCupópia language from theQuilombo do Cafundó, atSalto de Pirapora, São Paulo, discovered in 1978 and spoken by less than 40 people as a secret language,[6] is better classified as aPortuguese variety since it is structurally similar to Portuguese, in spite of having a large number ofBantu words in its lexicon. For languages with these characteristics, H. H. do Couto has forged the designation ofanticreole,[7] which would be the inverse of a creole language, as they are seen by thenon-European input theories (i.e.:creoles = African languages grammar + European languages lexicon;anticreoles = European languages grammar + African languages lexicon).
There is a Portuguese dialect in Helvécia, South ofBahia that is theorized as presenting signs of an earlier decreolization. Ancient Portuguese creoles originating from Africa are still preserved in the ritual songs of the Afro-Brazilian animist religions (Candomblé)[citation needed].
It has been conjectured that the vernacular of Brazil (not the official and standardBrazilian Portuguese) resulted from decreolization of a creole based on Portuguese and native languages; but this is not a widely accepted view. Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese is continuous and mutually intelligible with European Portuguese, and in fact quite conservative in some aspects.[8]Academic specialists compiled by linguist Volker Noll[9][10] affirm that the Brazilian linguistic phenomena are the"nativização",nativization/nativism of a most radically Romanic form. The phenomena in Brazilian Portuguese are Classical Latin and Old Portuguese heritage. This is not a creole form, but a radical Romanic form.[8] Regardless of borrowings and minor changes, it must be kept in mind that Brazilian Portuguese is not a Portuguese creole, since both grammar and vocabulary remain "real" Portuguese and its origins can be traced directly from 16th century European Portuguese.[11] Some authors, like Swedish Parkvall,[12] classify it as asemicreole in the concept defined by Holm:[13] a semicreole is a language that has undergone “partial restructuring, producing varieties which were never fully pidginized and which preserve a substantial part of their lexifier’s structure (...) while showing a noticeable degree of restructuring”. Nevertheless, scholars like Anthony Julius Naro and Maria Marta Pereira Scherre demonstrated how every single phenomenon found in Brazilian Portuguese can also be found in regional modern European Portuguese and 1500s and 1600s European Portuguese, such as the epic poetry ofLuís de Camões, as well as other Romance languages such asAranese Occitan,French,Italian andRomanian, classifying these phenomena as a natural Romance drift.[11] Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese is continuous with European Portuguese and its phonetics is more conservative in several aspects, characterizing the nativization of akoiné formed by several regional European Portuguese variations brought to Brazil and its natural drift.[11]
Papiamento, spoken on Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, is closely related to the Upper Guinea Creoles:[1] Guinea-Bissau Creole, and especially with Cape Verdean Creole. Papiamento has a Portuguese basis, but has undergone a large Spanish[14] and considerable Dutch influence.
Traces of a Portuguese-based pidgin have also been detected among the enslaved population inNew Netherland.[15]
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