Portuguese Creole

: This article is primarily about the languages. See also a summary in the context of the other creole people.

Origins

Portugal in the period of discoveries and colonization created a linguistic contact with native languages and people of the discovered lands and pidgins were formed. Until the 18th century, these Portuguese pidgins were used as a Lingua franca in Asia and Africa.

Related Topics:
Portugal in the period of discoveries - Pidgins - 18th century - Lingua franca - Asia - Africa

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Later, the Portuguese pidgins were expanded grammatically and lexically, as they became creole languages. Today, these languages are known as "Portuguese Creoles". The Portuguese Creoles or Portuguese-based Creoles are the ones that have almost all lexical content bases on Portuguese, while grammatically they are very different.

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According to the monogenetic theory of pidgins advanced by Hugo Schuchardt, many creoles have structural similarities because most of the pidgins and creoles of European base in the world derived from a version of the Lingua Franca relexified by the Portuguese. This "broken Portuguese" would be used by European sailors whenever they met new peoples.

Related Topics:
Monogenetic theory of pidgins - Hugo Schuchardt - Relexified

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Items like the preposition na (Portuguese word for "in" feminine) would be marks of this common origin. The monogenetic theory does not explain how the syntactic structure of many creoles could arise from a language that does not possess such a structure.

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The Portuguese word for "creole" is crioulo, it derives from criar (to raise) and olo (house - a typical African house in the Portuguese African colonies). Since most of the African creole speakers had a Portuguese father and an African mother, they were raised (criados) by their African mother, not as slaves, in the "olos", thus "crioulos", and were servants in the house of their fathers. Thus the creole was left free to develop into a stable language. While the Africans were often deported to the Americas, the mixed raced were not. The African slaves were prohibited from speaking their own languages, which their masters did not understand. Instead, they were also instructed to speak a Portuguese pidgin.

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In Portugal and the African Portuguese language countries, the word "crioulo" is often a synonym of "Cape Verdean", where the large majority of the population is mixed raced. The word "crioulo" for the language is only used for the Guinean Portuguese Creoles. In these countries the word "Crioulo" does not have the same connotation it has in Brazil.

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