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Studies in linguistics and anthropology have demonstrated that kinship systems and cultural practices change upon contact with other languages and cultures; however, creole kinship systems are generally overlooked. This paper examines the kinship terminology used by the Portuguese Settlement community in Malacca, Malaysia. The mapping of this kinship terminology is based on the division into terms of address and terms of reference, using three theoretical frameworks ('identity alignment', 'language as an act of identity', and 'partial reciprocal diffusion'), while also taking into account Malacca Creole Portuguese, the standard variety of Malay, Baba Malay, Chetti Malay, Dutch, and English. The findings point to the existence of parallel kinship systems within the same language and indicate lexical connections to the other creole communities in Malacca (namely, Chettis and Baba-Nyonya). Accordingly, the terminology is divided into two segments: one oriented to the Portuguese superstrate and one toward the substrates and adstrates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents the most comprehensive inventory of lexical similarities between Chabacano and Luso-Asian creoles to date. Certain formal similarities, especially regarding function words, have not gone unnoticed in the past, but for the most part have been treated as coincidences. Less attention has been paid to cases of parallel formal and semantic innovation involving content words. Taken together, these data suggest a non-coincidental lexical component shared between Luso-Asian creoles and the multi-directional propagation of features across Ibero-Asian creoles. This notion is further supported if we consider the well-known cultural, commercial and demographic connections between the Philippines and the Portuguese colonies in Asia. At the individual level, discarding a Spanish etymology in favor of a Portuguese one is a very problematic endeavor that often leads to inconclusiveness. However, we argue that the sheer number of shared retentions and innovations presented in this study can only be accounted for by factoring in some degree of language contact. Luso-Asian elements must have seeped into Chabacano at the time of its genesis and at later stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malacca Portuguese Creole (MPC) (ISO 639-3; code: mcm), popularly known as Malacca Portuguese or locally as (Papiá) Cristang, belongs to the group of Portuguese-lexified creoles of (South)east Asia, which includes the extinct varieties of Batavia/Tugu (Maurer 2013) and Bidau, East Timor (Baxter 1990), and the moribund variety of Macau (Baxter 2009). MPC has its origins in the Portuguese presence in Malacca, and like the other creoles in this subset, it is genetically related to the Portuguese Creoles of South Asia (Holm 1988, Cardoso, Baxter & Nunes 2012). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents and discusses the instances of synchronic variation attested in the personal pronoun paradigm of modern Sri Lanka Portuguese, an endangered Portuguese-based creole spoken by relatively small communities scattered across Eastern and Northern Sri Lanka. Although Sri Lanka Portuguese has a long history of documentation dating from, at least, the beginning of the 19th century, only a few studies have explicitly reported cases of synchronic variation. This study aims, therefore, to fill that gap, by contributing to the description and explanation of patterns of variation relating to the personal pronoun paradigm as encountered in documentary data collected between 2015 and 2020, over several field trips to the districts of Ampara, Batticaloa, Jaffna, and Trincomalee. The nature of the variation observed in the data ranges from phonetic alternations to strategies of paradigm regularization and stylistic shrinkage, often revealing the effects of diachronic processes of variant competition and substitution. Combining the observed patterns of variation with surveyed linguistic trends of language shift, we propose that obsolescence may be responsible for some of the variability encountered in modern SLP personal pronouns, especially that associated with certain socially- or geographically-defined subsets of the speech community (viz. the younger generations and the speakers from Jaffna) characterized by advanced language loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses the influence of Portuguese on Amazonian French Creole lexicon. Topics discussed include usage of French-lexified Creole language by three groups in the state of Amapá in Brazil, numbers of Amazonian French Creole (AFC) speakers, and the role played by adstrate language in the development of Creole lexicons. It also explores the origin of several Amazonian French Creole words.

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article addresses the historical and sociolinguistic evolution of Fa d'Ambô, a Portuguese-related creole language spoken originally on the small island of Annobón in Equatorial Guinea. It will be shown that Fa d'Ambô and the three creole languages spoken on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe (Santome, Angolar and Principense) descend from a single contact language that arose on the island of São Tomé and branched in the sixteenth century. After its permanent settlement in the second half of the sixteenth century, Annobón became strongly isolated until the twentieth century. Due to intense migration from Annobón to Equatorial Guinea's multilingual capital Malabo over the last decades, Fa d'Ambô's speech community has not only become divided but also more exposed to other languages, in particular to English-based creole Pichi, the capital's lingua franca. Given the small size of the Fa d'Ambô speech community (approx. 5,000 speakers), it will be argued that these factors, in addition to the lack of government support for the country's minority languages, pose an increasing threat to the survival of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early stages of the China trade European traders knew nothing of Chinese, while the Chinese traders were equally ignorant of European languages. It was in this setting that pidgin languages developed for interethnic communication. While the role of Chinese Pidgin English in the China trade is fairly well-understood (see Baker 1987; Baker & Mühlhäusler 1990; Bolton 2003; Ansaldo 2009), the use of pidgin Portuguese is poorly documented and our understanding of it is correspondingly limited (Tryon, Mühlhäusler & Baker 1996). In this article we discuss what can be learnt from a newly transcribed phrasebook -- the Compendium of Assorted Phrases in Macau Pidgin. We first review the use of contact varieties of Portuguese in the China trade. We then introduce the contents and layout of the Compendium and explain the transcription practices adopted for the phrasebook. Grammatical features contained in the phrasebook are examined and illustrated. We conclude with an examination of the significance of the Compendium in enriching our understanding of pidgin Portuguese and its relationship with Macau Creole Portuguese as well as Chinese Pidgin English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present extended argumentation against a raising analysis for every type of relative clauses. Specifically, we argue that purpose relative clauses involve raising of a null operator to Spec,CP, contrary to that-relatives, which involve raising of the antecedent DP. We further argue that this analysis applies to all purpose relative clauses, both subject and object purpose relatives. After showing that all purpose relatives in European Portuguese are CPs, we present several arguments in favor of a null operator analysis of this type of structure. First, we show that parasitic gap effects support the existence of a variable in object purpose relatives and in VP adjunct purpose clauses with an object gap. We then show that Principle A effects in object purpose relatives allow to distinguish this type of relatives from that-relatives and support a null operator analysis of the former. The same analysis is shown to apply to subject purpose relatives. Second, we compare European Portuguese to Capeverdean, a Portuguese-related creole. We claim that the properties of purpose relative clauses in Capeverdean show that the derivation of such clauses is different from the derivation of that-relatives, although wh-movement applies in both. Finally, we suggest that an analysis distinguishing the structure of object purpose relatives from the one of object that-relatives may contribute to explain some acquisition facts: if purpose relatives involve movement of a null operator instead of movement of a DP, they do not give rise to intervention effects that violate the version of Relativized Minimality which Friedmann et al. (2009) argue children assume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the emergence of music which blends Portuguese and African languages Kriolu music in Cape Verde and discusses influence of the slave trade, the whaling industry, transatlantic travel and Cape Verdeans who left and returned on musical genres and dance styles of Cape Verde.

In this paper, we discuss the recent discovery of four letters written in 1783, one of which is written fully in Papiamentu, the other three comprising Papiamentu fragments. The data in these constitute one of the earliest written attestations of Papiamentu. We first provide a brief overview of the earliest attestations of Papiamentu and then present the Letters as Loot research programme, to which we owe the discovery of the 1783 letters. Following this, the article discusses the contents of the letters and the socio-historical context in which they were written. To close, we discuss the value of this new source for Papiamentu studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the present condition of Sri Lanka Portuguese after the Sri Lankan Civil War from 1983 to 2009. Sri Lankan Portuguese is a Portuguese-based Creole spoken by the Portuguese Burgher population on the East Coast of the island, and by the Ceylon Kaffir population on the West Coast. The Portuguese conquered the coastal areas of Sri Lanka in the early 16th century.

The present paper argues that West African Portuguese-related Creoles (WAPCs) developed from a Basic Variety (BV) of Portuguese that arose in the second half of the 15th century among the numerous African slaves who were then present in Portugal. This BV, variously called Lingua de Preto (LdP) 'Black Language; falar Guiné 'Guinea speech', etc., is known to us through its representation in Portuguese literature, especially in 16th century theatre, but also in popular writings until the very end of the 18th century. In the first part of the study (sections 1-4), we substantiate our claim that such literary representations are indeed reliable renditions of the linguistic medium African slaves in Portugal actually used in their interactions with the white population and among themselves. We propose a historical scenario to account for the 'return' of LdP to Africa, i.e. Senegambia, where it soon became the lingua franca of trade between Portuguese expatriates and the local populations. From this lingua franca, creoles subsequently arose. In the second part (sections 5-11), we propose an extensive outline of LdP grammar such as we are able to retrieve from the corpus. Comparisons with present-day WAPCs are attempted. We conclude (sections 12-13) that the availability of such historical testi- monies indeed gives us the exceptional opportunity of gaining some first-hand knowledge of the transitional medium that necessarily separates a lexifier language from 'its' creole(s). The fact that this transitional medium, we think, looks much more like a BV than a destructured jargon lends support to the assumption that untutored L2 acquisition by adults played a crucial role in creole formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The status of Capeverdean as a pro-drop language is controversial. Baptista (2002) contends that this Portuguese-based creole has null referential subjects with some types of predicates, while Pratas (2002, 2007) proposes that it has only expletive null subjects. She argues that the rare cases of root null subjects can be analyzed as instances of null expletives. The aim of this paper is to show that in Capeverdean there is an asymmetry in the distribution of null referential subjects. These are ruled out in root contexts, but allowed in some embedded contexts; this is the case when the null subject is bound by a wh-operator or a quantifier. Following Holmberg's (2005) and Holmberg, Nayudu & Sheehan's (2009) analysis of null subjects, we offer an analysis of Capeverdean null subjects exploring the properties of T in the language (in particular, the lack of a rich inflectional system), the syntax of subjects, and the type of null category available. We claim that Capeverdean embedded null subjects are variables, licensed by an operator in the matrix clause. We show that these specific properties explain minimal differences between null subjects in Capeverdean and Brazilian Portuguese. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author discusses about his article on Papiamentu, one of the most complex languages in the world, which was initially published in an journal. The author provides an explanation to Silvia Kouwenberg, who discusses a paper of his. The author does not support Kouwenberg's idea that the weighting of different subsystems of grammar appears arbitrary, in context of creoles languages.

To quantify the degree to which the structure of superstrate and substrate languages influence that of a creole, this paper compares the nearly 100 grammatical features of Guiné-Bissau Creole Portuguese surveyed in Baptista, Mello, & Suzuki (2007) with the corresponding structures in Balanta (one of the creole’s substrate/adstrate languages) and Portuguese (its superstrate), proceeding from one area of syntax to another. However, tables summarizing the presence or absence of features in each of the three languages are not organized by area of syntax but rather by the patterns of the features’ presence or absence in the three languages, allowing a quantification of the various patterns of influence, e.g. the percentage of cases in which a feature is found in the creole only, in the creole and its superstrate only, in the creole and its substrate only, or in all three. These percentages are then discussed regarding what support they might lend to the various hypotheses purporting to explain the sources of creole language structures: the influence of superstrate and substrate languages, universals, creole-internal innovations, and the convergence of all or some of these. The issue of Balanta being both a substrate and an adstrate language with many speakers bilingual in the creole is also discussed, as is the dated bias in the very grammatical categories chosen for the survey, which assumes an Atlantic creole prototype based on ‘Kwa’ rather than West Atlantic languages, the Niger-Congo subfamily to which Balanta belongs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of creolisation, some of which went by the name of ‘miscegenation’ in older colonial studies, have a much broader area of distribution than the colonial and postcolonial spaces wherein they are traditionally studied. In fact, they originate in a very large area of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and are ultimately not colonial in origin. Moreover, these processes involved social technologies that were gendered and deeply affected knowledge networks and movement of people and goods in the Indian Ocean and beyond. Processes of creolisation in the Americas can also be traced back to these ancient Indian Ocean patterns. Those processes have been somewhat overlooked by traditional nation-centred historiographies. They have, however, noticeably inflected colonial and postcolonial imaginaries through a variety of local languages, such as, for instance, from west to east: Brazilian Portuguese, Afrikaans, Netherlands Indies Dutch or Malay-Indonesian. They also find expression in various kinds of narratives, including historiographical works. Only a connected history, linked to a translinguistic approach, will be able to retrieve more fully the complexities and nuances of those ancient networks of people and knowledge transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a background for a critical understanding of the contemporary linguistic situation and literary life with regard to the Creole culture of the Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao (ABC) Islands. A historical synopsis from 1499 to the present, including a short account of the developments from the Spanish discovery until the 19th century, is presented. A short overview of the development of the creole language Papiamentu is also presented.

The article describes the development of the creole language Papiamentu during the period of slavery in the Caribbean islands of Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire. According to the author, the lexicon of Papiamentu is primarily of Iberian origin. He adds that Spanish influences are even more prevalent in Aruban Papiamentu than in Papiamentu spoken on Curaçao and Bonaire. A background of the origin of African enslavement by Europeans in presented.

The article explores the role of the Portuguese language on Curaçao in the formation of the Creole language Papiamentu. According to Alonso Zamora Vicente's classic dialectology, Papiamentu is based on the Afro-Portuguese Creole carried over by slaves from Africa. An overview of the Afro-Portuguese spoken by slaves and the Portuguese spoken by Sephardic Jews in the Caribbean area is also presented.

The article provides an overview of ideology and writing in Papiamentu in the Netherlands Antilles. The publication of the "St. Eustatius Gazette" in Curaçcao was established in 1816, whose volumes form an invaluable source of socio-cultural, political, and economic information. It is stated that the first original texts from Dutch Antillean soil to be qualified as literature were in Spanish. Later on, the concept of creolization dominated literary writing both in Papiamentu and in Dutch.

This paper reconsiders the complementiser and the tense-mood-aspect systems of the Papiamentu clause within the framework of the split CP (Rizzi 1997) and the split INFL (Pollock 1989) hypotheses, providing new evidence for the left periphery heads. It provides a detailed account of the Papiamentu morphemes involved that unifies syntactic and interpretive properties. Of particular interest is the proposal that di – which introduces infinitives – and lo – traditionally considered a future marker – both head FinP, and that pa, when functioning as a marker of necessity, heads MoodP. Contra certain claims in the literature, this paper argues that the order of preverbal material is not different from that of other Caribbean creoles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study a a brief introduction to the oral nature of the literatures from Cape Verde And São Tomé and Principe. Though different in outcomes—because of their shared (pre)-history, both African and both European in nature—the literary production that sprung from these two archipelagos share a distinctively Portuguese-Creole/Afro-Portuguese aspect, linguistically as well as culturally, that sets than apart from the rest of the Lusophone African countries, namely Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique, though obviously sharing w¡th them many cultural and linguistic aspects, Portuguese as well as (pan) African.

The substratum theory, while regarded as antiquated and oversimplified by some modern historical linguists, seems to be necessary to explain the influence of certain West African languages on the Creole Portuguese of Annobon. Features which match West African languages but no known variety of Portuguese include vowel harmony, the breaking or deletion of consonant clusters, the canonical syllable structure, palatalization of consonants, replacement of/r/ by/l/, absence of the passive transformation, the nature of negation, the copula, several aspects of word order, and several types of lexical item including videophones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The monogenetic theory of the origin of European-based pidgins and Creoles rests upon a thesis which carries the chain of development back to Sabir, the Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, in the Middle Ages and later. The most important link was Pidgin Portuguese, whose speakers were the most important in the early slave trade and in general European maritime expansion. Italian -- especially Genoese -- merchants and seamen, the earliest users of Sabir, were in especially close contact with Portuguese merchants and sailors throughout the fifteenth century. The multilingual situation and the compact socio-economic unit constituted by whites on the Atlantic coast of Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries provide an explanation of the transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]