Língua de Preto, the Basic Variety at the root of West African Portuguese Creoles

Abstract

Língua de Preto falar Guiné 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 testimonies 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.

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