Guinea-Bissau Creole

Guinea-Bissau Creole, also known as Kiriol,[5] is a creole language whose lexicon derives mostly from Portuguese. It is spoken in Guinea Bissau, Senegal and The Gambia. It is also called by its native speakers as guinensi,[6] kriyol,[7] or portuguis.

Guinea-Bissau Creole
Kiriol
guinensi, kriyol, kiriol, purtuguis 'kriolo'
Native toGuinea-Bissau, Senegal, The Gambia
Native speakers
1.0 million[1] (2006–2007)[2]
L2 speakers: 600,000 in Guinea-Bissau (no date)[3]
Portuguese Creole
  • Afro-Portuguese Creole
    • Upper Guinea Creole
      • Guinea-Bissau Creole
Language codes
ISO 639-3pov
Glottologuppe1455[4]
Linguasphere51-AAC-ab

Guinea-Bissau Creole is spoken as a native tongue by approximately 15% (190,000) of Bissau-Guineans[2] and as a second language by approximately 50% (as of some time before 1992).[3]

A variant of Guinea-Bissau Creole is also spoken in southern Senegal, mainly in the region of Casamance, a former Portuguese colony, which is known as Portuguis Creole or Casamance Creole. Creole is the majority language of the inhabitants of the Casamance region and is used as a language of commerce.[8]

Standard Portuguese is the official language of Guinea-Bissau, but Guinea-Bissau Creole is the language of trade, informal literature and entertainment. It is not used in either news media, parliament, public services or educational programming.[9]

History

The creole languages of Upper Guinea are the oldest-known creoles whose lexicons derive heavily from Portuguese. They first appeared around Portuguese settlements established along the northwest coast of Africa; Guinea-Bissau Creole was among these Portuguese-lexified creoles to have emerged. Portuguese merchants and settlers started to mix with locals almost immediately. A small body of settlers called lançados ("the thrown out ones"), contributed to the spread of the Portuguese language and influence by being intermediaries between the Portuguese and natives.

There are three main varieties of this creole in Guinea-Bissau and Senegal: Bissau and Bolama, Bafata, and Cacheu–Ziguinchor.

The creole's substrate language is the language of the local peoples: Mandingas, Manjacos, Pepéis and others, but most of the lexicon (around 80%) comes from Portuguese.

The Portuguese-influenced dialect of Casamance, known as Portuguis Creole or Casamance Creole,[10] similar to the one of Cacheu (Guinea-Bissau) has some influence of French. Fijus di Terra (Filhos da Terra, English: Children of the Land) and Fijus di Fidalgu (Port. Filhos de Fidalgo, Eng. Children of Nobles) speak it, all of them are known, locally, as Purtuguis because they adopt European habits, are Catholics and speak a Creole. They are descendants of Portuguese men and African women. Most of them have Portuguese surnames, such as da Silva, Carvalho or Fonseca. The former Casamance Kingdom made a friendly alliance with the Portuguese and the local king adopted European lifestyle, and there were Portuguese in his court. In 1899, the city was ceded to France and in the middle of the 20th century, the language spread to the surrounding area. After Senegal's independence from France, the Creole people were seen as friends of the French, and discrimination by the more numerous northern Wolof-speaking community started, which has caused Casamance to struggle for independence since 1982. Today, although they continue to struggle, the movement is more placid and learning Portuguese is popular in Casamance because they see it has a link to their past. It is also learned across Senegal since the independence of the country from France.[8] In Senegal, the creole is the first language of at least 46,500 people (1998); it is mainly spoken in Ziguinchor, but there are also speakers in other Casamance cities and in The Gambia.

The use of Guinea-Bissau Creole is still expanding but with growing interference from Portuguese (due to television, literacy, prestige and emigration to Portugal) and African languages (through the migration of speakers of native African languages to the main urban centres of Guinea-Bissau, where the creole is prevalent).

Example

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Creole: Tudu pekaduris ta padidu libri i igual na balur suma na diritus. Suma e dadu kapasidadi di pensa, e tene tambi konsiensia, e dibi di trata nutru suma ermons.[11]

Portuguese: Todas as pessoas que nascem são iguais e livres nos direitos. Como são dadas as mesmas capacidades de pensar e ter também consciência, devem ser tratadas como irmãos!

gollark: You probably could generate it automatically out of a bunch of lines.
gollark: Also, if you play it in safe mode i.e. don't launch the driver on boot the game will apparently refuse to run until you reboot.
gollark: Lots of games do the kernel driver thing, but they're venturing into new areas of malware-like "anticheat" by making it run constantly.
gollark: https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/fzxdl7/anticheat_starts_upon_computer_boot/
gollark: As in, kernel driver thingy running all the time even with the game closed.

References
  1. The remainder of the population listed in Ethnologue 18 appears to be Cape Verdean Creole, as per Ethnologue 12.
  2. Guinea-Bissau Creole at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  3. Upper Guinea Crioulo at Ethnologue (12th ed., 1992).
  4. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Upper Guinea Crioulo". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  5. Benson, Carol (2003). "Possibilities for educational language choice in multilingual Guinea-Bissau". In Huss, Leena; Camilleri Grima, Antoinette; King, Kendall (eds.). Transcending Monolingualism: Linguistic Revitalization in Education. Swets & Zeitlinger. pp. 67–88. ISBN 1134380828.
  6. Scantamburlo, Luigi (2019). Dicionário do Guineense (2a. ed.). Lisboa: Colibri. ISBN 9789896898106. OCLC 1091114509.
  7. Kihm (1994)
  8. Horta, José (12–25 April 2006). "A Língua Portuguesa no Senegal" [Portuguese language in Senegal] (in Portuguese). Instituto Camões. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  9. Intumbo, Incanha, Situação Sociolinguística da Guiné-bissau [Sociolinguistic Situation in Guinea-Bissau] (PDF) (in Portuguese), archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-12-18
  10. Quint, Nicolas; Noël Bernard, Biagui (2013). "Casamance creole". In Michaelis, Susanne Maria; Philippe, Maurer; Martin, Haspelmath; Magnus, Huber (eds.). Search Results The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages Check |url= value (help). II: Portuguese-based, Spanish-based, and French-based Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 40–49.
  11. "Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Crioulo da Guiné-Bissau (Guinea Bissau Creole)". Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Literature
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