Portuguese language in Africa

African Portuguese (Português Africano in Portuguese) is a term for the varieties of Portuguese spoken in Africa. Portuguese is a post-colonial language in Africa and is one of the official languages of the African Union. What makes these varieties of Portuguese worth grouping together seperately from those of Brazil and Portugal is their common origin in Subsaharan Africa's colonial history and the fact that African Portuguese co-exists with Portuguese-based creoles (Upper Guinea and Gulf of Ginuea Creoles) and autochtonous African languages (Bantu and Niger-Congo families).

African Portuguese experiences pressure and possibly competition from French and English. Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and Sāo Tomé e Principe are all member-states of La Francophonie and Mozambique is a member-state of the Commonwealth of Nations.

Geographic Distribution

The nation-states with Portuguese as an official language are reffered to by the acronym PALOP (Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa)and include the following: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé e Principe. In these Counries African Portuguese is a primarily urban language having a reduced presence in rural areas.

South Africa also has approximately 1,000,000 speakers of Portuguese who are largely white Angolans and Mozambicans who emigrated after idependence in the late '70s. The civil wars in Angola and Mozambique have resulted in more recent migrations of refugees (some of whom speak Portuguese) to neighbouring countries such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia and South Africa.

Senegal has it's own lusophone connection with a significant community of Cape verdeans in Dakar and speakers of Guinea-Bissau Creole in its southern region of Casamance.

Equatorial Guinea was at one point a Portuguese Colony and is home to a Portuguese-based creole and is an observer nation in the CPLP.

The Role of African Portuguese

As an official language, African Portuguese serves in the realms of administration, education, law, poilitics and media. Given the existing linguistic diversty of the PALOPs, African Portuguese also serves the purpose of ''lingua franca'' allowing communication between fellow citizens of different ethno-linguistic backgrounds. It is in this way that each country has started to develop a national culture.

Additionally, Portuguese connects the PALOP countries to eachother, to Portugual, East Timor and, most interestingly, to fellow former colony Brazil which pursues its own relations with PALOP independently of Portugal. As the number of L1 and L2 speakers of Portuguese continues to increase, so too will the role of the language grow and change.

Media

BBC Para Africa, RFI and RDP-Africa are all media outlets that make a point of presenting Portuguese as an African language aside form it's origins in Europe. Lusophone Africa forms an obvious market for Brazilian media and thus African speakers of Portuguese have available to them an alternative to Standard European Portuguese. Music is one way in which the linguistic profiles of PALOP have increased. Many recording artists from PALOP, in addition to singing in their maternal languages, sing in Portuguese to one degree or another. The success of these artisis in the World Music industry increases international awareness of African Portuguese.

Influence of African Portuguese

As a result of immigration to Portugal various varieties of African Portuguese have influenced contemporary speech in Portugal. In the '70s it came from White people from the former colonies (reffered to as Retornados). More recent immigration from the PALOPs has resulted in a visible demographic of black and brown Portuguese who have strong links to Lusophone Africa.

In Brazil, many of the indigenous African languages that influence African Portuguese had the same influence historically on the formation of Brazilian Portugese during the colonial period especially lexically.

Creoles

Any discussion of the role of the Portuguese language in Africa must take into account the various Portuguese Creoles that have developed there. These new languages co-exist with Portuguese and, in the countries where they are spoken, form a continuum with the lexifying language. In Cape Verde, Crioulo levinho reffers to a variety of Cape verdean creole which takes on various features of Portuguese and is a result of bilingualism in that country.

External Links

Reflections on Language Policy in African Countries with Portuguese as an Official Language

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