Principal language

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Principal ( Lunguyê )

Spoken in

Sao Tome and Principe
speaker 200-4000
Linguistic
classification

Creole language

  • Portuguese based
    • Afro-Portuguese Creole
      • Gulf of Guinea Creole
    Principal language
Language codes
ISO 639 -2

cpp

ISO 639-3

pre

The Principensic language , nicknamed lunguyê ("language of the island") by its speakers, is a Portuguese Creole that is spoken in a community of some 4,000 people in São Tomé and Príncipe - especially on the island of Príncipe . There are two Portuguese-based Creole languages on São Tomé , Angolar and São Tomé .

Today Principensisch is mostly spoken by a few older women (according to some estimates the language has only 200 native speakers); the majority of the island community now speaks standard Portuguese; some also speak forro .

In principle it has many similarities with the Forro on Sao Tome, and could be considered a Forro dialect. Like Forro, it is a Creole language based on Portuguese with the substrate of Bantu languages and the Kwa languages .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ethnologue
  2. ↑ a b according to a 1989 study John A. Holm: Pidgins and Creoles: Reference Survey . Cambridge UP, Cambridge 1989, ISBN 9780521359405 , p. 277.