Portuguese Base Creoles Creoles are natural languages as we learnt in the MFL Symposium. They are formed rapidly, and their creation stems from the urgent need of full expression and communication in between individuals who belong to multilinguistic communities which are relatively stable. We call “Portuguese based creoles” all the creoles whose lexicon is, in its vast majority, of Portuguese origin. However, from a grammatical point of view, creoles are autonomous and differentiated languages. The creoles of Portuguese base are generally classified according to a predominantly geographical point of view even though there is, in many cases, also a correlation in between the geographical location and the type of languages of substrate present at the time of formation. For example, in Africa one can find the following creoles: Creoles of High Guinea (in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Casamansa), Creoles of the Guinea Gulf (in S. Tomé and Prince). There are Indian-portuguese creoles in India, such as Diu, Daman, Mumbai, Korlai, Quilom, Cananor, Tellicherry, amongst others. In Asia, there are Portuguese based creoles in Malaysia (Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Malacca) and in some islands of Indonesia (Java, Flores, Ternate, Ambom, Macassar and Timor). These latter ones are known as Malayan-Portuguese. The creoles from Macau and Hong-Kong are denominated as Sino-Portuguese. In America there is a creole that can be considered of Iberian base given that Portuguese shares the origin of great part of its lexicon with Spanish and that is the Creole from Papiamento (Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire in the Antilles). Finally, there is another creole called Saramacane which exists in Suriname, and although of English base, it shows in its lexicon a strong Portuguese influence.
Source: Instituto Camões By Miss Santos 19
