Cape Verdean Creole

How did Kriolu take shape

One view holds that the Portuguese simplified their language for enslaved Africans. Adam and Quint argue that enslaved Africans kept West African grammar and swapped in Portuguese words. Chomsky and Bickerton see it forming among people born on the islands. A. Carreira traces it to a Portuguese pidgin on Santiago from the 15th century, which the lançados carried to the African coast, where it split into the ancestors of Cape Verdean Creole and Guinea-Bissau Creole.

From Santiago and then Fogo, settlers took it to São Nicolau and Santo Antão in the 17th century and to the remaining islands in the 18th and 19th.

What keeps it from becoming official

Portuguese runs school, administration and foreign relations in Cape Verde, and the two languages live in diglossia, with Creole slowly decreolising under Portuguese pressure. A 2005 government resolution laid out the conditions for making Creole official, superseded by another in 2015. The step has not been taken, mainly because there is no standard. Speakers resist variants other than their own, spellings wander, and one word for pocket has been recorded in eight forms. Some advocates propose two standards, a northern one centred on São Vicente and a southern one on Santiago.

Which alphabet writes Kriolu

ALUPEC, the Unified Alphabet for the Writing of the Cape Verdean Language, is the only system the authorities recognise. Decree-Law No. 67/98 approved it on an experimental basis in 1998 and Decree-Law No. 8/2009 institutionalised it, but it is not compulsory and not every speaker accepts it. It spells by sound, not by Portuguese etymology: k for every k sound, s for every s sound, and tx where an etymological spelling would write tch.

Each of the nine inhabited islands has its own variant. Brava, Fogo, Santiago and Maio form the southern Sotavento branch; Boa Vista, Sal, São Nicolau, São Vicente and Santo Antão form the northern Barlavento branch.