African words and calques in Capeverdean Creole (Santiago variety)

Nicolas Quint (1)

1 LLACAN - Langage, LAngues et Cultures d'Afrique Noire

Capeverdean (CV) is the mother tongue of more than a million people living in, or originating from, the archipelago of Cape Verde, situated about 500 km west of Dakar (Senegal). As a Portuguese-based Creole, this language obviously has many Portuguesederived items in its vocabulary, although there are often significant phonetic changes (see Quint 2000a: 53-139) such as: CV obi ‘to hear’ < Port. ouvir CV nabidja ‘heifer’ < Port. novilha. Nevertheless, not all CV words derive from Portuguese; indeed, some quite common CV words can be traced back to diverse African languages, e.g. CV djobi ‘to look at’ < Mandinka juubee. CV djáki ‘bull calf’ < Wolof yëkk. In this article, I examine the importance of this African stratum and explore what African words and expressions in CV can tell us about the origins of this language and, more generally, about the formation of Afro-European creoles.

Mots clés: Capeverdean Creole; Cape Verde; Creole languages; Africanisms; Substrate; Calques; African substrate

Domaines: Linguistique

Nicolas Quint. African words and calques in Capeverdean Creole (Santiago variety). Angela BARTENS; Philip BAKER. Black through White. African words and calques which survived slavery in Creoles and transplanted European languages, Battlebridge Publications, pp.3-29, 2012, 978-1-903292-12-9. ⟨hal-01169428⟩