Cafundó language

Cafundó
Cupópia
Native to Brazil
Region Cafundó, São Paulo
Native speakers
 unknown (40 cited 1978)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 ccd
Glottolog cafu1238[2]

Cafundó (Portuguese pronunciation: [kafũˈdɔ]), or Cupópia ([kuˈpɔpjɐ]), is a 'secret' language spoken in the village of Cafundó, São Paulo (Brazil). The language is structurally similar to Portuguese, with a large number of Bantu words in its lexicon.

Cafundó was at first thought to be an African language, but a later study (1986) by Carlos Vogt and Peter Fry showed that its grammatical and morphological structure are those of Portuguese, specifically the rural hinterland Southeastern (caipira) variety; whereas its lexicon is heavily drawn from some Bantu language. It is therefore not a creole language, as it is sometimes considered.

Speakers

The speaker community is very small (40 people in 1978). They live in a rural area, 150 km from the city of São Paulo, and are mostly of African descent. They also speak Portuguese, and use cafundó as a "secret" home language. A cafundó speaker and an African-born Bantu (Angolan or Mozambican) speaking Portuguese and Bantu languages can understand each other, because Angolan and Mozambican dialects also have its particular Bantu-derived characteristics.

References

  1. ↑ Cafundó at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Cafundo Creole". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

External links