Principense Creole

Principense Creole
Lunguyê
Native to São Tomé and Príncipe
Ethnicity 1,560 (no date)[1]
Native speakers
 200  (1999)[1]
Portuguese-based creole

  • Lower Guinea

    • Principense Creole
Language codes
ISO 639-3 pre
Glottolog prin1242[2]
Linguasphere 51-AAC-acb

Principense Creole, called lunguyê ("language of the island") by its speakers, is a Portuguese creole spoken in a community of some four thousand people in São Tomé and Príncipe, specifically on the island of Príncipe (there are two Portuguese-based creoles on São Tomé, Angolar and São Tomense), according to a 1989 study.[3] Today it is mostly spoken by some elderly women (the Ethnologue entry lists 200 native speakers); most of the island's community speaks noncreolized Portuguese; some also speak Forro.

Principense presents many similarities with the Forro on São Tomé and may be regarded as a Forro dialect. Like Forro, it is a creole language based on Portuguese with substrates of Bantu and Kwa.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Principense Creole at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Principense". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. ↑ Holm, John A. (1989). Pidgins and Creoles: Reference Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. p. 277. ISBN 978-0-521-35940-5.