Cape Verdean Creole – Santo Antão: What We Know So Far1 Dominika
Cape Verdean Creole – Santo Antão: what we know so far1 Dominika Swolkien Universidade de Cabo Verde & Alexander Cobbinah Universidade de São Paulo The Santo Antão variety (SA) of Cape Verdean Creole (CVC) is not only very little studied but the existing publications, overwhelmingly in Portuguese, are not well known among a wider linguistic audience. This is particularly surprising if we consider that from the first Cape Verdean census, in 1731 (Carreira 1984), until the 1970s Santo Antão has been the second most populous island of the archipelago. The article presents a review of the literature from historical sources about the settlement of Santo Antão, which then serves as a base from which to reconsider current debates about the genesis of CVC. Linguistic data, mainly of phonological nature, from conversations recorded during a short field trip to Santo Antão (Cabo da Ribeira and Vila das Pombas), complemented by existing data on other varieties of CVC, are used to support the proposed hypotheses. Keywords: Cape Verdean Creole, Santo Antão variety, sociolinguistic history, phonology, language description 1. Introduction The goals of this article are as follows. First, we aim to summarize the existing literature on the variety (section 2) and, based on a wide range of historical works, sketch a possible socio-historical scenario of its formation in the early 16th century and further development until the current linguistic situation (section 3). Second, based on our exploratory fieldwork on the island, we present selected features of SA phonology (section 5) and compare them with the two other varieties of Barlavento for which comparable data is available (São Vicente, São Nicolau), as well as to the variety of the main island Santiago, 1 The authors would like to thank Marlyse Baptista and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful suggestions and corrections.
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