# Sergio Baldi, *Dictionary of Portuguese loanwords in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa*

Adrián Rodríguez-Riccelli

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OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/lla/14059

DOI: 10.4000/15e40

ISSN: 2822-7468

**Publisher**

Llacan UMR 8135 CNRS/Inalco

**Electronic reference**

Adrián Rodríguez-Riccelli, "Sergio Baldi, *Dictionary of Portuguese loanwords in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa*", *Linguistique et langues africaines* [Online], 11(1) | 2025, Online since 30 June 2025, connection on 18 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lla/14059; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15e40

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-SA 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.
The *Dictionary of Portuguese loanwords in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa* by Sergio Baldi is a meticulously compiled cross-linguistic lexicon of Lusophone lexical borrowings in sub-Saharan African languages that stands alone in its ambition, scope, and comprehensiveness. Its breadth immediately reminds the reader of the far-reaching impacts of the very early and enduring influence of Portuguese language and culture in sub-Saharan Africa. It also recalls the crucial role of socio-historical context and language ecology in guiding the nature and course of language contact in lexical change.

In the Preface to the *Dictionary*, Baldi begins with an endearing recounting of how, as an Africanist working on Swahili, he came to compile a log of Portuguese loanwords borrowed into this language. As he expanded that endeavor into a larger project, he straightforwardly and directly accomplished his goals of providing Africanists a tool for identifying Lusophonisms in sub-Saharan African languages, while also meeting the goal of highlighting the astoundingly deep and enduring Portuguese influence on Niger-Congo languages.

The useful and informative Preface is followed by a prose Introduction section rich in historical background and methodological framing. Baldi begins the Introduction section by providing a brief but succinctly summarized overview of the language-external history of West Africa just before the onset of Portuguese contact there, then of the early colonial period in which the Portuguese were the dominant European power engaged in trade with sub-Saharan African polities, and of the period shortly thereafter in which other European powers like the Dutch and English came to challenge the Portuguese for control of the trade and contacts with sub-Saharan African peoples and societies.

After establishing some of the relevant socio-historical background, Baldi turns to a methodological consideration of the dictionaries or grammars of sub-Saharan African languages, some a few centuries old, that served as the primary source content for his study and Dictionary. For instance, he highlights some of the purported Lusophonisms that past dictionaries/grammars either accurately identified or erroneously misidentified, and how his careful attention to this guided his own procedure in compiling and verifying the entries that he would include in his Dictionary. In particular, Baldi warns of misattributions such as Swahili *saa* 'hour', which a previous author claimed was derived from Portuguese *sala*, but which is actually from Arabic *sāʻa* (Wehr 1966: 441b) 'time, while; hour; clock'. Baldi describes the method by which he would flag purported Portuguese loanwords listed in previous works on sub-Saharan African languages, and then for those lexical items of doubtful loanword status, he would verify some of their morphophonological characteristics to contemplate the probability that the loanword would have been integrated as such into the recipient language.

Where the absence of modern linguistic methodology and theory contributed to some of the lack of scientific rigor in some of the older works that Baldi consulted, one of the benefits of consulting these older works, he points out, is that it allowed him to identify instances in which a Portuguese loanword once existed in a sub-Saharan African language, but then apparently fell out of use. He shares the example of the old Wolof lexeme *frastu* 'bottle' < Port. *frasco* 'flacon', which he identified in a work from 1825 (Dard 1825: 17), but which by the time of Diouf's (2003) Wolof-French dictionary had been replaced by the French-origin loanword *butéel* < *bouteille* 'bottle'.

In another subsection of the Introduction, Baldi briefly summarizes some of the loanwords that went in the other direction: from sub-Saharan African languages as donor languages into Portuguese as the recipient language. He points out the interesting process by which many such sub-Saharan African loanwords entered the broader Portuguese language via Brazilian Portuguese, such as *cacimba* 'water well' < Kimbundu *kiximba* 'cistern, tank'. This sub-section again conveys the nature
of the colonial-era dynamics between imperial maritime power Portugal and the sub-Saharan African societies. Somewhat confusingly, following a list and short discussion of some sub-Saharan African loanwords borrowed into Portuguese, the remainder of that subsection reverts to discussion of the dynamics of loanwords that went in the other direction (as is the principal concern of the Dictionary). Perhaps Baldi organized the thematic progression in this way to again highlight the linguistic impact of the Portuguese presence in sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, the large number of Portuguese loanwords in Swahili that are related to card games is notable (e.g., *copa* 'cup', *dama* 'damsel', *espada* 'sword', *ouros* 'gold', *paus* 'clubs', *rei* 'king', *sabre* 'saber', *trunfo* 'trump card') and military arms (*bala* 'bullet', *espingarda* 'rifle', *estopa* 'slow match', *peça* 'piece/unit/component', *pelota* 'Minié ball', *pólvora* 'gunpowder').

From there, after having excluded lexemes that were misidentified as Portuguese-origin loanwords, Baldi moves on to provide his confirmation of 150 verifiable Portuguese-origin loanwords in sub-Saharan African languages (p. 10), these having been confirmed, in consultation with area studies experts, because they are still in usage or because they have been documented in previous dictionaries/grammars. In perhaps the most fascinating aside in this prose section of the Dictionary, Baldi explores instances of Portuguese loanwords which found their way into sub-Saharan African languages in the interior of the African continent in zones beyond those that experienced direct historical contact with the Portuguese language. For instance, he points to the spread and institutionalization of Swahili in Tanzania and Kenya as a transmitter of Portuguese-origin loanwords to several local languages that never experienced direct contact with the Portuguese language. One far-flung example is of the Merina dialect of Malagasy spoken in the central highland plateau of Madagascar. Whereas previous works had not found any Portuguese loanwords in this variety (Dama-Ntosha 1953), or just one (Adelaar 2009), Baldi's own scan found five: *mananàsy* < *ananás* 'pineapple', *faneva* < *bandeira* 'flag', *kapiteny* < *capitão* 'captain', *ampingahàratra* < *espingarda* 'rifle', *ariary* < *real* 'currency' (p. 12). His working hypothesis is that these loanwords entered the Merina variety of Malagasy through contact with Swahili.

In the final Section 3 of the prose portion of the Dictionary, Baldi carries out a sweeping analysis and summary of noun class affixing patterns on the Portuguese loanwords in Niger-Congo languages, which famously have complex systems of nominal affixation loosely based on correspondences between specific affixes representing all the nouns contained in idiosyncratic semantic and/or part-of-speech or grammatical-category classes, much like grammatical gender marking but with several gender categories available rather than just the two or three that usually appear in Indo-European languages. This section leaves any reader previously unfamiliar with Niger-Congo noun class affixation systems profoundly impacted by a sense of unpredictability (often the semantic categories are difficult to organize around a unifying theme in their meaning) and unwieldiness (it is difficult or impossible to spot a pattern as to which noun class categories Portuguese loanwords tend to get placed into across the many languages of the Niger-Congo family containing Lusophonisms).

The lexical catalog portion of the dictionary lists the loanwords first based on the Portuguese lexeme, its Portuguese-internal etymology, and an English translation from the meaning of that word in Portuguese. Then, underneath the Portuguese lexeme, Baldi lists the sub-Saharan African languages that have received that loanword by the name of the language in English in alphabetical order in an indented column, and immediately to its right in the same column in between parentheses he provides an abbreviation of the author's name who published the original work in which Baldi identified the Lusophonism. The next column to the right lists a corresponding phonological approximation of the morphophonological rendering of the loanword in the recipient language, and the rightmost column in the entry lists the closest English translation from the recipient language meaning of the word.

Despite the large portion of the prose Introduction dedicated to discussion of the noun class affixation systems in sub-Saharan African languages, the lexical entry catalog does not list such inflections or derivational forms, nor does it list the kinds of stem or root form variations like those which can be found in Wolof. However, this is understandable, as the length or size of the lexical entry catalog might have become too unwieldy if all such alternations, derivations, or inflections were to be listed.
Using this system in this Dictionary, if a reader wanted to consult which sub-Saharan languages have borrowed a given word from Portuguese, one would simply seek the original Portuguese lexeme in alphabetical order or using a Ctrl + F command. To find all the Lusophonisms that exist in a given sub-Saharan African language, one would use the Ctrl + F command to find each time that that language is listed as a recipient language under a Portuguese lexical entry across the full catalog. It might be more difficult to determine whether a given lexeme in a sub-Saharan African language is a Lusophonism or not, such as in the event a researcher comes across an unfamiliar word in a sub-Saharan African language that they are researching and is unsure of its etymological source. Still, one could either search by the approximate morphophonological form as it exists in that language, or simply consult every entry from that language listed in the Dictionary to see if the form they are seeking appears or not.

In sum, Baldi's *Dictionary of Portuguese loanwords in sub-Saharan African languages* is an ambitious and impressively comprehensive work that is useful for Lusophonists, Africanists, contact linguists, and typologists alike. The historical and methodological background section of the prose portion preceding the lexical catalog section of the Dictionary aids the reader greatly in comprehending the scope of the work, the long-lasting legacy of Portuguese colonialism in the region, and its relevance for many different subfields of linguistics, African studies, and Lusophone studies. The lexical catalog portion of the Dictionary serves as a useful and singular resource for any researcher considering issues such as the functional/historical motivations for lexical borrowings, and the semantic and morphophonological adaptation of loanwords into recipient language systems, especially those with rich systems for morphophonologically and semantically classifying nominals. On this last note, perhaps one of the few drawbacks of this work is its lack of engagement with the introductory and theoretical overview/framework chapters by Haspelmath (2009) and Tadmor (2009) in the De Gruyter handbook on *Loanwords in the world's languages*. Engagement with these recent treatise and project report would have made the impact and reach of Baldi's *Dictionary* even greater, though I do believe that its valuable contributions should nonetheless be appreciable to a diversity of cross-disciplinary scholars, in spite of this minor shortcoming. In particular, this Dictionary is a practical tool for researchers who need to quickly spot Lusophonisms or resolve the etymological status of loanwords in sub-Saharan African recipient-languages.

## References

Adelaar, Alexander. 2009. Loanwords in Malagasy. In Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds.), *Loanwords in the world's languages*, 717–746. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110218442.717.

Dama-Ntsoha [Jean-Baptiste Razafintsalama]. 1953. *Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue malgache*. Vol. 2: *Les mots dérivés des apports malais maoris motas arabes souahilis*. Ambanidia-Tananarive: Ny Antsiva.

Dard, Jean. 1825. *Dictionnaire français-wolof et français-bambara, suivi du dictionnaire wolof-français*. Paris: Imprimerie Royale. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96900475.textelimage.

Diouf, Jean Léopold. 2003. *Dictionnaire wolof-français suivi d'un dictionnaire français-wolof*. Paris: Karthala.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2009. Lexical borrowing: Concepts and issues. In Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds.), *Loanwords in the world's languages*, 35–54. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110218442.35.

Tadmor, Uri. 2009. Loanwords in the world's languages: Findings and results. In Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds.), *Loanwords in the world's languages*, 55–75. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110218442.55.

Wehr, Hans. 1966. *A dictionary of modern written Arabic*. (Ed.) Cowan, J. Milton. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.