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Upper Guinea Creole
Evidence in favor of a Santiago birth*
Bart Jacobs

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

This paper addresses the debate on the place of origin of the Upper Guinea
branch of Portuguese Creole (UGPC) as spoken in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance (GBC)1 and on the Santiago Island of Cape Verde (SCV). The hypothesisthat UGPC emerged on Santiago rather than on the mainland is underpinned
both historically and linguistically. First, a historical framework is presented that
accounts for the linguistic transfer from Santiago to Cacheu. Secondly, Parkvall’s(2000) lexical evidence in favor of a Santiago birth will be analyzed and corroborated. Thirdly, a phonological trait that separates GBC from SCV is highlighted
and shown to favor a Santiago origin. Finally, lexical and phonological features
typical of 15th–16th century Portuguese shared by GBC and SCV are combinedwith historical data to further strengthen the Santiago birth hypothesis.
Keywords: Santiago Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau and Casamance
Creole, migration from Santiago to Cacheu, Mandinka, Wolof, (de)palatalization
patterns, 15th–16th century Portuguese* I am grateful to Marlyse Baptista, Noël Bernard, George Brooks, Ulrich Detges, Stéphane
Goyette, Toby Green, Tjerk Hagemeijer, Philip Havik, John Holm, Jürgen Lang, Peter Mark,
Philippe Maurer, John McWhorter, Mikael Parkvall, Nicolas Quint, Armin Schwegler, Gerhard
Seibert, Donald Winford and two anonymous reviewers of JPCL for comments and suggestions.
Needless to say, responsibility for any errors remains solely my own.
1. According to Wilson (1962: vii), ‘Within Guiné three dialects of Crioulo are recognized: thatof Bissau and Bolama, now the most widely spoken; that of Cacheu and São Domingos (andZiguinchor), spoken mainly along the northern border towards the coast; and that of Bafatá
and Geba’. Kihm (1994: 8) describes the main Bissau variety and maintains that, ‘Except for thepersistence of a distinct dialect in Ziguinchor (…), geographical variation is almost extinct’.
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 25:2 (2010), 289–343. doi 10.1075/jpcl.25.2.04jac
issn – / e-issn – © John Benjamins Publishing Company

290 Bart Jacobs

1.

Introduction

This paper is concerned with the formation of the Upper Guinea branch of Portuguese Creole (UGPC), as spoken in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance (GBC) andon the Santiago Island of the Cape Verdes (SCV). The place of origin of the twocreoles ‘ist heftig umstritten’ [‘is highly controversial’] (Bartens 1996: 28) and has
been subject to debate ever since scholars noted the similarities between them. The
question raised is whether UGPC emerged on the continent and from there wastaken to the Cape Verde Islands, or vice versa. Scholars concerned with the issue
have relied chiefly on historical suppositions and speculation, while considering it
impossible to solve the matter by means of linguistic data. This is where the present paper enters the discussion.
The lack of linguistic evidence produced a certain impasse in the debate. Although Parkvall (2000) put forward pioneering linguistic (lexical) evidence insupport of a Santiago origin, he was not able to breach this impasse: his evidence
has been largely ignored in subsequent publications on UGPC and substantial debate on the matter has been avoided in recent years.
As noted by D’Andrade & Kihm (2000: 98), GBC and SCV ‘are closely related
typologically and geographically, and there has been a lot of, still unsettled, debate
about whether they ought to be historically related to one another and, if yes, whatshould be the orientation of this relation’. Similarly, Viaro (2005: 82–83) mentions
that ‘[o] CPGB (…) revela certa semelhança com o CPCV e não são poucas as tentativas de explicação que unam diretamente esses dois falares’ [‘GBC reveals certain
similarities with Cape Verdean Creole and more than a few attempts have been
made to explain these similarities’].2 To date, the ‘question of finding out where
Cape Verdean Creole originated [is still a] controversial issue’ (Baptista 2006: 41).
1.1 Hypothesis and structure of the paper
The present paper takes a straightforward stand in this discussion: both historicaland linguistic arguments will be given in order to defend the hypothesis that proto-UGPC emerged and nativized in the late 15th to early 16th century on Santiago,
from where it was taken to the mainland by native Cape Verdeans who settled inand around Cacheu in the late 16th century. It is argued that this contingent ofCape Verdeans triggered a Founder Effect (cf. Mufwene 1996) that accounts forthe establishment and diffusion of proto-UGPC in Cacheu from where the creole
must have spread to places such as Ziguinchor, Geba and Bissau.

2. All translations from the original are mine.

Upper Guinea Creole 291

Within the debate on UGPC’s place of origin, a first distinction should bemade between hypotheses that assume a shared proto-creole ancestor and thosethat do not. For the reasons given in Section 2, this paper definitely assumes theexistence of a shared proto-creole ancestor and disregards all others. The supposition of a shared proto-creole ancestor leaves us with a convenient division into twoclearly opposite lines of thought: the continental birth hypothesis with transfer toSantiago and, vice versa, the Santiago birth hypothesis with transfer to the mainland. In Section 3, the former is critically discussed and shown to have a rather
narrow empirical base. The latter is historically and linguistically underpinned in
the remaining sections.
In each case of hypothesized language transfer, there is an obvious need to‘show that the right speakers were in the right place at the right time’ (Bickerton 1994: 65, a.k.a. ‘Bickerton’s Edict’). For the present case, this means showingthat Cape Verdeans were crucially involved in the colonization of those regions
where GBC is thought to have emerged. This is the subject of Section 4: a historical framework that focuses on the foundation of Cacheu by Cape Verdeans is presented in order to account in an uncomplicated manner for the linguistic transferfrom Santiago to the continent.
One of the present paper’s main objectives is to add linguistic reasoning to adebate that so far has been dominated by historical speculation. Section 5 briefly
introduces the transition within the paper from chiefly historical-based (Sections
2–4) to chiefly linguistic-based (Sections 6–8) evidence. Section 6 provides an extensive and critical discussion of Parkvall’s lexical evidence. This implies the analysis of the diachronic and synchronic spread of Mandinka and Wolof in the areas
where UGPC is spoken. Section 7 focuses on palatalization patterns that separate
SCV from GBC, and adduces these patterns to argue in favor of UGPC’s Santiago
origin. Section 8, finally, just as Section 6, also relies crucially on and benefits from
historical-demographic data: several shared UGPC features typical of 15th–16th
century Portuguese are claimed to have entered GBC via Santiago.
As already suggested, a shared proto-creole is taken as the point of departure.
Only the continental birth hypothesis and the Santiago birth hypothesis comply
with this condition and the paper is therefore concerned primarily with playing
these two hypotheses off against each other (in favor of the latter). To clear the way
for this bipolar analysis, it seems appropriate to first explain why those hypotheses
that do not take a shared proto-creole as starting point appear untenable.

292 Bart Jacobs

2. Hypotheses not considered in this paper
2.1 ‘SCV and GBC not genetically related’
On rare occasions the kinship between SCV and GBC has been disputed (e.g.
Morais-Barbosa 1975: 150; D’Andrade & Kihm 2000: 108). The present paper will,
however, take as its point of departure the generally accepted idea that the twocreoles do share a common origin: Quint’s (2000b: 99–117) concise comparison
leaves little room for doubt, and more recently, Baptista, Mello & Suzuki (2007)
have further explored the structural similarities, establishing a 90% correspondence of the grammatical features measured by Holm & Patrick’s (2007) comparative creole chart. Rougé (1999a: 56), furthermore, estimates that ‘80% das palavras de origem africana do crioulo de Santiago existem também na Guiné’ [‘80% ofAfrican-derived lexemes in SCV also exist in GBC’]. Both the 90% grammaticalcorrespondences and the shared African lexicon would constitute small miracles
if the two creoles were not intimately related.
2.2 The simultaneous development hypothesis
Da Mota (1954: 232) was the first to argue for ‘um crioulo caboverdiano-guineense,
formado simultâneamente dos dois lados e com relativa unidade devido às influências mútuas’ [‘a Cape Verdean-Guinean creole, formed simultaneously on bothsides, and relatively uniform due to mutual influences’]. This school of thought has
since been adopted and elaborated upon by scholars such as Rougé (1994, 2004a,
2005), Do Couto (1992, 1994, 2003) and Baptista (2006, 2007a).
Rougé (1994: 144) details: ‘Pour reprendre l’expression de Da Mota, on parlera
d’une langue guinéo-capverdienne mais qui dés l’origine apparaît dialectalisée’ [‘Totake over Da Mota’s expression, we can speak of one Guineo-Cape Verdean language that appears dialectalized from the beginning’]. Baptista (2006: 93) prefers
to speak of ‘the formation of two distinct but related creoles, one with its roots on
the African mainland, and the other on the archipelago’ (cf. Baptista 2007a: 41).
Do Couto (2003: 92) sums up: ‘[O] que parece mais plausível é a possibilidade deele [GBC] ter surgido em Cabo Verde e na Guiné ao mesmo tempo’ [‘What seems
most plausible, is the possibility that GBC emerged in Cape Verde and Guinea atthe same time’].
Although at first glance a simultaneous development scenario is surely an attractive compromise, in my opinion, it is simply too far-fetched and does not do
proper justice to the deep structural correspondences between SCV and GBC at
all levels of the grammar. This is expressed well by Quint (2000b: 115): ‘On ne peut
pas produire des traditions orales ou une morphologie si proches dans deux endroitsUpper Guinea Creole 293

séparés à la fois’ [‘Oral traditions or a morphology so similar cannot emerge simultaneously in two different places’].
It appears to me, furthermore, that the simultaneous development hypothesis
is unfalsifiable and therefore bound to remain purely speculative. Morais-Barbosa(1975: 151), for example, commented: ‘the simultaneous development of the samelanguage in two separate territories would presuppose an almost daily intimatecontact between their two populations (…), which the difficulties of communication certainly made impossible’, while Cunha (1981: 43–46) countered that such
intimate contact did in fact exist between the two regions. Both standpoints, however, do nothing to falsify or verify the simultaneous development hypothesis: after all, who knows how intense contact between two regions should be to foster asimultaneous creole development in the first place?
2.3 Naro (1978), or a common pidgin ancestor
Naro (1978) postulated the emergence of an L2 variety of Portuguese among Africans in 15th century Lisbon (denoted Lingua de Pretu by Teyssier 1959), fromwhich a pidgin or langue de reconnaissance (a term coined by Naro 1978) would
have developed. This langue de reconnaissance, in turn, was used by the Portuguesecolonizers in their encounters with Africans in Upper Guinea and would havecreolized separately on Santiago and on the continent.3
A first critical observation regards L2 varieties: ‘as opposed to creoles, suchvarieties do not normally contain highly grammaticalized copular and TMA constructions drastically different from the target language’ (Parkvall 2005: 701). If
this is correct, it severely weakens Naro’s account, since the correspondences between SCV and GBC (whether we take the Casamance or the Bissau variety) concern exactly such ‘highly grammaticalized copular and TMA constructions drastically different from the target language’.
A second observation incompatible with Naro’s account — and, for that matter, with all accounts that depart from a common pidgin rather than a common
creole ancestor (e.g. Kihm 2008: 282) — is that the correspondences between thecreoles concern complex inflectional and derivational morphology and that most,
if not all, of GBC’s functional items can be traced back to SCV. It is common knowledge that ‘pidgins (…) have very few functional items’ (Bickerton 2001: 1104; cf.
Muysken 2008: 191; Veenstra 1996: 259; Parkvall 2006: 324; McWhorter 2005: 10).
With respect to TMA marking in pidgins and creoles, Bakker (2008: 142) notesthat pidgins ‘do not have these preverbal particles’ and Parkvall speaks of the
3. Nigerian Pidgin, spoken in the Bight of Benin, according to Naro (1978) also sprang fromthe langue de reconnaissance.

294 Bart Jacobs

typical absence in pidgins of passive morphology (2000: 20) and conjunctions(2000: 67). If these assumptions about pidgins are correct, and if we agree that thecorrespondences between GBC and SCV are structural and concern TMA marking, (passive) morphology and in fact all other functional categories (e.g. subordinate conjunctions) said to be absent in most pidgins, it then becomes problematic,
to say the least, to ascribe these correspondences to a (often ill-defined) common
pidgin ancestor.4
Quite the contrary, judging from the complexity of the correspondences, it
seems fairly safe to assume that the contact language underlying both SCV and
GBC was a fully-fledged creole and that it was transmitted from one place to theother by native speakers.5
The reconnaissance language postulated by Naro (1978) might very well haveexisted, and, of course, if it did, it might, to an unknown extent, have contributed
to the shaping of the proto-creole that, as argued in this paper, arose on Santiago.
But this is of no concern here; paramount in the present context is rather that
Naro’s reconnaissance language (or any other hypothesized trade jargon or pidginfor that matter) did not give birth to GBC and SCV in two places separately.6

4. When discussing pidgins, distinctions should preferably be made between the different developmental stages. Scholars commonly distinguish between jargons, pidgins, stable pidgins,and expanded pidgins (cf. Mühlhäusler 1997: 12). Bakker (2008) prefers to speak of jargons,
pidgins and pidgincreoles. To my knowledge, in the accounts that have proposed (or discussed
the possibility of) a common UGPC pidgin ancestor, such distinctions were not made, an omission that debilitates the accounts beforehand. Bakker (2008) provides a concise overview of thestate of the art of, and the literature available on, pidgin studies.
5. Typically, the farther we go back, the closer GBC and SCV seem to have been. Synchronically, for instance, the preverbal progressive markers differ in the two creoles (SCV sata vs. GBCna). However, in 19th century GBC, besides na, the preverbal progressive marker sata was apparently still in use (Barros 1899: 274, 275). Moreover, as noted by Rougé (1993a: 323), GBC na
goes back to the periphrasis sta na, still heard in the speech of elderly people. The same periphrasis, sta na, is common in SCV to indicate a progressive action (Nicolas Quint p. c.). But also
on a phonological level we see that the more conservative varieties of Ziguinchor and Cacheu
are closer to SCV than is the Bissau variety (cf. Rougé 2004b; Doneux & Rougé 1988; Wilson
1962: 35, 36; Bal 1983).
6. See, for instance, Peck (1988: 85, 86), Rougé (1986: 30–31), Veiga (2000: 25) and Do Couto(1994: 33) for additional historical objections to Naro’s (1978) hypothesis.

Upper Guinea Creole 295

3. The continental birth hypothesis
As argued above, for linguistic reasons, we may assume the existence of a protocreole (rather than a pidgin) underlying both GBC and SCV. Obviously, this assumption leaves the possibility that this proto-creole came into existence on themainland and from there was taken to Santiago perfectly intact and this is roughly
what the continental birth hypothesis contends. To varying degrees, this idea received support in publications such as Rougé (1986, 1993a,b), Doneux & Rougé(1988), Santos (1979), Kihm (1989), Do Couto (1994, 2005), Opazo (1990) and
Scantamburlo (1981, 1999).7
The continental birth hypothesis can in turn be subdivided roughly into two
schools of thought: the first relies heavily on the assumption that GBC emergedamid small mixed Luso-African social groups and trading societies dispersed
throughout the Guinea River region.8 Rougé (1993b: 113) formulates this idea asfollows: ‘[L]e créole de Guinée Bissao, et au moins en partie, celui du Cap Vert (…),
ont certainement émergé au sein de groupes sociaux d’intermediaires dans le commerce entre Portugais et peuples africains’ [‘GBC and, at least in part, SCV certainly
emerged amid communities of middlemen in the commerce between the Portuguese and the African people’]. Similarly, Kihm (1989: 354) assumes, ‘as seems
most probable, that Kriyol came into existence around the Portuguese settlements,
in the partially miscegenated, more or less christianized community that soon
crystallized around them’.
A due amount of attention has been paid to the founders of these settlements/
communities, the Portuguese and Luso-African brokers and middlemen known
as lançados or tangomaos, as well as to the native Africans they employed, the grumetes. From the interethnic contact and cultural mixing within these communities‘é de se esperar que surgisse um pidgin, uma língua de contato. Esse pidgin teria sido
levado para o arquipélago de Cabo Verde’ [‘a pidgin must have developed, a contact
language. This pidgin would have been taken to the Cape Verdean archipelago](Do Couto 1994: 32).
The second school of thought advocates a creole birth in the (slave) trading
centers (praças or presídios) that developed in the late 16th and early 17th century. According to Rougé (2006: 64), Cacheu, Ziguinchor, Geba and Bissau are the‘principaux centres de créolisation’. These places are shown on Map 1. Founded
7. It should be made clear that, in addition, a series of authors postulate a continental birth of
GBC without giving their opinion on the ties with SCV.
8. In this paper, the term ‘Guinea River region’ is used to denote the area that stretches from theRiver Senegal to Sierra Leone. In literature on the colonial era, the same area is also referred toas ‘Portuguese Guinea’ or ‘Guinea of Cape Verde’.

296 Bart Jacobs

Map 1. Upper Guinea.

in 1589 (or 1588 according to some), Cacheu in particular is considered o berço
da nação guineense [‘the cradle of the Guinean nation’] and crioulo de Cachéu is asynonym for crioulo antigo [‘old creole’] (Do Couto 1994: 31).
3.1 Critical discussion of the continental birth hypothesis
The linguistic evidence against this hypothesis is discussed in Sections 6–8. In thissection some historical objections are presented. As mentioned, there are basically
two lines of thought within the continental birth hypothesis, one advocating thebirth of GBC within the lançado-communities and the other advocating a Cacheubirth, but typically, some authors are indecisive and put their money on both (e.g.
Do Couto 1994, Rougé 1993a, 1994, 2006). Below, however, both cases are shownto have a rather narrow empirical basis.
3.1.1 The emergence of GBC within the lançado-communities?
Do Couto (1992: 113) emphasizes that ‘na maioria dos processos históricos que
deram em pidgins/crioulos houve efetivamente dominação de um povo por outro’Upper Guinea Creole 297[‘the majority of historical processes that resulted in a pidgin or creole were infact characterized by the domination of one people over the other’]. Interestingly, this was exactly the missing ingredient on the continent, at least prior to
the foundation of Cacheu in 1589. According to Lang (2001: 184), for instance,‘pendant les 150 ans [±1450–1600] où les Portugais détenaient un quasi-monopole
dans la traite des noirs, ils n’auraient jamais exercé aucun type de souveraineté dansce qu’ils s’appelaient os rios de Guiné’ [‘during the 150 years of the Portuguese
quasi-monopoly in the slave trade, they never exerted any type of sovereignty in
the Guinea River region’]. Mendes (2005: 233), when describing the 16th century
Luso-African trade communities, reinforces Lang’s observation:
Ces centres de traite, face à la résistance des populations locales mais également au
regard du faible potentiel humain du Royaume de Portugal, n’avaient fait l’objet
d’aucune tentative de colonisation. C’est au contraire les rois africains qui, par l’intermédiaire de leurs alcaides, exerçaient un contrôle direct sur ces centres, et sur lesEuropéens de transit.
[‘These trade centers, facing the resistance of the local people, but also becauseof the reduced human potential of the Portuguese kingdom, were not the objectof any attempt at colonization. It was rather the African kings who, by means of
their alcaides, exercised direct control over these centers, and over the Europeansin transit’].

As implied by Do Couto’s earlier observation, with the Portuguese/lançados by nomeans dominating the Africans, a Portuguese-lexified creole is unlikely to havecome into existence in these 16th century trade communities.9
Also relevant is the following related observation made by Peck (1988: 85): ‘In
Guinea, (…) Africans did not need pidgin to communicate among themselves.
In Guinea and Southern Senegambia, Mandinka served as a vehicular language.
Similar native African vehicular languages must have existed in other regions of
the continent’. Unexpectedly but accurately, Rougé supports this idea: ‘Les africains n’ont jamais eu besoin des langues européennes ou de systèmes linguistiques quien seraient issus pour communiquer entre eux’ [‘The Africans never needed European languages or derived linguistic systems to communicate with each other’](1994: 142). Again, this is not a situation that many would see as proto-typical for
creole-formation.
9. According to Mendes (2008: 84), furthermore, ‘none of the small centers had forts in thesixteenth century (…)’. And Lopes (2003: 56) adds: ‘[O]s poderes locais utilizaram a oportunidade oferecida pelos Lançados e Afro-Portugueses para escapar as vàrias tentativas de um controle
oficial português do comércio costeiro’ [‘The local powers used the opportunity provided by the
lançados and Afro-Portuguese to escape the attempts of the Portuguese to officially control thecoastal trade’].

298 Bart Jacobs

Moreover, lançados were renowned for the fact that ‘ils s’africanisèrent dans
une large mesure’ [‘they Africanized to a large extent’] (Boulègue 1987: 117). Father F. Guerreiro (cited in Bull 1989: 69), travelling the Guinea Coast in the 16th
century, also noted that the lançados ‘se acomodarem e se conaturalizarem com osgentios da terra onde tratam, riscam o corpo, ficam parecidos como lagartos, serpentes’ [‘accommodate and unite themselves with the local people, scratch theirbodies, and end up looking like lizards and snakes’]. Accordingly, Gamble & Hair
(1999: 70) speak of ‘the lançados who (…) in practice adjusted elements of their
behavior to the social morals of their African neighbors and relatives’. As Mark
(2002: 19) puts it: ‘Luso-African culture was open to individual assimilation’. These
processes of assimilation or Africanization among lançados are unlikely to havefostered the emergence of an Afro-Portuguese creole.10 For similar reasons, theanthropologist Seibert (2009: 1), who analyzed and compared the social dynamics
of the Cape Verde Islands and the Guinea-Bissau region in the colonial era, concluded that ‘Creole societies emerged in Cape Verde (…), but not in the Rivers ofGuinea’.
3.1.2 Formation of GBC in Cacheu?
According to Ladhams (2006: 90), ‘it was at Cacheu that what is now known as
Guinea-Bissau Creole (or Kriyol) appears to have developed (…), particularly according to oral tradition’. Indeed, only with the foundation of a fort in Cacheu in
1589 — and Geba, Farim, Ziguinchor and Bissau following in the 17th century— was a situation created that might have been favorable to creole-formation. But
even there, Portuguese is unlikely to have ever become a target language for asocially inferior group of ethnically mixed Africans, as was the case on Santiago.
Esteves (1988a: 9), for instance, uses the terms anarquia and indisciplina to characterize the situation in Cacheu in the early 17th century, with merchants coming
not only from Portugal and Cape Verde, but just as often from Spain, England,
France and the Netherlands. A considerable part of the (slave) trade conducted bythese nations was conducted ‘directamente com as populações autóctones’ [‘directlywith the autochthonous population’] (Esteves 1988a: 9). In even clearer terms, after analyzing 300 years of colonialism in Guinea-Bissau in general and in Cacheu
in particular, Mendy (1993: 168–169) concludes: ‘They, the Portuguese, never,
not even by the most elastic definition of the term, dominated the indigenous
10. A different issue is of course whether the lançados — and if so, how many of them — alreadyhad a creole (i.e. early SCV / proto-UGPC) as their native tongue before moving to the continent, which they then might have passed on to their offspring. This possibility is discussed in
4.2. Paramount here is, however, that a new creole is very unlikely to have developed among the
lançados on the continent.

Upper Guinea Creole 299

inhabitants (…). It is clear (…) that Portuguese sovereignty in Guiné (…) was but
a fiction, in spite of the erection of “forts” ’. In other words, also in the more industrious Guinean forts and factories such as Cacheu, so it seems, a strict ‘dominationof one people over the other’ (Do Couto, cited above) was absent.
What is more, as the next section will demonstrate, Cacheu (and probably
several other praças) were populated from the start with and by Cape Verdeans,
and a trade language (early SCV) was therefore already at hand. We can then apply
Mufwene’s (1996) Founder Principle to analyze the situation of language contactthat subsequently evolved in these enclaves. According to this Principle, it would
have been more cost-effective to maintain and diffuse the native tongue of the firstsettlers than to create a new creole (more on this in Section 4.4).
4. The Santiago birth hypothesis
Lopes Da Silva (1957) was the first to defend the idea that UGPC emerged on
the islands and from there was transplanted to the continent. He points towards‘A importância do elemento cabo-verdiano na colonização (…) da Guiné Portuguesa’ [‘The importance of the Cape Verdean element in the colonization of Portuguese Guinea’] and postulates that GBC derives from ‘o crioulo cabo-verdiano(…) levado pelos colonos idos do arquipélago’ [‘Cape Verdean Creole taken by thecolonizers from the archipelago’] (Lopes Da Silva 1957: 31). Once established anddiffused on parts of the mainland, early SCV ‘se foi diversificando e adquirindo caracteres próprios sob a influência das línguas nativas’ [‘diversified and acquired its
own characteristics under the influence of the [local] native languages’] (ibidem).
Among the adherents of the Santiago birth hypothesis are Carreira (1983a), Silva(1985, 1990), Thiele (1991), Kihm (1994), Quint (2000a,b), Parkvall (2000), Baptista (2000, 2002) and Peck (1988).11
It is this hypothesis that is seen by some as ‘traditional wisdom’ (Kihm 1994: 4)
and, indeed, the one with which the present paper is in agreement. However, wheresome of its adherents have stressed the importance of the before-mentioned lançados, tangomaos and grumetes (e.g. Kihm 1994; Baptista 2000), I will rather point
towards the demographic weight of Cape Verdeans in settling the Guinea-Bissau
11. To my knowledge, no linguist primarily concerned with GBC (rather than with SCV) other than Peck has been so explicit in claiming the Santiago birth of GBC. According to Peck(1988: 58), ‘Kriol originated in the Cape Verde Archipelago and was later transplanted to the
Guinea Coast as a result of Portuguese imperial expansion in that area’. He does believe, though,that the proto-creole taken from the archipelago repidginized on the continent, which in myopinion, as argued above, does not do justice to the complexity and structurality of the correspondences between SCV and GBC.

300 Bart Jacobs

region12 in general and Cacheu in particular (regardless of whether there werelançados among them), after which a Founder Effect would have set in, guaranteeing the preservation, diffusion, and further development of early SCV into GBC
on the continent.
4.1 The development of SCV in the late 15th, early 16th century
As noted by Do Couto (1992: 110) when comparing the conditions for creole birthon Santiago with those on the continent, ‘as condições que Chaudenson sugere para
explicar o surgimento de crioulos’ were ‘melhor representadas no arquipélago’ [‘theconditions that Chaudenson mentions to explain creole-formation were better
represented on the archipelago’]. Indeed, whereas defenders of the continental
birth hypothesis fail to unfold any plausible scenario as regards when and where
the creole might have emerged, the birth of a creole on Santiago is by no means an
opaque matter (rather a relatively straightforward and transparent one) and someconsensus has been reached on when and where to situate this birth: scholars such
as Lang (2006, see 4.1.2), Quint (2000a: 55), Carreira (1983a: 64, 65) and Veiga(2000: 37) all advocate the emergence of SCV in the late 15th, early 16th century.
Two types of evidence support this idea.
4.1.1 Socio-historical evidence
After the Portuguese took Santiago in 1458, its (slave) factory was established in
1466 (Mendes 2008: 66). Subsequently, ‘Vers la fin du XVe siècle et la première moitié du XVIe siècle, l’île de Santiago, et principalement son port, Ribeira Grande, a ététransformée en une importante base d’exportation d’esclaves’ [‘Towards the end of
the 15th and the first half of the 16th century, Santiago Island, and principally its
port, Ribeira Grande, was transformed into an important center for slave exportation’] (Semedo 1993: 8–9).
Although we lack reliable data in terms of whites to slaves ratios for the early
period, we do know that generally, ‘In comparison to the Spanish, the Portuguese
constituted a very small minority in their colonies’ (Bartens 1999: 38). In addition,
the first groups of Portuguese settlers were characterized by ‘a significant disproportion between the sexes, the bias being towards male immigrants from Portugal’(ibidem). Under these circumstances, with high numbers of slaves coming in earlyon, Santiago would have witnessed ‘un métissage rapide et massif de la population’[‘a rapid and massive cross-breeding of the population’] (Lang 2001: 183). If theseassumptions are correct, it seems plausible to conclude that ‘by the late sixteenth
12. In this paper, the term ‘Guinea-Bissau region’ denotes the region comprising the territory ofmodern day Guinea-Bissau as well as the area south of the Casamance River.

Upper Guinea Creole 301

century, the island of Santiago, whose population was overwhelmingly of African
origin, constituted a Creole society’ (Mark 2002: 14).
This is confirmed by Father Sebastião Gomes (in Carreira 1983b: 72), who in1615 wrote to the King: ‘Há aqui (Santiago) quatro sortes de gente, isto é, crioulos,
que são os naturais da terra, cristãos-novos, clérigos da terra e de Portugal, e alguns
cristãos-velhos de Portugal, mas muito poucos’ [‘We have here (Santiago) four typesof people, that is, creoles, who are natives of this soil, New Christians, clergies
from this soil and from Portugal, and some Old Christians from Portugal, but veryfew’]. Indicative of the numerical dominance and social status of the crioulos (alsoknown as fidjus da terra) in early 17th century Santiago, is that they occupied ‘cargos na Câmara (os de maior destaque na época)’ [‘positions within the Chamber (ofthe highest standing in that epoch)’], exercised offices within the clergy, worked
as merchants and carried out public services (Carreira 1983b: 72, 73; cf. Baleno
2006: 154; Soares 2006: 194). Horta (2000: 106, 106fn), for instance, discusses theindividual case of the Cape Verdean trader De Almada, who was ‘the first mulatto
to receive the habit of Christ (…). This is clear evidence of the growing process of
Africanization on Santiago, a process that extended to the social elite of the island’.
Kihm (1994: 4) believes that Santiago did indeed offer ‘a prototypical setting’for creole-formation, and even a passionate defender of the continental birth hypothesis such as Do Couto cannot but admit that it is ‘em Cabo Verde que vamos
encontrar as condições propostas por Chaudenson para a pidginização/crioulização’[‘on Cape Verde where we are going to find the conditions for pidginization/creolization proposed by Chaudenson’].
4.1.2 Historical-linguistic evidence
The majority of the slaves brought to Santiago in the first five to six decades of
its development as a slave center were taken mainly from the Senegalese Wolof
territory. This is convincingly demonstrated by Lang (2006) with the aid of documentary evidence from 16th century travel accounts13 and concrete data of the late
13. To the various excerpts from travel accounts provided by Lang (2006), I would like to add
one from De Almada (1594 in Köpke 1841: xi), who assures that Santiago was populated by‘diversas geraçõens de negros, dos quaes os primeiros são os Jalofos’ [‘several generations of negros,of whom the Wolofs were the first’] and this one from Barros (1899: 283): ‘[R]azões temos que
nos levam a suppôr (…) que os primeiros habitantes, o subsolo ethnico, da ilha de S. Thiago não
seriam escravos importados da nossa costa da Guiné. Os camponezes de Caboverde, chamados
Vadios afastam-se tanto dos Pepeis e Mandingas (…), quanto se aproximam dos Jalofos (…)’ [‘Wehave reasons to believe that the first inhabitants, the ethnic base, of the island of Santiago would
not have been the slaves imported from the Guinea Coast. The people of the villages of Cape
Verde, called vadios, distinguish themselves from the Pepels and the Mandinkas as much as theycorrespond to the Wolofs’]. In addition, De Lemos Coelho (1684, see Boulègue 1989: 18) had

302 Bart Jacobs

15th and early 16th century slave trade between Valencia and Santiago.14 However, Portuguese control over the Petite Côte rapidly declined: ‘[N]os meados doséculo XVI franceses e ingleses já estavam de posse dos resgates dos rios Senegal eGâmbia’ [‘In the mid-16th century, the French and the English already possessed
the trading posts of the Senegal and Gambia Rivers’] (Esteves 1988b: 36) and bythat time Portuguese trade was already primarily centered in the area south of theCasamance River. In 1625, the Cape Verdean traveler Donelha (in Da Mota & Hair
1977: 123) contemplates: ‘The trade of the island of Santiago with parts of Guinea
at one time extended from the Sanaga [Senegal] River to Serra Lioa. The Sanaga
trade lasted little more than sixty years’.
As a result of this areal shift in the Portuguese (slave) trade during the firsthalf of the 16th century, the number of Wolof slaves taken to Santiago strongly
diminished in favor of slaves from the Guinea-Bissau region,15 where Mandinka(and Temne to a lesser extent) dominated trade and the presence and influence of
Wolof was negligible (see Section 6.2.3). Lang (2006: 54) cleverly combines these
historical events with linguistic data, that is, with the presence of Wolof features at
all levels of the SCV grammar (see Sections 6.2.3 and 6.3): with hardly any Wolof
slaves arriving on Santiago after the first five to six decades of colonization, theWolof features in SCV unambiguously suggest that ‘la créolisation du portugais surl’île a commencé avec son peuplement effectif dès 1466’ [‘the creolization of Portuguese on the island started effectively with its peopling since 1466’].
4.2 Lançados as transmitters of UGCP?
Interestingly, both supporters of the continental hypothesis as well as adherents of the Santiago hypothesis have (to varying degrees) relied on the notion ofmade reference to Cape Verdean creole offspring of Wolof noblemen who had taken refuge on
Santiago in 1489 following a war of succession within the Wolof Empire.
14. Additional proof for the early presence of Wolof on Santiago can be found on a culturallevel: the butaque, by many considered to be the oldest music/dance of Cape Verde, ‘é igualmente
costume jalofo’ (Barros 1899: 284).
15. In a similar fashion, Silva Andrade (1996: 40) explains: ‘[A]vec le rétrécissements de l’Empire
colonial portugais, sous la poussée des autres puissances coloniales (…), le réservoir d’esclaves en
Afrique occidentale se trouva, vers le milieu du XVIe siècle, presque réduit aux limites de la GuinéeBissau actuelle’ [‘With the withdrawal of the Portuguese colonial empire under pressure of othercolonial powers, the reservoir of slaves in West Africa was, towards the middle of the 16th century, nearly reduced to the borders of present-day Guinea-Bissau’].

Upper Guinea Creole 303

lançados16 as principal actors in the respective scenarios. Whereas some postulate the birth of GBC within the lançado-communities (an unlikely possibility, as
argued in Section 3), others rather tend to picture the lançados (also known astangomaos17) as transmitters of early SCV to the continent: ‘They settled in Cape
Verde with African wives and children and had, as a result, the opportunity tolearn the creole and disseminate it on the continent, in Guinea for instance’ (Baptista 2002: 17). Note that the scenario of language transfer from the islands to thecontinent unfolded in the present paper (Sections 4.3 and 4.4) is not in the least
dependent on the role of the lançados. Nonetheless, the claim for their role astransmitters of SCV is on historically solid footing, as shown below.
There is reason to believe that most of the lançados/tangomaos originatedfrom Santiago, rather than coming directly from Lisbon. Mendes (2005: 234), forinstance, describes the lançados as ‘des forçats exilés de force sur l’île de Santiago
lors du peuplement initial’ [‘convicts forced to live in exile on Santiago at the time
it was initially populated’], thereby suggesting that an unknown number, prior toestablishing themselves on the continent, had been among the very first generation of Santiago residents. And in a 1520 letter, a Portuguese official reported to
an officer stationed on Santiago: ‘Nous sommes informés que beaucoup des hommes
blancs qui de cette île [Santiago] vont dans les bateaux aux points de traite, se fixent là et se font tanguomaaos’ [‘We are informed that many white men who go byboat from this island to the trading points, settle there and become tangomaos’](Boulègue 1987: 118). In line with these observations, Green (2007: 110) maintains
that ‘[t]he lançados had grown very rapidly along the coast from 1500 onwards,
with most of their numbers coming from Cabo Verde’, with Brooks (1993c: 185)
largely coinciding: ‘Cabo Verde-born Portuguese and, increasingly, Cabo Verdeborn Luso Africans soon became more numerous than peninsular Portuguese as
lançados living in Senegambia and along the Upper Guinea Coast’.
Barry (1988: 78) recounts that, because of the advantageous position of theCape Verde Islands, ‘les lançados (…) finissent par concurrencer dangereusement les
Portugais de la métropole’ [‘the lançados ended up competing dangerously with thePortuguese from the metropole’]. The success of the lançados led the Portuguese
16. Hawthorne defines: ‘When they settled on the coast in areas from Gambia to Sierra Leone,
Cape Verdean and Portuguese merchants were referred to as lançados or tangomaos’ (2003: 58).
Digressions on the lançados are found in most publications concerned with Upper Guinea’s
colonial history, but see in particular Do Couto (1992), Da Silva (1970), Mark (1999), Boulègue(1989), Brooks (1993a), Soares (2000) and several articles in Lopes (ed. 1993).
17. In some early accounts (e.g. Donelha 1625 / 1977), a distinction is made between the twoterms. The present paper makes no such distinction and follows the more common habit of using both terms interchangeably to refer to the same class of private Luso-African traders.

304 Bart Jacobs

Crown to take a series of measures that ‘reduced the privileges of the Cape Verdesettlers, from whom the lançados were principally recruited’ (Rodney 1965: 308).
But according to Hawthorne (2003: 58), in spite of these measures, ‘Cape Verdean
trade continued and the number of settlers increased’. Hawthorne (2003: 63),
moreover, accurately observes that the majority of 16th and 17th century travelaccounts of the Guinea Coast come from Cape Verdean natives, ‘Portuguese merchants leaving few descriptions of it, possibly because they considered the area
unhealthy’. Indeed, travelers as De Andrade (1582), De Almada (1594), Donelha(1925) and De Lemos Coelho (1669/1684) were all native Cape Verdeans, andthe physical circumstances on the continent were undoubtedly more favorable forCape Verdean born lançados than for Portuguese from Portugal (more to this in
Section 4.6.2).
In the light of these observations, it is little surprising that towards the end of
the 16th century, André Donelha, a native Cape Verdean merchant, traveled along
the Gambia River where he would come across ‘many well-known tangomaos’(Da Mota 1977: 147) and it seems fair to assume that an unknown but significant
number of the lançados/tangomaos would have either spent time on or originatedfrom Santiago. Bartens (1996: 59) sums up and concludes: ‘Da die lançados undtangomaos häufig von den Kapverden kamen, ist das erste Erklärungsmodel [Santiago birth hypothesis] besonders verlockend’ [‘Since the lançados and tangomaos
were often from the Cape Verdes, the Santiago birth hypothesis is particularly
tempting’].
Thiele (1991: 37–38) thereby takes for granted that the majority of the lançados
spoke SCV ‘muttersprachlich’ [‘as their native language’]. Such (unreferenced) affirmations, however, are premature. Before jumping to such conclusions, it shouldbe emphasized that the historical documents and travel accounts do not provide
any answer as to what the native tongue of the first generation of lançados actually was (i.e. Portuguese or the proto-creole). In fact, we know fairly little withcertainty about the lançados’ exact (ethno-)linguistic profile nor about the exact
nature of their ties with the local Africans. As a consequence, scenarios with lançados as leading actors will remain rather tentative. Instead, the correspondences
between GBC and SCV warrant the search for more steady and reliable patternsof migration from the Cape Verde Islands to the mainland, which is the subject of
the next section.
4.3 The foundation and settlement of Cacheu by Cape Verdeans
Do Couto (1994: 31), in an attempt to refute the Santiago birth hypothesis, maintains: ‘Não houve nenhuma migração maciça de cabo-verdianos para o continente’[‘There was never any massive migration of Cape Verdeans to the continent’]. In

Upper Guinea Creole 305

support of Do Couto, Scantamburlo (1999: 31) adds that ‘as imigrações de Caboverdianos, para a Guiné, se verificaram sobretudo nos anos 1850–64’ [‘the immigrations of Cape Verdeans to Guinea took place mainly in the years between 1850–
1864’]. However, on closer inspection, it becomes very clear that native Cape
Verdeans (mostly from Santiago) did in fact play a key role in the early settlementof the Guinea region, with historical patterns of considerable migration from theCape Verde Islands to the continent existing during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Especially significant is the fact presented below that Cacheu − considered bymany the birthplace of the continental creole (Do Couto 1994: 31, 32; Ladhams
2006: 90) − was founded and settled by Cape Verdeans.
Ecological problems on the Cape Verde Islands throughout the 16th century,
according to Green (2007: 257), ‘meant that there was an increasing movement toGuiné’. He adds that ‘[t]he construction of the fort at Cacheu is revelatory of theislanders’ greater interest in residing on the coast’. His next comment is no less revealing: ‘The strength of the links between Cabo Verde and Guiné was emphasizedby an anonymous account that mentioned that many of the freed blacks in Cacheu
had formerly been slaves from Santiago’ (ibidem).18 Green gives at least two plausible reasons why this might have been so, when noting, firstly, that ‘the buildingof the fort of Cacheu in 1589 (…) was instigated by Manuel Lopes Cardoso, aresident of Santiago’ (2007: 41) and, secondly, that there is ‘evidence of people from
Santiago moving to Cacheu during the famines of Santiago in the early 17th century’ (2007: 277fn). As to the first: in spite of some disagreement on the exact yearof Cacheu’s foundation,19 there is wide agreement that the Cape Verdean Manuel
Lopes Cardoso was behind the building of a fortified settlement on the site 20; as tothe second: this is confirmed by, for instance, Patterson (1988: 303, 306):
A major famine, accompanied by smallpox and a plague of blood-sucking flies
which tormented man and beast, caused great hardship on Santiago and probably

18. Part of the original citation is provided by Green (2007: 257fn.): ‘Cacheu is populated bywhites and “algūs pretos forros da mesma terra criados porem com os brancos e muita parte são eforão cativos de vezinos da Ilha de Santiago” ’.
19. Occasionally (e.g. Esteves 1988a: 6), 1588 is mentioned as the year of Cacheu’s foundation;
Rodney (1970: 90) mentioned 1591. Note, in any case, that with ‘foundation’, reference is madeto the building of a fortified settlement/factory on the site of Cacheu, while villages already musthave existed on the same site prior to these dates. See, for instance, Havik (2004: 57, 58) on tradeand commercial activity in and around Cacheu from the early 16th century onwards.
20. Brooks, for instance, recounts: ‘In 1589 Manuel Lopes Cardoso, a São Tiago trader, (…)
persuaded Chapala, the ruler of Mata and the principle Papel ruler of Cacanda, to allow thebuilding of a stronghold along the Cacheu River’ (cf. Estevez 1988a: 6; Mendy 1993: 139).

306 Bart Jacobs

other islands in 1609–1611. Food was sent from the Gambia and experienced
cloth-makers were among those who fled to the Cacheu area on the mainland.21

Moreover, as Peter Mark (p. c.) pointed out, the idea of Santiago-born slaves living
as freed blacks in the Guinea region is illustrated by the individual case of Gaspar
Vaz, who served the native Cape Verdean André Donelha as a guide and interpreter in his journey through the Gambia region. Gaspar Vaz had been ‘a slave on
this island [Santiago] of a neighbor of mine’, and was now making a living in theGambia as ‘a good tailor and button-maker’ (Donelha 1625, in Da Mota & Hair
1977: 149).
It is important to add that prior to the actual foundation of Cacheu’s factoryin 1589, this ground already harbored ‘une communauté de marchands (Capverdiens et Luso-Africains locaux)’ [‘a community of merchants (Cape Verdeans andlocal Luso-Africans)’] (Boulègue 2006: 49) that enjoyed protection from the Cape
Verdean authorities (Boulègue 1989: 18). The site of Cacheu was mentioned ‘by acontemporary source in the 1570s, as the place where a Pepel king (…) received the(first) governor of Cape Verde’22 (Havik 2004: 58fn). Thus, when Lang (2001: 184)
notes that ‘la courronne a longtemps fait tout son possible pour empêcher une installation permanente sur la côte des commerçants de Santiago’ [‘the Crown made every effort to obstruct a permanent settlement of Santiago merchants on the coast’],it seems that these efforts were in vain, and that Cacheu would come to be thepermanent ‘Cape Verdean’ coastal settlement the Crown so desperately sought toprevent. (See Brooks (1993a: 237–244) on the rapid expansion of Cacheu’s society
and trade activity from its foundation onwards.)
The following observation made by André Alvares De Almada (in Köpke
1841: 48) is now increasingly interesting: in 1594 he makes note of the fact that
Cacheu was inhabited by ‘muitos negros e muitos dos nossos’ [‘many blacks andmany of ours’]. With the data presented above in mind, and considering that De
Almada was ‘natural da Ilha de São Tiago do Cabo-Verde, e nella morador’ [‘a native of the Santiago Island of Cape Verde and residing there’] (Köpke 1841: i), thepredicate ‘muitos dos nossos’ can refer to little other than native Cape Verdeans.
21. In a similar vein, Carreira (1983b: 73) had noted that during the 1610 famine a part of Santiago’s population emigrated ‘em consequência da crise de dinheiro e da recessão dos negócios’[‘as a result of the financial crisis and the commercial recession’]. Another scholar mentioning
the settlement of former Cape Verdean slaves in Cacheu is Mendy: in the third third of the 17th
century, Cacheu’s newly assigned Captain-Major Bezerra brought with him some slaves and‘vadios de S. Thiago por elle assalariados’ [‘vadios [= runaway slaves] from Santiago payed byhim’] (Mendy 1993: 143).
22. Brooks (1993c: 188) details that the referred Cape Verdean Governor was António Velho
Tinoco and that he visited the Cacheu River in 1574.

Upper Guinea Creole 307(Similarly, when De Almada describes the Wolof people as ‘os primeiros e maischegados a nós’ [‘the first and closest to us’], the referent of nós is the Cape VerdeIslands rather than Portugal.)23
It should now be emphasized that Cacheu, in turn, was the main source of settlers for various other growing enclaves in the region where GBC is nowadays spoken, such as Farim (founded ca. 164124) in the interior and Ziguinchor (foundedca. 164525) in Casamance (Trincaz 1981: 2; Rougé 2004b: 149; Mendy 1993: 152,
153). According to Mendy, ‘the praça of Cacheu (…) had two dependent presídios,
Farim and Ziguinchor’, both of which are said to have been founded by the ‘former
Captain-Major of Cacheu, Gonçalo Gamboa de Ayala, in the early 1640s’ (Mendy
1993: 152, 153). Rougé (2004b: 149) confirms the foundation of Ziguinchor ‘par lecapitaine de la place de Cacheu’ [‘by the captain of Cacheu’] and adds that its residents ‘entretenaient des liens de parenté avec les familles luso-africaines de Cacheu’[‘held family ties to Luso-Africans from Cacheu’] (ibidem).26

23. In addition, De Almada (in Köpke 1841: 48) affirmed that the people he encountered in
Cacheu were ‘muito entendidos e praticos na nossa lingoa’ [‘very skilled in our language’]. The
predicate ‘nossa lingua’, then, can refer to either Portuguese or early SCV. As shown in 4.1, it ishistorically and linguistically justified to assume that SCV had already developed and nativizedon Santiago by the time De Almada was born and raised there. Many authors in fact accept
this assumption. Dos Reis Santos (2001: 169), for instance, calls De Almada a ‘mestiço (…) que
com certeza conheceria o crioulo’ [‘a mestizo who surely knew creole’]; Bull (1989: 71), analyzing
De Almada (1594), also believes that ‘por nossa língua deve entender-se um crioulo-português’[‘by our language a Portuguese creole is meant’] and Havik (2006: 48) provides arguments tobelieve that ‘[u]ntil the eighteenth century, the term ‘Portuguese’ is used as a synonym for Creole dialects spoken along the coast’. Note, moreover, that if the Cape Verdean settlers had bothPortuguese and early SCV in their linguistic repertoir, they will have opted for the latter tocommunicate with local Africans, since the creole is/was typologically much closer to the local
African vernaculars than is/was Portuguese.
24. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farim
25. As with Cacheu, these dates of foundation are open to discussion, since dwellings and/or(small) settlements must have already existed on the same locations, sometimes under different
names. Brooks, for instance, describes: ‘In 1621 the settlement of Bichancór, “five leagues” from
Cacheu, was reported to have fifteen dwellings of Portuguese traders, a church and a priest, andmany local Christians (…). The settlement was almost certainly Ziguinchor’ (1993a: 241). Similarly, lançados probably already traded in Farim prior to 1641, when the site was still commonlyreferred to by its Mandinka name, Tubabodaga (Brooks 1993a: 241; cf. Havik 2004: 60). I thankPeter Mark for comments in this regard.
26. From Ziguinchor, speakers of GBC later migrated to the north of Casamance reaching Dakar, where it is spoken by a minority nowadays (Bal 1983: 15).

308 Bart Jacobs

4.4 Founder Principle
If the migration patterns revealed above are correct, that is, if a sizeable numberof native Cape Verdeans were indeed among the first settlers in Cacheu, several
aspects of the Founder Principle, as outlined by Mufwene (1996), might prove
crucial to understanding how and why early SCV could and would come to establish itself as a primary trade language and subsequently spread throughout the
Guinea-Bissau region. As posited by Mufwene (1996: 92), ‘it was generally morecost-effective for subsequent generations of immigrants (free, enslaved, and indentured) to learn the emerging local vernaculars [in this case the native tongueof the Cape Verdeans populating Cacheu, i.e. early SCV] than to develop new ones
from scratch’. Interestingly enough, a similar idea had already been formulated by
Peck (1988: 85), with specific reference to UGPC and the Guinea region: ‘In allprobability, the existence of relatively stable colonies of creole-identified people
did more to implant creole on the African coast than any need for it on the part oftribal Africans’.
If a Founder Effect accounts for the establishment and diffusion of early SCV in
Cacheu, it becomes increasingly interesting to recall that both Farim and Ziguinchor, and possibly other places where GBC is spoken nowadays, were founded andpopulated mainly by people from Cacheu.
4.5 Additional patterns of Cape Verdean migration to the mainland
Cacheu was not the only upcoming city in the Guinea-Bissau region with a pronounced presence of Cape Verdeans. According to Lopes (2003: 59), ‘Afro-Portugueses nascidos em Cabo Verde controlavam Bissau e o Rio Grande’ [‘Afro-Portuguese born in Cape Verde controlled Bissau and Rio Grande’]. In addition to the
Guinea-Bissau region, parts of the Petite Côte were settled by Cape Verdeans. As
noted in Section 4.2, many of the lançados dispersed throughout the coast originated from or held ties with the Cape Verde Islands. Boulègue (1989: 31), furthermore, mentions that in Bezeguiche (modern day Dakar) ‘le Padre Alexis ne trouva
en 1634 qu’une seule famille chrétienne, qui était originaire des îles du Cap-Vert’[‘in 1634, Father Alexis found only one single Christian family, who originatedfrom the Cape Verde Islands’]. Moreover, the mayor of the village of Gaspar, also
located on the Cape Verdean peninsula, ‘était né aux îles du Cap-Vert’ [‘was bornon the Cape Verde Islands’] (Boulègue 1989: 16) and in the neigbouring harbourof Rufisque, around 1600, ‘il y a des noirs, des mulâtres et des créoles naturels des îlesde Santiago et Cabo Verde’ [‘there are blacks, mulâtres and creoles from the Islandsof Santiago and Cape Verde’] (anonymous traveler cited in Boulègue 1989: 39).
It is no surprise, then, that most trade villages taken over by the French and theUpper Guinea Creole 309

English throughout the Senegambia region in the 16th century ‘antes pertenciam
exclusivamente aos moradores de Santiago’ [‘previously belonged exclusively to themoradores of Santiago’] (Esteves 1988b: 36; cf. Silva Andrade 1996: 70).
In sum: attempts to trivialize the role of Cape Verdeans in the early settlementof the Guinea-Bissau region appear to be ill-founded; it seems rather that Cape
Verdean migrants were found throughout the Upper Guinea Coast, and, crucial
to our argument, were involved in (the foundation of) practically all the trading
communities of any significance to the Guinea region’s economy and developmentfrom the 16th century onwards.27
4.6 No surprise
As is well known, from 1533 onwards, the entire Guinea River region fell under the commercial and clerical jurisdiction of the Cape Verde Islands (Carreira
1983b: 14, cf. Esteves 1988a: 8) and the region soon became known as Guiné deCabo Verde. It should therefore hardly be a surprise to find mostly Cape Verdeansamong the founding fathers of the coastal settlements. Two additional circumstances, discussed below, seem to have further facilitated or even encouraged Cape
Verdeans to populate the Guinea River region.
4.6.1 Famine(s)As mentioned previously, the Cape Verde Islands suffered a severe famine in theearly 17th century (a fome e a epidemia de 1610, Carreira 1983b: 73), which marked
a more general economic and humanitarian crisis on the archipelago throughout
the 17th century (Carreira 1983b: 40, 44; Semedo 1993: 9; Barbe 2002: 47)28 andwould have stimulated the emigration of native Cape Verdeans to neighboring
regions, Cacheu in particular.
The early 17th century famine also encouraged the cheap selling of slaves from
Santiago to praças such as Cacheu, where the demand was increasing rapidly with
27. Duarte (1949: 13, cited in Silva Andrade 1996: 47) came to a similar conclusion: ‘Nous pouvons dire que la Guinée doit véritablement son origine portugaise aux colons de l’Archipel frontalier de la terre ferme. Ce furent eux qui durent empêcher plus tard toutes les prétentions desétrangers sur ces territoire. En débarquant sur la terre ferme pour faire le commerce, le Capverdien
entama la politique de conquête (…)’ [‘We can say that Guinea truly owes its Portuguese origins
to the colonizers of the archipelago. It was them who later had to undermine the foreigners’
pretentions in this territory. While disembarking on the mainland to trade, the Cape Verdean
practiced the politics of conquest’]. I did not manage to obtain a copy of Duarte’s (1949) paper
entitled ‘Os Caboverdianos na colonização da Guiné’.
28. Note, moreover, that prior to this famine, periods of extreme drought had already struck thearchipelago (Barbe 2002: 47).

310 Bart Jacobs

the presence of Dutch, English, French and Spanish traders. With respect to theprices of slaves from Santiago, Boulègue (1987: 137) notes that ‘[é]videmment, lesprix pouvaient baisser temporairement, les années de famine; (…) pendant une famine on vendait un esclave pour un demi alquiere (c’est-à-dire six litres et demi)
de mil ou de haricots’ [‘obviously, the prices could drop temporarily in years offamine; during a famine slaves were sold for half an alquiere (that is six and a half
liters) of grain or beans’].
4.6.2 Advantageous physical constitution
According to Hawthorne (2003: 58), ‘through their parents or slaves coming fromthe coast, they [native/creole Cape Verdeans] (…) possessed some immunity
to diseases that plagued Europeans in Africa’. This is examplified by Patterson(1988: 300): in reference to epidemics reaching the Cape Verde Islands in times offamine, he talks of ‘imported yellow fever striking at the non-immune European
segment of the population’, thereby confirming what most historians agree on,
namely that, over the whole, native/creole Cape Verdeans were genetically better
equipped to settle the mainland (cf. for example Boulègue 1989: 17).
The relevance of these observations to the hypothesized transfer of early SCV
to Cacheu is ilustrated by Esteves’ (1988a: 13) remark that, to fortify the settlementof Cacheu, soldiers should preferably be drawn from the island of Santiago rather
than from Portugal, ‘por os do Reino não resistirem à dureza do clima’ [‘while thosefrom Portugal do not resist the climate’]. And indeed, in 1644, the King of Portugal ordered soldiers recruited from Santiago to be stationed in Cacheu (Esteves
1988a: 21). But in 1508 already, the Bohemian Valentim Fernandes (in Gamble &Hair 1999: 267) had reported that those he found trading along the Gambia River‘are black and a few light tawny. The river is unhealthy for Christians who comehere’ (cf. Hawthorne, cited in 4.2; Carreira 1983: 83).
4.7 A note on identity-related terminology in travel accounts
Mark (2002: 14, 15) makes the relevant observation that in the 16th and 17th
centuries
Cape Verdeans, like mainland Luso-Africans, resolutely maintained that they
were ‘Portuguese’ (…); the ‘Portuguese’ were defined, broadly speaking, by cultural and socioeconomic characteristics. The first defining characteristic of ‘Portuguese’ identity was occupation: to be ‘Portuguese’ was to be a trader, much as tobe Juula in Senegambia implied that one was a long-distance merchant.

Not only the archipelago’s inhabitants themselves, but also outsiders appear tohave classified Cape Verdeans as Portuguese, as this fragment from the 1623

Upper Guinea Creoleaccount of the Guinea Coast by the Dutch sailor Dirck Ruiters (cited in Brooks
1993b: 40) demonstrates: ‘The trade we called “coastal” is mostly undertaken(…) by Portuguese who live on Santiago Island’. In addition, in these 16th and17th centuries travel accounts, the term ‘black’ (or Portuguese negro) was used inreference to Africans and ‘white’ (or branco) ‘to refer to “Portuguese” and Cape
Verdeans’ (Mark 2002: 26; cf. Mark 1995; Horta 2000). The native Cape Verdean
De Almada, for instance, ‘was apparently a mulatto. Nevertheless, he places himself in the category “white” ’ (Mark 2002: 26). Mark’s analysis seems correct: in
1730, an anonymous traveler (cited in Bradshaw 1965: 9) noted that the creoles
he encountered in Gambia ‘reckon themselves still as well as if they were actuallyWhite, and nothing angers them more than to call them Negroes, that being aterm they use only for slaves’.
These identity-related facts put the numerous references in travel accounts
from native Cape Verdeans such as De Andrade (1582), De Almada (1594),
Donelha (1625) and De Lemos Coelho (1669/1684) to ‘Portuguese’ and ‘whites’in the Guinea River region in a new perspective: it is not far-fetched to assume
that in a considerable number of cases reference was in fact made to (descendantsof) native Cape Verdeans. Finally, it is revealing to note that ‘[t]he use of the term
Creole to designate individuals or groups in the Guinea-Bissau region is recorded
in various sources from the early seventeenth century. However, the term (…) was
only reserved for those originating from the Cape Verde Islands’ (Havik 2006: 52).
4.8 The Christianization of the Guinea region by Cape Verdean missionaries
Thiele (1991: 38) explains: ‘Mit der Gründung der Diözese der Kapverden und Guinea-Bissaus 1533 in Ribeira Grande (Santiago) waren beide Regionen auf klerikaler Ebene (…) unmittelbar miteinander verbunden’ [‘With the foundation of the
Diocese of the Cape Verdes and Guinea-Bissau in 1533 in Ribeira Grande (Santiago), both regions were directly connected to each other on a clerical level’].
Consequently, a closer look at the Christianization of the Guinea region mightprovide us with additional clues about the language transfer from Santiago to thecontinent.
It appears that the settlement receiving primary attention from the Diocese
headquartered on Santiago was Cacheu. According to De Benoist (2008: 28), theBishops of Santiago largely ignored the trading points on the Petite Côte: ‘Seuls lesvillages de Buba 29 et de Cacheu leur paraissent mériter un effort permanent’ [‘Only
the villages of Buba and Cacheu appeared to them to be worth a permanent effort’]. Along the same lines, in 1595, the Jesuit Lopes Soares de Albergaria (in Da
29. Buba lies approximately 300 miles south-east of Cacheu.

311

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Mota & Hair 1989:no pagenumbers) wrote: ‘It seems to the Bishop of Cape Verdethat a seminary or college could (…) be established on Santiago Island for thepadres of the Society (…) and from this seminary they could go out to preach andcould form a station on Rio de São Domingos [= Cacheu] and at such other settlements as seemed necessary’. Vicente (1993: 102) therefore concludes that ‘[a] vida
cristã em Cacheu’ [‘Christian life in Cacheu’] started with ‘a criação da Diocese deCabo Verde, em Janeiro de 1533’ [‘the creation of the Diocese of Cape Verde, inJanuary 1533’] (cf. Santos Hernández 1975: 196).
Cape Verdean missionaries were successfully operating in Cacheu shortly after its official foundation: towards the end of the 16th century, ‘[l]es évêques deSantiago (…) construisent à Cacheu “une très bonne église, avec chapelle, sacristie,
cour, maison à étage pour le clergé (…). Pendant certains carêmes, 600 personnes s’yconfessent, tant Noirs que Blancs” ’ [‘the bishops of Santiago constructed in Cacheu“a very nice church, with a chapel, a sacristy, a courtyard, a terrace house for theclergy (…). During certain masses, 600 people would confess, both blacks andwhites” ’] (De Benoist [2008: 28] citing Pinto Rema). In that same period, the Father João Pinto (in De Benoist 2008: 31) visits Cacheu, and learns that ‘[u]n prêtre
envoyé par l’évêque de Santiago y vient tous les ans pour permettre aux 700 à 800
chrétiens qui y sont déjà installés d’accomplir leur devoir pascal’ [‘a priest sent by the
Bishop of Santiago comes there every year to perform the Easter service to some
700 to 800 Christians who are already installed there’].
In other words, the role of the Cape Verde Islands in Christianizing the Guinea region in general, and Cacheu in particular, was pivotal. With this in mind,
it seems relevant to point out the documentary evidence provided by Carreira(1983b: 72) indicating that on Santiago, by the early 17th century, most religious
services were already carried out by crioulos (rather than by Portuguese from Portugal; cf. Section 4.1.1). Soares (2006: 194) therefore talks of ‘padres da terra’, who‘já nasciam no mundo da crioulidade’ [‘Fathers of this land, who were already bornin the creolized world’] and − just as Baleno (2006: 154–156) − emphasizes thelikelihood that quite early on creole rather than Portuguese was spoken in informal clerical circles and was used to catechize Africans.
De Lemos Ceolho (in Peres 1953: 41, 43, 44), a native and resident of Santiago,
who, with regard to the Africans he encountered along the Guinea-Bissau coast in
the mid-17th century, provides valuable insight into the social dynamics that may
have facilitated the diffusion of SCV in the Guinea-Bissau region by way of theCape Verdean clergy:[D]ará muy pouco trabalho a reduzirem-se à Fé Catholica (…); he a gente mais apta
para receber a Fé Catholica de toda quanta ha em Giune, dão os grandes das aldêas seus filhos aos brancos para que lhos criem, e lhos fação christãos, e eu lhe criei

Upper Guinea Creole 313

muitos, e os trazia em minha companhia como escravos e me servião de chalona[interpreter] em suas mesmas terras, e muito negros grandes que são como dônos dasaldêas me pedião que lhe levasse padre á sua terra que se querião confessar.
[‘It will take little effort to convert them to Catholic faith; of all the people in Guinea these are most receptive to Catholicism. The seniors give their children to thewhites to take care of them, and they make them Christians, and I raised many,and I took them into my company as slaves and they served me as chalona [interpreters] in the same areas, and many senior blacks that are like lords of the villages
asked me to bring a priest to their territory because they wanted to confess’].

If the spread of early SCV in the Guinea region indeed correlated with the spreadof Christianity, and if Cacheu was indeed the primary focal point of the Cape
Verdean missionaries, then it may not be a coincidence that the people of Ziguinchor (which, as noted in 4.3, was settled by migrants from Cacheu) still refer tothemselves as Kriston ‘Christians’ and to their variety of GBC as lingua (or fala)Kriston ‘Christian Language’ (Havik 2006: 46).
5. Linguistic evidence in favor of a Santiago origin
In compliance with ‘Bickerton’s Edict’ (cf. Smith 1999: 252), the previous section
showed that the right speakers were indeed at the right place at the right time, that
is, Cape Verdeans were crucially involved in the founding and peopling of Cacheu.
However, it cannot be denied that the strong ties between Santiago and the Guinea
River region were characterized by a two-way flow of people. It is known that considerable numbers of slaves were taken from Cacheu to Santiago, that Guinean/
Luso-African merchants moved there, and that native Cape Verdeans remigrated
to their home soil. As a consequence, one could still insist on the possibility that —in spite of the unlikely circumstances — a creole emerged on the continent, andfrom there was transplanted to Santiago. To go beyond these realms of speculation, it becomes increasingly important to look for empirically sound evidence inthe form of synchronic linguistic data.
5.1 On the presumed impossibility of adducing linguistic evidence
While the different theoretical camps battled each other with historical arguments
mostly, a consensus has been reached on the impossibility of adducing linguistic evidence to clarify matters. Perl (1982: 65), for example, states: ‘Eine eindeutige Klärung dieses Problems nur mit linguistischen Mitteln ist (…) kaum möglich’[‘A definite solution to this problem is hardly possible with only linguistic means’].

314 Bart Jacobs

Similarly, after having discussed linguistic peculiarities that separate GBC from
SCV, Rougé (1994: 144, 145; cf. Scantamburlo 1999: 32) concludes:[I]l faut reconnaître qu’aucun des faits linguistiques dégagés jusqu’à présent n’est véritablement décisif, chacun le plus souvent peut être interprété dans un sens ou dansun autre. Rien ne permet de dire si c’est le créole du Cap Vert qui a été africanisé parles guinéens ou si c’est celui de Guinée qui a été désafricanisé par les capverdiens.
[‘It should be recognized that none of the linguistic facts presented up till now istruly decisive; each of them can be interpreted in one way or the other. Nothing
indicates if the Cape Verdean Creole was Africanized by the Guineans, or whether
the Creole of Guinea was deafricanized by the Cape Verdeans’].

In the meantime, however, Parkvall (2000: 133fn) has presented ‘lexical evidence
suggesting that the islands were the true birthplace of Cape Verde PC’. This evidence has been neglected in subsequent publications. It is systematically discussed
in Section 6 below. Sections 7 and 8, moreover, present and combine additional
phonetic and historical-linguistic data respectively, all of which suggest a Santiago
birth of UGPC.
6. Parkvall’s lexical evidence in support of a Santiago origin
It should first be recalled that a significant number of the SCV African lexical
items is also present in GBC: as mentioned in 1.1, Rougé (1999a: 56) estimated thatsome 80% of SCV’s African-derived lexemes also appear in GBC. Of this 80%, heanalyzed ‘46 palavras cuja etimologia não deixa dúvida algúma’ [‘46 words whose
etymology leaves no doubt whatsoever’]. Of these 46 items, ‘24 são de origem mandinga, 11 de origem wolof, 3 oriundas do temne de Serra Leoa, 3 de ñun de Casamansa e 5 de origens diversas (manjaku, diola, beafada, etc.) ou existem em várias
linguas da região’ [‘24 are of Mandinka origin, 11 of Wolof origin, 3 derived from
Temne of Sierra Leone, 3 from Njun of Casamance and 5 are of diverse origin(Manjaku, Diola, Beafada, etc.) or exist in various languages of the region’] (Rougé 1999a: 56). His subsequent observation, based on this etymological survey, isstriking, and of particular interest for the remainder of this section: ‘Isto significa
que as línguas que forneceram a maior proporção do léxico aos dois crioulos, com
excepção do ñun, são línguas que geograficamente não têm contactos directos com os
pontos de crioulização do continente’ [‘This means that the languages that provided
the largest proportion of the lexicon to the two creoles, with the exception of Njun,
are languages that are geographically not in direct contact with the points of creolization on the continent’] (Rougé 1999a: 56).

Upper Guinea Creole

While Rougé did not draw any conclusions from his own observation. Parkvall(2000), having made a similar etymological assessment,30 did take the logical next
step: he argues — completely in line with Rougé’s observation — that speakers ofboth Mande languages and Wolof are underrepresented in those areas where GBC
is spoken and that, therefore, the shared lexical items of Mande and Wolof origin‘are unlikely to have entered Guinea-Bissau PC [Portuguese Creole] other than by
way of the Cape Verdes’. This makes sense: it is no secret that the Cape Verde Islands were heavily populated with Mande (predominantly Mandinka) and Wolofspeaking slaves. ‘[T]his, in turn, suggests that the proto-Upper Guinea PC aroseon the islands, rather than on the mainland’ (Parkvall 2000: 111).
To corroborate Parkvall’s argumentation, I will split it in two — the Mande/
Mandinka31 argument and the Wolof 32 argument — and discuss the plausibility ofeach of the two arguments separately.
6.1 The Mande/Mandinka argument
According to Parkvall (2000: 111), a little under 40%33 of GBC’s African-derived
lexemes and more than half of the African lexicon shared between SCV and GBC
consists of Mande items, while ‘Guinea-Bissau is massively Atlantic-speaking(only about 10% speak a Mande language), so we would expect the Mande component to have been imported from elsewhere (i.e. the Cape Verdes)’. Parkvall’s 10%

30. Parkvall’s Afrolex (1999b) is an assessment and etymological survey of African-derived lexemes in all Atlantic creoles and probably the most thorough of its kind.
31. Within the Mande branch, the languages with the most speakers are Mandinka, Soninke,
Bambara and Dioula. In modern day Guinea-Bissau, however, Mande is represented chiefly by
Mandinka: we find only one other Mande language in Guinea-Bissau, namely Soninke, spoken
by a, in this context, negligible number (6,470) of Guineans. The lexical Mande items in theshared UGPC vocabulary, moreover, all seem to derive from Mandinka. Therefore, to corroborate the plausibility of Parkvall’s Mande argument, we can focus on (the spread of) Mandinka.
In travel accounts and literature on the Upper Guinea region, Mandinka is also referred to as
Mandinga, Mandingo and/or Mandingue, and just as often no distinction is made between
Mande and Mandinka. For details on Mande and Mandinka, see, for instance, Vydrine et al.
(2000) or Dwyer (1989).
32. Wolof, of the Atlantic branch, is the language with the most speakers in Senegal (over3,500,000, according to the Ethnologue). In the same branch we find languages such as Balanta,
Manjaku (both spoken in Guinea-Bissau), and Temne (spoken in Sierra Leone). See Wilson(1989) for details on the Atlantic branch. See Boulègue (1987) and references therein for details
on the history (13th–16th centuries) of Wolof.
33. More than 50% according to Rougé (2005: 13).

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estimate is roughly confirmed by the Ethnologue34 (13% Mandinka versus 87%
West-Atlantic).35 This seems to strongly support his claim that the 40% contribution of Mande/Mandinka to GBC’s African lexicon is disproportional.
However, Parkvall (2000: 133) also asserts that ‘when the Portuguese first arrived, Mandinka is said to have been more widespread than it is today’. In fact,scholars agree on the pivotal role Mandinka had as a trading language along theUpper Guinea Coast in the 16th and 17th centuries: Rougé (2006: 72), for instance, notes: ‘[A]u moment de la formation des créoles existait une entité politiquemanding hégémonique sur une région qui comprend la Gambie, la Casamance etl’actuelle Guinée Bissau’ [‘At the time of the creoles’ formation, a political Mandeentity existed that ruled the region that comprises Gambia, Casamance and modern day Guinea-Bissau’], a claim that is abundantly verified by 16th–17th century
travel accounts of the region. In this light it seems less surprising to find a highnumber of Mandinka items in the GBC lexicon.
It must be stressed, however, that the exact spread of Mandinka in the GuineaBissau region in the 16th and 17th century could not be traced within the spaceof this article: future research should further clarify whether or not the 40% of
Mandinka items in the African part of the GBC lexicon is disproportional in relation to the spread of Mandinka in the 16th and 17th centuries. In this respect, it
is interesting to cite Rougé (2005: 13): ‘Ainda que mais de 50% do léxico africano
destes crioulos [SCV and GBC] seja de origem mandinka, os falantes dessa língua
mandê praticam pouco o crioulo’ [‘Although more than 50% of the African lexiconof UGPC is of Mandinka origin, the speakers of this Mande language make little
use of GBC’]. This suggests that the active participation of Mandinka speakers ina hypothetical continental formation of GBC would have been minimal, in whichcase the 40% of Mandinka items in GBC’s African lexicon would, as claimed by
Parkvall, indeed be disproportional.
6.2 The Wolof argument
What appears to be very solid is the second part of Parkvall’s evidence, which
is based on the claim that Wolof is not, or hardly, spoken in Guinea-Bissau, but
still contributed significantly to the African part of the GBC lexicon and to theAfrican lexicon shared between SCV and GBC: ‘The shared Atlantic component(…) derives more from geographically distant languages, such as Wolof ’ (Parkvall
2000: 111). The Santiago birth hypothesis provides a fairly straightforward
34. http://www.ethnologue.com/
35. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=GW

Upper Guinea Creole 317

explanation for the Wolof lexemes in UGPC’s shared African lexicon. As shownin 4.1.2, there are both historical and linguistic arguments ‘en faveur d’une présence massive de locuteurs wolof à Santiago, au temps de la formation de son créole’[‘in favor of a massive presence of Wolof speakers on Santiago, during the formation of its creole’] (Lang 2006: 61). Below, the Wolof argument is systematicallycorroborated.
6.2.1 Assessing Wolof’s contribution to UGPC’s shared African lexicon
As mentioned, Rougé (1999a: 56) found that SCV and GBC share at least 11 (unspecified) lexemes of probable Wolof origin, making Wolof the second largest
contributor (after Mandinka) to UGPC’s shared African lexicon. Combining Rougé’s (2004a) etymological dictionary and Quint’s (2000b: 295–300) assessmentsof UGPC’s shared African lexicon, I also identified 11 shared UGPC lexemes ofprobable Wolof origin,36 which are listed in the Appendix to this paper.
Of course, three factors that might hamper a proper assessment of the Wolof
contribution should be acknowledged: firstly, Wolof is by far the best documented
language within the branch of Atlantic languages. This might color the results ofetymological research in favor of Wolof. Secondly, as noted by Kihm, ‘we only haveaccess to the present forms of the languages, and there is no guarantee that they
have not changed since the time they were substratally active’ (1989: 35). Thirdly,
through centuries of contact, Mandinka and the surrounding Atlantic languages
have borrowed lexically from one another. These three circumstances make that‘savoir où le créole est allé chercher chacun de ces lexèmes est assez délicat’ [‘knowing where the creole went looking for each one of these lexemes is a rather delicate
matter’] (Rougé 2006: 64).
On the other hand, Kihm also provided arguments that make it safe to assume
that the African languages ‘remained more or less the same’ (1989: 35) over the last
three to four centuries. And we may also recall that Rougé (1999a: 56) — an absolute authority in etymological research on the Portuguese-based creoles (cf. Rougé
2004a) — believes that the etymology of the 11 Wolof items ‘não deixa dúvida
algúma’ [‘is beyond doubt’]. We therefore need not doubt that Wolof was indeed amajor contributor to UGPC’s African lexicon and it seems justified to take Rougé’s
etymological survey as representative.
6.2.2 The antiquity of the Wolof-derived lexemes
To reinforce the idea that the Wolof items belong to the oldest stratum of UGPC’s shared lexicon, it should be pointed out that five of the eleven shared Wolof
36. Of course, these 11 lexemes are not necessarily the same ones as the 11 Rougé (1999a) referred to.

318 Bart Jacobs

lexemes listed in the Appendix are verbs, and two others appear to be derived
from verbs. According to Quint (2008: 50), the fact that only Wolof and Mandinka
have contributed non-nominal items to SCV’s African lexicon ‘pode indicar queestas duas línguas tiveram um papel mais importante do que as restantes línguas
africanas na génese do crioulo de Cabo Verde’ [‘could indicate that these two languages had a more important role than the other African languages in the genesis
of SCV’].
Just as telling is the Wolof-derived UGPC noun bindi ‘tool for making couscous’, derived from Wolof yindi-bi ‘idem’. Of this noun, ‘La consonne initiale (…)
provient, vraisemblablement, d’un ancien préfixe de classe wolof’ [‘The initial consonant probably derives from an ancient Wolof class-prefix’] (Rougé 2004a: 296,
emphasis added).37
6.2.3 The diachronic and synchronic absence of Wolof in the Guinea-Bissau
regionThe size and antiquity of the Wolof-derived lexicon in UGPC justifies the claimthat a sizeable contingent of Wolof speakers must have been present at the time
when and in the place where UGPC came into existence. This was shown to be thecase for Santiago, whereas in the 16th–17th century Guinea-Bissau region, on theother hand, stable Wolof communities are definitely not, as affirmed by Parkvall
and Rougé, to be found.
According to a map in Holm et al. (2006),38 the Gambia River forms a naturalborder below which Wolofs are absent. Of course, and although not shown on thismap, Wolof is nowadays spoken below the Gambia River in Casamance, Senegal(especially in Ziguinchor), but that is a result of the relatively recent migration of
Wolofs to the area: ‘En Basse Casamance, la pénétration Wolof s’est effectuée (…)
au moment de l’installation française’ [‘In Lower Casamance, the penetration of
Wolof happened when the French settled there’] (Trincaz 1984: 165), which meansthat Wolofs did not arrive in Ziguinchor prior to the late 19th century. Initially,
when Ziguinchor was founded, the dominant local languages were ‘en particulier
37. In some more detail, Rougé (1999a: 55, emphasis added) explained: ‘Bindi designa um vasode barro perfurado que serve para a preparação du cuscus. Hoje, em wolof yindi-bi tem o mesmo
sentido; para explicar a forma crioula há de se admitir (…) a existência, no passado, na língua
wolof, de prefixos de classes nominais correspondentes aos actuais índices de classes eventualmente
sufixados aos nomes. Assim, a origem de bindi seria uma antiga forma do wolof *bi-indi’ [‘Bindi
denotes a perforated clay vase that serves to prepare couscous. Today, in Wolof, yindi-bi has thesame sense; to explain the creole form, one must admit the existence in ancient Wolof of nominal class prefixes corresponding to the current class indications optionally suffixed to nouns’].
38. The map is shown on the inside of the cover.

Upper Guinea Creole 319

le bainouk, le diola et le mandinka’ (Rougé 2004b: 149). It seems appropriate, therefore, to say that, at least historically, the area below the Gambia River lies ‘fora
da zona de influência do uólofe’ [‘outside of Wolof’s sphere of influence’] (Quint
2008: 41).
But regardless of the diachronic spread of Wolof in Casamance, few would
argue that GBC emerged in Ziguinchor and subsequently spread to Cacheu andBissau. As was already noted in Section 3, proponents of the continental hypothesis tend to believe that ‘o crioulo se teria formado em Cachéu o Geba’ [‘the creole would have been formed in Cacheu or Geba’] (Do Couto 1994: 32). Recall,moreover, that Ziguinchor was founded in the 1640s by the captain of Cacheu
and settled by migrants from that same place (see Section 4.3). Bartens (1996: 57)
therefore affirms: ‘Das Kriôl der heute zu Senegal gehörigen Casamance gehört historisch zum Dialekt von Cacheu’ [‘The Creole of Senegalese Casamance historicallybelongs to the dialect of Cacheu’].39
This knowledge allows us to focus on the linguistic situation in the region
that has become Guinea-Bissau. Here, there is no doubt that Wolof is underrepresented in relation to what the language contributed to UGPC’s shared African
lexicon. The Ethnologue shows the rich variety of languages spoken in GuineaBissau, including some with only a very small number of speakers, but Wolof is
not listed (cf. Do Couto 1995: 209). Similarly, a map in Bull (1989: 72) displaying
the country’s ‘distribução geográfica das populações’ highlights everything but thepresence of Wolofs.
Whereas Mandinka’s considerable lexical contribution can be argued to result from its extensive diffusion and use as a trade language in the Guinea Riverregion during UGPC’s formative period, this is clearly more difficult to maintainfor Wolof. Rougé’s (1999a: 62) remark regarding the 15th–16th century Guinea
River region is significant in this respect: ‘No que diz respeito ao wolof, não temos
indicações acerca da sua utilização nessa altura como língua veicular’ [‘With respect to Wolof, nothing indicates its usage at that time as a vehicular language’].
In line with this remark, a map in Boulègue (1987: 12, 2006: 46) indicates that the
diffusion of Wolof in the second half of the 15th century was not any different
from now, with Wolofs being absent below the Gambia River. In addition, according to an anonymous statement (in Gamble & Hair 1999: 67fn) made around
1500, the ‘River Gambia divides the kingdom of Jolof from the great kingdom of
39. More than two decades ago, Peck (1988: 98fn), in his study of the Casamance variety of
GBC, came to the conclusion that ‘Wolof (…) can be considered a superstrate language to Kriolin the Casamance, whereas it was a substrate language in the Cape-Verdean formative period of
this language’, an accurate observation, although it is more correct to speak of ‘adstrate’ insteadof ‘superstrate’ in the case of GBC and Wolof in modern day Casamance.

320 Bart Jacobs

Mandingua’. This, in turn, coincides with Quint’s (2008: 27) observation that ‘opovo uólofe se manteve de modo relativamente estável na mesma área do continente
africano’ [‘the Wolof people remained relatively stable in the same area of the African continent’].
Claiming a key role for Wolof in the 16th and 17th centuries is also problematic in the light of the fact that in the 16th century Senegambia witnessed ‘La fin del’hégémonie du Jolof’ (Boulègue 2006: 47, cf. Boulègue 1980: 170; Barry 1988: 31):
the weight and prestige of Wolof as an interethnic trade language would only havediminished afterwards. Indeed, in 1669, in reference to the Senegalese Wolof kingdom, De Lemos Coelho (in Peres 1953: 8) commented: ‘[N]ão tem de grande este
Reino mais que o nome, porque não he mayor nem em gente, nem em poder, que os
mais desta nação’ [‘This Kingdom has only its name, because it is not greater inpeople or in power than the others of this nation’]. Furthermore, in an analysisof the English merchant Jobson’s (1623) account of his journey along the Gambia River, Gamble & Hair (1999: 68) note that Jobson ‘supplies no evidence about
Wolof society’. And although at that time Wolofs must have still occupied parts of
the north bank, ‘it is possible that in Jobson’s period Wolof influence was generally
in decline’ (ibidem).
In other travel accounts, indications of a possibly more widespread use of
Wolof in the Guinea region in UGPC’s formative period are missing as well. De
Almada (1594, in Köpke 1841: 48), for instance, made note of the presence in andaround São Domingos of ‘Banhuns, Buramos, Casangas, Jabundos, Falupos, Arriatas e Balantas’. He mentioned no Wolofs. Towards the end of the 17th century,
the Bishop D. Frei Vitoriano Portuense (in Da Mota 1974: 59) reported the presence in Bissau of Balantas and Pepels, but not of Wolofs.
No less significant is the lack of references to Wolof in Mark’s (2002: 81–96)
thorough analysis of cultural and ethnic mixing in the Gambia-CasamanceCacheu region in the 17th and early 18th centuries, suggesting that people of
Wolof descent were not, or rarely, involved in this mixing. Instead, it seems proper
to recall ‘l’existence d’une puissance mandingue hégémonique dans la région’ [‘theexistence of a hegemonic Mandinka power in the region’] (Rougé 2006: 71) during
the formative period of UGPC.
Interestingly, and crucially in the present context, it was Temne,40 rather than
Wolof, that was competing with Mandinka in some (southern) parts of the Guinea region. Rougé (1994: 142), for instance, observes: ‘A l’arrivée des portugais en
Guinée, deux langues jouaient ce rôle [= the role of trade language], le mandingue et (…) le temne de Sierra Leone’ [‘At the arrival of the Portuguese in Guinea,
40. Nowadays, according to the Ethnologue, Temne (of the southern branch of Atlantic
languages) is spoken almost exclusively in Sierra Leone.

Upper Guinea Creole 321

two languages fulfilled the role of trade language, Mandinka and Temne of Sierra
Leone’]. A certain Father Alvares, traveling along the Guinea Coast, identified
Temne as ‘la [langue] plus utilisée et narurelle. C’est celle qu’apprenent les étrangers’ (Rougé 1994: 142). Although Temne was apparently much more extant than
Wolof in 16th–17th century Guinea (cf. Section 6.2.6), the contribution of Temne
to GBC’s (and UGPC’s shared) African lexicon is overshadowed by that of Wolof.
6.2.4 The absence of GBC adstrate languages in UGPC’s shared African
lexiconOne could argue that the use of Wolof beyond its ethnic boundaries as a second(or third or fourth) language of individuals belonging to ethnic groups within the
Guinea region might account for some of the Wolof lexemes in UGPC. We canindeed safely assume that an unknown number of Africans residing in the 16th–
17th Guinea-Bissau region would have had knowledge of Wolof in addition totheir mother tongue, or even as a second mother tongue. But although the tertiary
presence of Wolof in Guinea-Bissau is possible and even likely, this does not suffice to account for the Wolof-derived lexemes in UGPC’s shared African lexicon:
the main problem is that it then remains unclear why we do not find any African lexemes in this shared lexicon deriving from those languages that, contrary
to Wolof, are and were in fact wide-spread in the Guinea-Bissau region. In thisrespect, Parkvall’s (2000: 152) observation is accurate that the lexical items foundin GBC inherited from the Atlantic languages dominant today in Guinea-Bissau— e.g. Balanta, Papel, Pulaar, and Manjaku — are conspicuously absent in UGPC’s
shared African lexicon. Indeed, that is unexpected in the case of a UGPC birth in
the Guinea-Bissau region.
6.2.5 On the interpreters
An anonymous reviewer of this paper made the very relevant comment that someof the interpreters who accompanied Portuguese merchants into the Guinea region
may have been Wolof speakers, ‘which might explain (at least in part) the Woloffeatures in GBC’. Although the scope of this article does not allow for an extensive
discussion, it does seem useful to briefly address the issue of these interpreters.
As suggested by the reviewer, Wolof interpreters were indeed commonly deployed by the Portuguese to establish (trading) contacts in Upper Guinea, but only
in Wolof-ruled territory, that is, in the region north of the Gambia River, and,
consequently, only in the early period up to, say, the first third of the 16th century.
Afterwards, from the mid-16th century onwards, with the Portuguese forced toshift their activities from the region north of the Gambia River to the region southof it — to the region where GBC is actually spoken and where it would have comeinto existence according to the continental hypothesis — chiefly Mandinkas were322 Bart Jacobs

recruited as interpreters, who came to be referred to as chalonas: ‘os famosos chalonas, intérpretes (do mandinga kullona)’ (Rougé 1999a: 62).
Even initial Portuguese contact with the Akan people of the Gold Coast is likely to have been established with the aid of Mandinka interpreters (Hair 1966: 18).
‘However’, Hair continues, ‘Akan interpreters were soon trained’. This latter comment is relevant, since it suggests that the Portuguese chose their interpreters according to the region they explored and the (trade) language/ethnic group that was
dominant in that region. Bonvini (1996: 132), writing about the linguistic mappingof the Guinea region by the Portuguese in the early colonial period, points out
this correlation: ‘[P]etit à petit, se constituait sur le tas une connaissance aréale desdifférentes langues rencontrées. La géographie linguistique allait ainsi de pair avec
l’institution de l’interprétariat, les deux étant étroitement liées’ [‘Little by little, anareal knowledge of the different languages was acquired by experience. And so,
the linguistic geography would cohere with the schooling of interpreters, the twobeing closely connected’.
This sensible practice makes it unlikely that many Wolof interpreters were
employed to establish trade contacts with the Africans in the area south of theGambia River. Hair (1966: 14), for example, observed that in the account by thePortuguese merchant Fernandes of the Cacheu River, dated 1510, ‘The Flup ruler
was described as “Mansa Falup,” which, Hair assumes, ‘would tend to confirm that
Mandingo had served the early explorers as the language of contact throughout
the region’. But not only the Portuguese were inclined to employ Mandinka interpreters in the Guinea region: in 1623, the English trader Jobson explored theGambia River under the guidance of a young Mandinka interpreter (Gamble &Hair 1999: 68). And, as noted in 6.2.3, Jobson made no mention of contact with
Wolofs throughout his journey.
Of some significance is also the following digression by Hair (1966: 14) on a1456 journey along the Casamance River made by the Italian merchant Cadamosto in the service of the Portuguese Crown:[C]ontact was likely made in Mandingo, almost certainly the trading language(…) of the district (…). [Although] the interpreters carried by Cadamosto to theGambia may or may not have been Mandingo-speaking, (…) there is no doubtthat after the early voyages up to the Gambia, Mandingo came to be widely used
as a language of contact.

In this fragment, the plausibility is again suggested of assuming that the interpreters deployed by the Portuguese in their expeditions to the region below the Gambia River were Mandinkas rather than Wolofs. But first and foremost, the fragmentshows how little we can say with certainty about the ethnic background of theinterpreters, especially of those employed in the early decades of exploration.

Upper Guinea Creole 323

As a result, we can only speculate on what the interpreters’ role might havebeen in shaping the creole lexicon. In any case, it seems unlikely to me − but future
research might prove me wrong − that interpreters were important actors in any
creolization process. On the contrary, one might assume that wherever an interpreter was deployed, the need for and use of an Afro-Portuguese trade language
would have been reduced. Moreover, as mentioned in 6.2.3, the sizeable Wolofderived UGPC lexicon warrants the search for an accordingly sizeable number of
Wolof-speakers at the time and place of creolization, and this can be found early
on in Santiago rather than on the boats that set sail to explore the Guinea-Bissau
region.
6.2.6 On the African vocabulary in travel accounts
A similarly relevant reviewer’s comment concerned the possibility that some of
the lexical Wolof items might have been diffused by travelers and merchants passing through Wolof territory before ending up in the Guinea-Bissau region. A variety of African words and expressions indeed repeatedly pop up in the accounts by
Portuguese and other Europeans dating from the period in which UGPC emerged.
For a detailed and careful analysis of the African vocabulary found in these earlyaccounts, one may consult Rougé (1988, 1999b). His findings, however, severely
weaken any attempts to attribute shared Wolof-derived lexical items in UGPC todiffusion by Guinea region travelers and/or merchants.
First of all, ‘On notera, (…) que seule une minorité (±20%) des termes africains de ces textes est aujourd’hui attestée en créole de Guinée − la proportion est
encore plus faible pour le créole du Cap-Vert’ [‘it is noted that only a minority ofsome 20% of the African terms found in these texts is attested nowadays in GBC
and the proportion is even lower for SCV’] (Rougé 1999b: 189). Moreover, of this
20%, ‘il s’agit, en particulier, de noms de végétaux’ [‘most are plant names’] (Rougé 1988: 11). We may therefore suffice with noting that none of UGPC’s shared
Wolof-derived items listed in the Appendix is mentioned by Rougé as appearing
in one or the other travel account.
Two of Rougé’s additional findings connect nicely with observations made inprevious sections. As pointed out in 6.2.2, for example, seven of the eleven Wolof
lexemes shared by UGPC are either verbs or deverbal items, testifying to the antiquity of these lexemes. However, − as to be expected in more superficial cases oflexical borrowing − the African words found in the travel accounts ‘sont pratiquement tous des noms’ [‘are practically all nouns’] (Rougé 1999b: 195). Secondly, weobserved in 6.2.3 that Temne was of greater importance than Wolof as a trade language in the region below the Gambia River, but that − unexpectedly in the case of
a continental UGPC birth − the latter nonetheless contributed significantly more
to UGPC’s shared African lexicon than the former. In the African vocabulary of324 Bart Jacobs

the travel accounts, however, the proportion is reverse and carefully reflects thecontact traders, merchants and travelers must have had with both Mandinka andTemne when passing through the Guinea region. Hence, Rougé (1999b: 197) emphasizes: ‘Une (…) tendance (…) ressort clairement: l’importance du temné et dumandingue dans ce vocabulaire (…). Nous avons plus de 60% de termes attestés dansune de ces deux langues. C’est énorme’ [‘A tendency clearly emerges: the importance of Temne and Mandinka in this vocabulary. More than 60% of the lexemes
is attested in one of these two languages. That is enormous’].
6.2.7 Final remarks on the Wolof argument
In the discussion of the diffusion of Wolof provided above I may not have distinguished as carefully between ethnic, linguistic and political borders as one should
in analyses of multi-cultural areas such as the Guinea-Bissau region. Nor could
the discussion fully take into account the fluidity of these borders (if we can speakof ‘borders’ in the first place). These are shortcomings, no doubt, which could be
one reason why I might be somewhat overlooking or somehow underestimating
the (diachronic and/or synchronic) presence of Wolof in the area now known as
Guinea-Bissau. But, as mentioned, both the size and antiquity of the Wolof-derived
lexicon to UGPC justify the search for more or less stable Wolof communities in
the region where GBC would have come into being according to the continental
hypothesis. Such communities, it seems, were and are in fact absent there.
Be it as it may, those advocating a continental birth have, to my knowledge,
consistently avoided any attempts to account for the Wolof-lexemes in GBC. For
instance, when Do Couto (2005: 107) claims that GBC ‘resultou do contato dos portugueses com os povos locais (mandingas, manjacos, pepéis e outros)’ [‘resulted fromthe contact between the Portuguese and the local people (mandinkas, manjakos,
pepels and others)’], one wonders what stand he takes on the abundant presenceof Wolof items in the GBC lexicon. Similarly confusing is the observation that‘Kriyol (…) remained in contact with its substratum’ (Kihm 1994: 11) or Kihm’s(1989: 354) identification of GBC’s primordial substrate languages:
Disregarding very small languages (Buy, Haaj, Nalu, etc.), and also languages thatfor historical and/or geographical reasons cannot have been part of the substratum for Kriyol (Fula, Bijago, Susu), we are left with seven languages, viz. Manjaku,
Papel, Mankanya, Balanta, Dyola, Baynuk, and Mandinka.

Again, one is left wondering what the author’s position is on (the origins of) the
Wolof contribution to GBC. And why does Kihm (1989) not consider Wolof as apossible substrate source for grammatical features in GBC, while Doneux & Rougé(1993) and Ichinose (1995), for instance, do?

Upper Guinea Creole 325

If anything, these examples show how severely the Wolof-derived lexemes
complicate attempts to situate the birth of GBC in the Guinea River region where
the linguistic weight of Wolof is and was limited.
6.3 A morphosyntactic and semantic extension of the Wolof argument
It is now possible to apply and extend Parkvall’s Wolof argument to the morphosyntax and semantics of UGPC by identifying morphosyntactic and/or semantic
UGPC features of Wolof origin. Below, I will focus closely on two features forwhich a Wolof origin has been proposed in previous literature, and which characterize both SCV and GBC.
It should be stressed, nevertheless, that, in order to conclusively attribute afeature to Wolof, this feature must of course first be shown to be non existent inother Atlantic languages. With the scope of the present article, I have not been able
to provide such negative evidence, a task that is further complicated by the aforementioned fact (6.2.1) that Wolof is better documented than most of its fellow Atlantic languages. The next section, therefore, is somewhat speculative in characterand requires elaboration upon in future comparative research.
6.3.1

Two verbs ‘to have’: UGPC ten / tene, Wolof am / ame

Quint (2000b) and Lang (2005, 2006) have pointed out that both SCV (ten/tene41)
and Wolof (am/ame) have two verbs ‘to have’, one to express ‘possession essentielle’,the other to express ‘possession occasionelle’ (Lang 2006: 53). Quint (2000b: 55)
stresses that ‘la dérivation am > ame évoque aussi celle de ten > tene en badiais[SCV]’ [‘the derivation am > ame recalls that of ten > tene in SCV’] (more details
in Lang 2005: 45–51). In GBC we find the same pair ten/tene (Rougé 2004a: 270;
Scantamburlo 2002: 591).42
Overlooking a possible Wolof origin, Rougé (2004a: 270) comments: ‘Onpeut se demander pourquoi deux verbes alors que ni le portugais ni, semble-t-il,
les langues africaines en contact n’opèrent cette distinction sémantique’ [‘One wonders why two verbs, when neither Portuguese nor, so it seems, the African languages with which it is in contact use this semantic distinction’]. Nevertheless, his
41. This form is often realized as /teni/, but it is important to note that Paula Brito (1887) stillused the form 〈tene〉 and that the /e/ is also heard when the verb receives the anterior marker
or a clitic pronoun causing a stress shift from the penultimate to the last syllable, e.g. teˈneba orteˈne-l (Lang 2005: 45–46).
42. Whether the GBC pair expresses the same semantic distinction as the SCV pair does, remains unclear and requires further investigation.

326 Bart Jacobs

comment is important, since if, as he states, the distinction is indeed not found in
the languages with which GBC is in contact, this clearly strengthens the case fora Wolof origin.
The phonetic realization of GBC tene [tene] is noteworthy, since a strong tendency in the Bissau variety of GBC is to raise the unstressed etymological /e/ to[i], as in GBC misti ‘to want’, miti ‘to put’, bindi ‘to sell’ < P mester, meter, vender, etc. This seems to further favor the proposed connection with the Wolof pair
am/ame.43
6.3.2 Passive construction
Examples (1a,b) exhibit the striking similarities between UGPC’s auxiliary-lesspassive construction (occasionally referred to as ‘passive [verbal] participles’) withthe passive marker -du44 and Wolof’s auxiliary-less passive construction with thepassive marker -(t)u. The lack of an auxiliary in UGPC’s passive has at times been
analyzed simply as a result of the suppression of the Portuguese copula (e.g. Lopesda Silva 1957: 146). The similarities shown below, however, support the hypothesisthat UGPC’s passive (1a) results rather from the convergence of the Portuguese
participle marker –du with Wolof’s auxiliary-less passive construction (1b).

43. It is interesting to observe that Palenquero, a Spanish-based creole spoken in Colombia,
also makes use of two forms of the verb ‘to have’: ten and tené. In addition, Palenquero shareswith UGPC the imperfective (progressive) marker ta as well as the post verbal anterior marker–ba, and the apparently Portuguese-derived verb bai ‘to go’. To my knowledge, Wolof/UGPC
features in Palenquero have never been hypothesized. The 16th century arrivals of Wolof slaves
to Colombia, however, is well documented: Schwegler (1998: 224) talks of an initial period(1533–1580) ‘durante el cual predominaron en Cartagena los esclavos yolofos’ [‘during which
Wolof slaves predominated in Cartagena’] and Parkvall (2000: 137) confirms that ‘imports to
Colombia were dominated by Yolofs until about 1580, whereas late 16th and early 17th century
arrivals were predominantly Bantu’. The UGPC-like features in Palenquero permit the hypothesis that these 16th century Wolof slaves had knowledge of UGPC and may have contributed to
the formation of Palenquero. As to the Palenquero pair ten/tené, Schwegler & Green (2007: 290)
comment that ‘these two forms seem to be in free variation’. The Wolof/UGPC evidence suggeststhat in an earlier phase Palenquero speakers may have distinguished semantically between thetwo verbs.
44. See Quint (2000a: 234, 235; 2003: 232, 233, 250), Veiga (2000: 336) or Lang (1993: 158–160)
for details on the passive marker –du in SCV; Doneux & Rougé (1988: 21), Do Couto (1994: 88),
Scantamburlo (1999: 165, 166), M’Bodj (1993: 334), Kihm (1994: 243), and Wilson (1962: 26,
27) can be consulted for GBC. Baptista, Mello & Suzuki (2007: 67, 68) point out the similarities
between the creoles’ passive morphology.

Upper Guinea Creole 327(1) a. UGPC
					
					
		 b. W		
					
					

Porta fitxa -dudoor close pass45‘The door has been closed’
Bunt bitej -(t)u46
door def close pass
‘The door has been closed’ (Ndiaye 2004: 30)

In regard to the Wolof passive, Ndiaye (2004: 31) observes thatIl ne s’agirait pas de la forme passive comme on la rencontre en francais mais tout
simplement d’une tournure (…) que peut correspondre à un sens passif, l’objet de la
tournure active devenant sujet. (…) Le sujet exerce une action sur lui-même: l’agent
et le patient renvoie à la même personne.
[‘This passive is not like the French passive, but consists simply of a pronominal
turn that can correspond to a passive meaning, with the object becoming subject.
The subject exerts an action on itself. The agent and the patient refer to the same
person’].

This description carefully reflects the (auxiliary-less) passive construction of
UGPC, as described, for example, by Peck (1988: 147):
All Kriol transitive verbs can accept the passive affix ‘-du’ (…), which makes themcapable of participating in structures similar to the English and Portuguese passive. In these structures, what would have been an object of the verb, had the passive marker not been attached to the verbal stem, occupies the subject position.

Baptista (2007b) has proposed a more general Wolof influence to account for thelack of a copula in adjectival and passive predicates in UGPC.47 It must be stressed
once more, however, that before designating Wolof as a substrate source, negative
evidence from other languages spoken in Senegambia must be provided.
6.3.3 Other UGPC features of a proposed Wolof origin
Several other grammatical features have been proposed as possibly resulting from
Wolof substrate influence. A selection:–

The use of UGPC’s 3SG pronoun e/i as a copula has been extensively describedfor both SCV and GBC (e.g. Baptista 1999; Michaelis 2001: 177, 178; Kihm
1994: 37–41). Baptista (2007b: 192, 193) postulates a possible Wolof origin for

45. pass = passive marker.
46. def = definite article.
47. In modern SCV, this feature (lack of copula in adjectival predicates) only affects a fossilized
set of adjectives, whereas in GBC the feature is generalized.

328 Bart Jacobs–

7.

this feature: ‘il est (…) fort plausible que cette langue [Wolof] soit à l’origine del’usage de e comme copule’ [‘it is very plausible that this language [Wolof] is at
the origin of the usage of e as a copula’].
Quint (2009: 9) mentions that the verbal suffix -oti, as in UGPC ñapati ‘to biteoff a piece of something’ and UGPC txopoti ‘to peck’ (see Appendix) ‘is mostprobably derived from the Wolof iterative verbal suffix -(w)ati -/(w)ati/ (…) or-aat -/a:t/ (…) with the original meaning ‘to make something one more time,
usually or repeatedly’ (…). Possibly it was productive at an earlier stage’.

Phonetic evidence in favor of a Santiago origin48

As noted by Quint (2000a: 110), the palatal fricative /ʃ/, written 〈x〉, of the (Old)Portuguese etyma has been preserved in SCV (2–5).49 Although in most cases thepalatal fricative /ʒ/ (written 〈j〉 or 〈g〉) was devoiced50 (/ʒ/ > [ʃ] (6–9), Quint asserts that it has always kept its palatal quality. Indeed, I have found no instances in
SCV of the depalatalization of original Portuguese /ʃ/ or /ʒ/ to [s]. This contrasts
strongly with the process of depalatalization of etymological /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ to [s] thatcharacterizes GBC (cf., for instance, Opazo 1990: 37), as is demonstrated by thefollowing examples:51(2) P ˈpeixe ‘fish’										> SCV ˈpeʃi> GBC ˈpis(3) P baixo ‘low’										> SCV ˈbaʃu> GBC ˈbas(u)(4) P deixar ‘to leave’							> SCV ˈdiʃa> GBC ˈdisa52

48. I thank John Holm for a fruitful discussion on how to interpret the data presented in thissection.
49. The Old Portuguese affricate /tʃ/ written 〈ch〉 — although realized as a fricative /ʃ/ in modern mainstream Portuguese — was maintained both in SCV and in GBC (see Section 8.2).
50. The devoicing of voiced fricatives is completely regular in UGPC. Voiced allophones areattested in Cape Verde as well as in Guinea-Bissau, but are likely to result from post-formative
contact with Portuguese.
51. I have chosen to phonetically only transcribe the phonemes at issue.
52. Rougé (2004a: 129) adds: ‘En Guinée et en Casamance disa. On rencontre de plus en plus en
Guinée la forme dixa’ [‘In Guinea and Casamance disa. In Guinea, the form dixa is found more
and more’], thereby suggesting that the depalatalized variant disa is the older variant of the two.

Upper Guinea Creole 329(5) P lagarˈtixa ‘lizard’							> SCV lagarˈtiʃa> GBC lagarˈtisa53(6) P iˈgreja ‘church’									> SCV ˈgreʃa> GBC ˈgrisia(7) P viˈagem ‘trip’									> SCV ˈbiaʃi> GBC ˈbias(8) P ˈhoje ‘today’									> SCV ˈoʃi
> GBC aˈos(i)(9) P ˈsujo ‘dirty’										> SCV ˈʃuʃu> GBC ˈsusu

The depalatalization of etymological /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ in GBC is hardly surprising:
Parkvall (2000: 44) points out the lack of palatal fricatives /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ in most of theAtlantic and Mande languages spoken in the Guinea-Bissau region, like Balanta
and Diola from the Atlantic family and Mandinka from the Mande family. Rougé(2006: 65), when discussing phonological features shared by GBC and Mandinka,
stresses the contrast with SCV:
Il existe une ligne de partage trés nette entre le mandinka et le créole de Guinée et deCasamance d’une part et le créole capverdien de l’autre. Alors que le mandinka etle créole continental, comme la plupart des langues de la región, ne connaissent pas(…) de fricatives sonores ainsi que la fricative palatal sourde, présentes en capverdien (comme en portugais).
[‘A clear distinction exists between Mandinka and GBC on the one hand and SCV
on the other: Mandinka and the continental creole, like the majority of the region’s languages, do not have the voiced fricatives or voiceless palatal fricatives,present in Cape Verdean (as well as in Portuguese)’]

Similarly, Quint (2000a: 69) affirms that ‘[l]es créoles continentaux [GBC] sont restésplus proches des langues africaines qui les entourent, et qui, pour la plupart, ignorentle phonème /ʃ/’ [‘the continental creoles have remained closer to the African languages with which they are in contact and most of which ignore the phoneme /ʃ/’].
The theoretical consequences of these data are heavy: we can safely assume
that if UGPC had come into being on the mainland, it would have lacked the referred palatal fricatives from the beginning. If, then, UGPC had been taken fromthe mainland to Santiago, it is implied that the Cape Verdean /ʃ/ would have come
53. Rougé (2004a: 185) comments: ‘En Guinée et en Casamance lagartisa, qui a pour variante à
Bissau lagartixa’ [‘In Guinea and Casamance lagartisa, which has lagartixa as a variant in Bissau’]. Again, this suggests that the variant with depalatalized [s] is the older, more creole, variant.

330 Bart Jacobs

into use only in a post formative decreolizing stage through renewed contact with
Portuguese. However, if this is what happened, modern SCV palatalization patterns would not match those of Portuguese so closely. Instead, we would expect tofind at least some cases reminiscent of this earlier stage, i.e. cases of [s] instead of
etymological /ʃ/ or /ʒ/, which, however, have not been found: as was mentioned
above, depalatalization of etymological /ʃ/ or /ʒ/ seems completely unattested in
SCV, significantly also in the basilectal variety described by Quint (2000a,b).
These phonetic data significantly strengthen the claim that SCV did not comeinto existence on the mainland: while a development from Old P /ʃ/ ~ /ʒ/ > GBC[s] > SCV [ʃ] (10b, 11b) seems unlikely, it is very possible to reconstruct the phonetic development from Old P /ʃ/ ~ /ʒ/ > SCV [ʃ] > GBC [s] (10a, 11a):54(10) a.

P ˈpeixe ‘fish’		(11) a.

P viaˈgem ‘trip’ > SCV ˈbiaʃi > GBC ˈbias(10) b. P ˈpeixe ‘fish’		> SCV ˈpeʃi > GBC ˈpis

> GBC ˈpis *> SCV ˈpeʃi(11) b. P viaˈgem ‘trip’ > GBC ˈbias *> SCV ˈbiaʃi

8. 15th–16th century Portuguese features as evidence for a Santiago birth
In Section 3.1 it was shown that most, if not all conditions canonically considerednecessary for the emergence of an Afro-Portuguese creole were lacking on thecontinent prior to the foundation of Cacheu in 1589. We can therefore assume that
if GBC had formed on the continent, this would not have happened prior to thebeginning of the 17th century. This is in keeping with Lang’s (2001: 184) proposition that it seems ‘improbable que des communautés créolophones dignes de mention aient déjà existées au XVIe siècle sur la côte’ [‘unlikely that creole communities
worthy of mention already existed on the coast in the 16th century’], and the following observation made by Mark (2002: 15) is therefore hardly surprising: ‘Written sources clearly attest to the existence of Crioulo in Bissau, but only towards theend of the 17th century. (…). In 1582, Francisco de Andrade, sergeant-major ofSantiago, wrote that African traders on the Petite Cote spoke French and Spanish;
he mentions no trading language’.

54. Of course, this claim presupposes that SCV and GBC did not emerge separately. Those who
support the simultaneous development hypothesis can still argue that Portuguese /ʃ/ ~ /ʒ/ would
have simply given an [s] on the continent and an [ʃ] on Santiago. For reasons given in Section 2,
however, simultaneous development is not considered tenable.

Upper Guinea Creole 331

These facts and observations gain relevance when we isolate linguistic features found in UGPC reminiscent of 15th–16th century Portuguese (henceforth
Old Portuguese). As with the Wolof features, we can again plausibly account forthese Old Portuguese features by way of the Cape Verde Islands: as argued in Section 4.1, creolization on Santiago is likely to have already started in the late 15th
century. Quint (2000a: 55) therefore maintains that ‘La langue source du badiais[SCV] est sans conteste le portugais ancien (celui qu’on parlait au XVème siècle)’[‘The source language of SCV is without a doubt Old Portuguese (as spoken in the
15th century)’].
8.1 Lexical items
Scantamburlo (1999: 147) noted that in GBC’s lexicon we find ‘vocábulos derivados do Português dos séculos XV–XVI’ [‘lexemes derived from 15th–16th century
Portuguese’]. For the chronological and historical reasons explained above, GBC
is most likely to have inherited the Old Portuguese lexical items from SCV, rather
than the other way around. Examples of lexemes that might qualify as typically
Old Portuguese follow below.
Kihm (1994: 4) draws attention to GBC misti (~meste in Ziguinchor) ‘to want’< Old P ser/haver mester ‘to need, be needed’ (Modern P precisar, ser preciso) and
GBC limaria ‘animal’ < Old P alimaria (Modern P animal) and maintains thatboth items ‘were still in common use in 16th century Portuguese but not afterwards’. The items have cognates in SCV meste ‘to need’ and limaria ‘animal’ (cf.
Viaro 2005: 96, 98).
Kihm (1989: 369) also analyzed the complementizer GBC kuma and noted:‘Finding a plausible Portuguese etymon for kuma is not an easy job. Actually there
is only one candidate, viz., coma, an archaic variant of como ‘as, how’ that was stillin general usage in the 16th century, although very much on the decline (Teyssier
1975: 69)’. SCV has the truncated form ma as a complementizer, but the full form
kuma is still mentioned by both Lang (2002: 363) and Quint (2009: 74), and alsoin early texts of the Fogo and Brava varieties of Cape Verdean Creole recorded by
Parsons (1923) and Meintel (1975: 252) respectively, the full form kuma was still
used.
Also based on Old Portuguese coma is the UGPC comparative conjunction suma ~ sima ‘as, if ’: ‘Une ancienne expression portugaise assi coma (…) est
à l’origine en capverdien de sima, et en guinéen et casamançais de suma, qui signifient ‘comme’’ [‘The Old Portuguese expression assi coma is at the source of Cape
Verdean sima and GBC suma, meaning ‘as, if ’ ’] (Rougé 2004a: 70).

332 Bart Jacobs

Furthermore, the composed preposition UGPC banda di ‘next to’ derives
from Old Portuguese banda de (Rougé 2004a: 75).55 Modern mainstream Portuguese has ao lado de. Arguably, one can add UGPC Dos ~ Dios ‘God’ from Old
Portuguese Dios, which in early times occurred in variation with Deus (Quint
2000a: 115). However, additional corpus-based research seems needed to pinpoint
more exactly the periods in which the usage of these items went into decline.56
8.2 Phonological traits
On a phonological level, various authors have noted the fact that the Portuguese
voiceless fricative /ʃ/ written 〈ch〉 was integrated as an affricate /tʃ/ into SCV and
GBC. Rougé (1994: 140) rightly points out that this proves that ‘ces créoles sont nésà une époque où le portugais distinguait encore phonologiquement 〈ch〉 et 〈x〉’ [‘thesecreoles came into existence in an epoch in which Portuguese still distinguishedphonologically between 〈ch〉 and 〈x〉’] (cf. Kihm 1994: 5). However, if we may believe Teyssier, this epoch might have lasted well into the 17th century: ‘A partir doséculo XVII (…) vai ocorrer o desaparecimento de [tʃ]’ [‘From the 17th century onwards the [tʃ] starts disappearing’] (1983: 53). I will, therefore, not use the affricate
55. John McWhorter (p. c.) commented that Saramaccan has bandja for ‘side’, from Old Portuguese banda, which means that at least some Portuguese speakers were using that particularterm as late as the late 17th century. This of course shows that one should be cautious when
attributing words or structures to Old Portuguese and claiming their absence in Modern Portuguese: items do not disappear from one day to the other and some apparently archaic forms
are retained in dialectal varieties of Portuguese. It should especially be taken into account thatthe variety of Portuguese exported overseas preserved words and structures that disappeared inEuropean Portuguese (and vice versa). Needless to say, there is a need for additional future research in order to come to a more detailed picture of when certain items began to decline, and ifthey did, in which areas outside of Portugal they might have continued to be used. For instance,
although archaisms found in UGPC such as lagarto and kabasera (in the Old Portuguese senseof ‘crocodile’ and ‘baobab tree’; Da Mota 1954: 232; Viaro 2005: 97) may have become extinct inEuropean Portuguese prior to the 17th century (in favor of modern Portuguese crocodilo andbaobab or imbondeiro), they still pop up frequently in 17th century Portuguese travel accounts(Rougé 2004a: 89, 185).
56. Papiamentu specialists should be alarmed by the fact that in Papiamentu we find variousof the Old Portuguese items discussed here, such as banda di and meste ~ mesté(r). This is avaluable piece of evidence in support of Papiamentu’s Upper Guinea origins as argued by Quint(2000b) and Jacobs (2009a,b). A detailed discussion of Old Portuguese features in Papiamentu
and their UGPC equivalents can be found in Jacobs (2009b). Jacobs (2009a) analyses the correspondences between Papiamentu and UGPC in 5 grammatical categories and provides a historical framework that accounts for the linguistic transfer from Upper Guinea to Curaçao in thesecond half of the 17th century.

Upper Guinea Creole 333

realization of original Portuguese /tʃ/ written 〈ch〉 as an argument for a pre-17th
century birth of UGPC.57 The integration of its voiced Portuguese counterpart /ʒ/(written 〈j〉 or 〈g〉) into UGPC, on the other hand, does provide such an argument
and is therefore discussed below.
In word-initial position, Portuguese /ʒ/ almost without exception corresponds
to the SCV and GBC occlusive [dʒ]:(12) P ˈjogo ‘game’		> SCV ˈdʒogu, GBC ˈdʒugu(13) P ˈjunto ‘together’> SCV and GBC ˈdʒuntu(14) P ˈgente ‘people’		> SCV ˈdʒenti, GBC ˈdʒinti

In contrast, in word-internal position, original Portuguese /ʒ/ was predominantly
integrated as a fricative [ʃ] into SCV and [s] into GBC, i.e. without the occlusive
element. This was shown in examples (6)–(9) provided in Section 7.
As noted by Quint (2000a: 114), this distinction seems to reflect the Old Portuguese double realization of the phoneme /ʒ/: Teyssier (1983: 26–28) mentions
that in the Portuguese of the period between 1200–1350 the phoneme /ʒ/ wasrealized either as a fricative [ʒ] or as an affricate [dʒ]. For this period, he therefore
phonetically represents the phoneme as /(d)ʒ/, stating that ‘Este fonema foi inicialmente a africada /dʒ/, mas perdeu, num determinado momento, o seu elemento
oclusivo inicial, e passou a /ʒ/’ [‘This phoneme was initially the affricate /dʒ/, but,at a certain moment, lost its initial occlusive element and passed to /ʒ/’]. Unfortunately, the exact period in which /(d)ʒ/ definitely lost its occlusive element in favorof /ʒ/ is not clear: ‘Torna-se dificil saber se tal evolução ocorreu durante o período
que estamos estudando [1200–1350] ou depois dele’ [‘It is difficult to say whether
this evolution occurred during the period that we are studying [1200–1350] orafter’] (Teyssier 1983: 28). Nevertheless, Teyssier makes no more mention of anallophone [dʒ] in the period that extends from the 14th century to the present.
Therefore, it seems safe to guess that by the mid-16th century (if not earlier) the
two allophones had definitely merged into one voiced palatal fricative /ʒ/. If wethen recall that before 1589 (the foundation of Cacheu), conditions for any creoleto emerge were not met on the mainland, the preservation of the double realization of the phoneme /(d)ʒ/ in GBC poses an obvious problem to the continental
birth hypothesis.
It should, however, be emphasized that in order to draw firmer conclusions
from these data, further research is necessary (a) to more precisely pinpoint the
57. The same phonetic distinction is found in Papiamentu, where we find, for instance, tʃumbu< P chumbo ‘lead’, versus miʃi < P mexer ‘to touch, move’ (see details in Jacobs [2009b]; cf. Quint
2000b: 133).

334 Bart Jacobs

period in which the evolution of /(d)ʒ/ > /ʒ/ in Portuguese was finalized and (b) toverify or disprove whether one (or more) of the African substrate languages mightsomehow have been involved in the shaping of this phonological trait.
9. Conclusions
This paper aimed to provide historical and linguistic evidence in favor of the hypothesis that UGPC arose on Santiago and from there spread to the Guinea-Bissau
region, a hypothesis referred to as the Santiago birth hypothesis.
We started with a critical discussion of hypotheses that seem untenable to us.
For linguistic reasons, we took as a starting point the idea that GBC and SCV havea shared creole (rather than no shared, or a pidgin) ancestor. In addition, the socalled simultaneous development hypothesis was discarded for being far-fetched
as well as unfalsifiable. Section 3, then, listed a set of socio-historical argumentsthat speak against the birth of UGPC on the continent, arriving at the conclusionthat those conditions traditionally thought to foster creolization were absent on
the continent.
Section 4 presented an historical framework in support of the Santiago birth
hypothesis. To account for the linguistic transfer from Santiago to the mainland,
16th–17th century migration patterns from Santiago to the mainland in general and to Cacheu − founded by Cape Verdeans − in particular were revealed.
A Founder Effect was held responsible for the maintenance of the proto-creoleamong the Cape Verdean settlers in Cacheu and its subsequent diffusion to otherparts of the Guinea-Bissau region.
The controversy surrounding the origins of UGPC was directly related tothe (presumed) impossibility of adducing linguistic evidence, which has allowed
for diverging historical scenarios to be embraced. Parkvall, however, presented
the dominant lexical contributions of Mande/Mandinka and Wolof to UGPC’s
shared lexicon as evidence for a Santiago origin. The objective of Section 6 wasto corroborate the plausibility of Parkvall’s argumentation. Although the Mande/
Mandinka argument seemed contestable, the argumentation in its totality (andthe Wolof argument in particular) appeared to constitute a significant piece of
demographic-linguistic reasoning that offers valuable insight and clues towards a
better understanding of, as well as points of departure for future research into theorigins of UGPC.
It is interesting to note that the shared features (i.e. the shared Wolof-derived
lexemes and 15th–16th century Portuguese features, Section 8), rather thanthose that separate SCV from GBC, can provide indications about where to situate the birth of the proto-creole. On a phonological level, nonetheless, Section 7

Upper Guinea Creole 335

highlighted a striking difference between SCV and GBC, which points just as muchtowards an insular UGPC birth.
The discussed phenomena (i.e. the Wolof argument, the distinctive (de)palatalization patterns, and the 15th–16th century Portuguese features) need to bethoroughly addressed in future literature on the issue, and by those who posit a
continental birth in particular. Until then, the Santiago birth hypothesis reliably
and satisfactorily accounts for all these phenomena — both from a historical andfrom a linguistic point of view. There is no need to label this claim nacionalista(Scantamburlo 1999: 31) nor patriotista (Do Couto 1994: 31). It simply seems that‘a hipótese caboverdiana para a formação do crioulo português tem muitos argumentos a seu favor’ [‘The Cape Verdean hypothesis for the formation of the Portuguese creole has many arguments in its favor’] (Do Couto 1994: 30). What is now
labeled by some as ‘traditional wisdom’ (Kihm 1994: 4) might turn out to be merecommon sense.
Received: 9/18/2008
Revised:5/12/09
Accepted: 7/13/09

Abbreviations
SCV = Santiago Cape Verdean Portuguese Creole
GBC = Guinea-Bissau and Casamance Portuguese Creole
UGPC = Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole (a term covering both SCV and GBC)
P = Portuguese
W = Wolof

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Appendix: Lexical items of probable Wolof origin shared by SCV and GBC
Drawing on Quint (2000b, 2008)58 and Rougé (2004a), I have listed 11 lexical items of probable
Wolof origin that appear in the shared UGPC lexicon:59
SCV and GBC bindi ‘tool to make couscous’ < W yindi –bi ‘idem’
SCV botu, GBC abota ‘association’ < W mbootay ‘idem’
SCV djabakos ‘sorcerer, soothsayer’, GBC djanbakos ‘healer’ < W dyebar ~ jabar ‘charlatan’
SCV and GBC djagasi ‘to mix’ < W jaxase ‘to mix’
SCV and GBC lanbu ‘to collect, to coil up, to protect’ < W làmboo ‘to wrap up s.th./s.o.’SCV fepu, GBC fep ‘entirely, completely’ < W fepp ‘everywhere’
SCV lokote ~ lokoti, GBC lokoti ‘to extract with the fingers’ < W lóqati ‘to extract’
SCV and GBC moku ‘crushed’ < W mokk ‘to be crushed’
SCV and GBC ñapati ‘act of biting off a piece of something’ < W ñapat ‘to take a mouthful’
SCV txopoti ~ txuputi, GBC txopoti ~ txupati ‘to peck’ < W coppati ‘to peck’
SCV uñi, GBC woni ‘to show someone the buttocks as a sign of contempt’ < W wone ‘to show
something to someone’ and/or W wuññi ‘to blacken someone’s reputation’58. See Quint (2000b: 295–300) for a schematic representation of the African lexical items
shared between SCV and GBC.
59. For reasons mentioned in Section 6.2.1, the etymology of these items should be presented
with some reservations. Rougé sums up the methodological difficulties: ‘Os contactos linguísticos
luso-africanos que geraram estas línguas [GBC and SCV] foram precedidos de contactos entre asdiversas línguas africanas, contactos que provocaram empréstimos lexicais mútuos que dificultam
o trabalho do etimologista’ [‘The Luso-African linguistic contacts that generated these languages
were preceded by contacts between several different African languages, contacts that provokedmutual lexical borrowing which complicate the work of the etymologist’] (2005: 13).

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