Casamancese Creole
Facts
- Language: Casamancese Creole
- Alternate names: Guinea-Bissau Creole, Kiryol, Kriulo, Portuguese Creole
- Language code: dpovc
- Language family: Indo-European, Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Western Romance, Shifted Western Romance, Southwestern Shifted Romance, West Ibero-Romance, Galician Romance, Macro-Portuguese, Upper Guinea Portuguese
- Creole language
- Dialect of: Crioulo Upper Guinea
- Number of speakers: 20000
- Script: Latin script.
More information:
Introduction
Guinea-Bissau Creole, also known as Kiriol, is a creole language whose lexicon derives mostly from Portuguese. It is spoken in Guinea Bissau, Senegal and The Gambia. It is also called by its native speakers as kriyol, liŋgu kristoŋ.
The Casamancese Creole Verb
Nearly all Casamancese Creole verbs are characterized by a final, thematic vowel, often inherited from
- Portuguese, /a, e, i/ in most cases: kontá ‘tell’, kumé ‘eat’, durmí ‘sleep (v.)’;
- more rarely (mostly items of African stock) /o, u/: joŋgó ‘doze’, bambú ‘carry on one’s back’.
- Ø: perfective aspect
- ta: habitual aspect
- na: imperfective aspect
- baŋ: past tense (postverbal)
Casamancese Creole verbs belong to two different aspectual classes:
- dynamic verbs (e.g. bebé ‘drink’), which have past reference when preceded by the perfective marker Ø: N Ø bebé ‘I drank’;
- stative verbs (e.g. sebé ‘know’), which have present reference when preceded by the perfective marker Ø: N Ø sebé ‘I know’.