Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Introduction ⇫ ¶

Santome is primarily spoken on the island of São Tomé in the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, which consists of two islands in the Gulf of Guinea, West Africa. Pockets of Santome speakers can be found in countries such as Portugal, Angola, or Gabon. The language is historically connected with a self-reported group, the Forros, whose name is derived from Portuguese forro ‘freed (slave)’.

2. Sociohistorical background ⇫ ¶

The island of São Tomé was uninhabited when it was discovered by the Portuguese in 1470; it was permanently settled in 1493. There are still many questions with respect to the early demographics of the island. The available evidence suggests that during the homestead period, which lasted until approximately 1520, most slaves came from what is now Nigeria, especially the Edoid-speaking area (former kingdom of Benin), where the Portuguese ran a trading post at Ughoton. During the initial phase of settlement, each settler was granted a female slave by royal decree, with the purpose of settling the island. References to admixture of slave settlers and Portuguese settlers are well attested. The women and the children born under these circumstances became freed slaves in the 1510s. The shift to a plantation society in the 1510s corresponds to the arrival of Bantu-speaking slaves on the island, mainly from the ancient kingdom of Kongo and Angola. The Niger Delta gradually lost its importance and relations with the kingdom of Benin were cut off in the middle of the 16th century. The sugar industry on São Tomé peaked in the 1560s, and by the end of the century it collapsed due to a number of internal and external factors such as conflicts with runaway slaves and the superior quality of Brazilian sugar. However, after the collapse of the plantation system São Tomé continued to function as an entrepôt in the transatlantic slave trade. Although it is estimated that over 90% of Santome’s lexicon is derived from Portuguese, the impact of the African strata is felt in the lexicon, with a fairly equal split between Edoid and Kikongo etymologies, and especially in the grammar (Ferraz 1979). Santome is historically related to Angolar (also spoken on São Tomé, see Maurer 2012a, this volume), Principense (spoken on Príncipe, see Maurer 2012b, this volume), and Fa d’Ambô (spoken on Annobón, see Post 2012, this volume and Hagemeijer 2011).

3. Sociolinguistic situation ⇫ ¶

Although Portuguese is the official and most spoken language on São Tomé, Santome is spoken and understood by most of the population, which includes Principense and Angolar speakers. According to the 2001 census, the number of Santome speakers is rapidly declining among the younger generations. In 2009, Pontifice et al. prepared a spelling proposal (ALUSTP) for Santome, Principense and Angolar at the request of the Santomean government. In 2010, the proposal was ratified by the country’s Minister of Education and Culture. Otherwise very little consistent action has been undertaken to maintain or revitalize the country’s linguistic patrimony. Radio and television broadcastings in Santome are limited, but most local music is sung in this creole. Pioneering short descriptions were written by Schuchardt (1882) and Negreiros (1895), but renewed academic interest in Santome and the Gulf of Guinea creoles in general had to wait until the second half of the 20th century. The Creole of São Tomé (1979) by Luiz Ivens Ferraz stands out as a milestone in the studies on Santome. Despite the ongoing academic interest in Santome, no grammar has yet been published. There are a few sources for the lexicon, namely the Dicionário lexical Santomé-Português (Ministério da Educação e Cultura), as well as the work in Rougé (2004) and Fontes (2007). Santome has been occasionally used as a written language since the second half of the 19th century, but there are only a few publications in this language.

4. Phonology ⇫ ¶

Santome exhibits seven oral and five nasal vowels (see Table 1). Mid-vowel stem harmony is a pervasive feature of this creole (Hagemeijer 2009). Ferraz (1979) argues that Santome is a stress language, but this claim has been rejected by Maurer, who argues that Santome, as well as Principense, and Angolar, are tone languages (Maurer 1995, 2008, 2009). All lexical items in Santome end in an oral or a nasal vowel. A highly common type of sandhi rule consists of eliding the first vowel in a sequence of two vowels across word boundaries (mat’e ‘kill him/her/it’ < mata ê).

Santome has a phonemic inventory of 28 consonants and two glides. In general, the palatals [ʧ, ʤ, ʃ, ʒ] occur before close front vowels and are in complementary distribution with [t, d, s, z], which occur in all other environments. There is free variation between [ʤ] and [ʒ]. Note further that items exhibiting a prenasalized consonant can often occur without prenasalisation (e.g. ^ŋgandu ~ gandu ‘shark’; ⁿzali ~ zali ‘worm’). In addition to the consonants in Table 2, the labiovelar [g͡b] exists in a small number of exceptional items not known to most speakers, such as [g͡beg͡be] ‘snail species’, and a nasal approximant can be found in the ideophone [w̃a] (betu w̃a ‘wide open’) and in [nw̃a] ‘moon’. The trill [r] is not historically part of Santome but can be systematically heard in loan words, such as karu ‘car’ or ora ‘hour’ (clock time). Some speakers also produce the trill in other environments, such as consonant clusters (e.g. ladron ‘thief’, setembru ‘September’, Kristu ‘Christ’). The number of items with nasal and lateral palatals /ɲ/ (e.g. panha ‘to catch’) and /ʎ/ (e.g. alha ‘sand’) is limited.

The typical syllable structure is of the CV type. Words with one or two syllables are the most common type, but words with three or four syllables are still fairly common. Some lexical items are commonly truncated, such as toma ~ ton ‘to take’, sêbê ~ sê ‘to know’, anji ~ an ‘where’, tembeten ~ ten ‘also, as well’. Onsets exhibit up to three consonants, as in /ʃtlenu/ ‘night dew’ or /ʃkleve/ ‘to write’. Verbs in Santome begin strictly with a consonant.

5. Noun phrase ⇫ ¶

Gender is usually not morphologically encoded. Nouns referring to humans exhibit fully contrasting pairs (pe ‘father’ vs. men ‘mother’), but there are cases where the morphological contrast found in Portuguese has become lexicalized (manu ‘brother’ vs. mana ‘sister’). Animate, non-human nouns can generally form compounds with ome ‘man, male’ and mwala ‘woman, female’ (bwê ome ‘bull’ vs. bwê mwala ‘cow’).

Number is either expressed by contextually interpreted bare nouns (n kopla floli ‘I bought flowers’; ome sa bwa ‘the man is good’) or by the plural/definite marker inen (inen mosu ‘the boys’), which only attaches to inanimate nouns in the presence of the postverbal demonstrative-like marker se (*inen fya vs. inen fya se ‘the flowers in question’) (Alexandre & Hagemeijer 2007). The indefinite article and numeral ũa ‘a(n), one’ also precedes the noun. Bare nouns further occur in generic sentences.

Possessives, adjectives, and relative clauses follow the head noun. In their unmarked position, numerals and quantifiers precede it. This yields the following basic word order of the NP, exemplified in (1)

         quant  –  {pl.def, sg.indef} – num – N – dem – poss – adj - rel

(1)    tudu    inen           xinku  mina    se         bô        glavi          ku        sa     ke

         all        PL.DEF    five      child    DEM   POSS  beautiful   REL    be     house

         ‘all these five beautiful children of yours that are at home’

Distance contrasts are often expressed periphrastically since deictic se by itself lacks distance information.

(2)    ke           se      ku        sa        {ai/ala}

         house     dem  rel      be        here/there

         ‘this/that house’

Shorter forms ke sa ai ‘this house’ and ke sa ala ‘that house’ are also used. In addition, postnominal xi is used for entities that are out of sight and its use as a modifier of the head noun of relative clauses is particularly common.

(3)    kume   xi     ku     ê          kume

         food    dem  rel   3sg      eat

         ‘the food s/he eats’

The pronominal demonstratives are ise ‘this, these’, ixi ‘that, those’ (out of sight), isaki ‘this, these’, and isala ‘that, those’.

Table 3 lists dependent, independent, and possessive pronouns.

The table shows that subject and object pronouns only exhibit distinct forms in the first person singular. The contrast between dependent and independent pronouns is restricted to singular pronouns. Fine-grained distinctions between the pronouns are mostly related to phonological reduction and cliticization (2SG dependent, 1SG independent, 3PL), vowel harmony (3SG object), or free variation (2PL) (Hagemeijer 2007). The indefinite subject pronoun a (e.g. a fla ‘it is said’) can also anaphorically refer to a 3PL referent and may occur in plural imperatives (e.g. a kume! ‘you eat!’ (plural)).

The paradigm of adnominal possessives is slightly different because they are underlying genitive forms (dê = ‘his/her, its’, is derived from the obligatory contraction of *di ê ‘of him’). This is only visible with vowel-initial pronouns (ê, inansê, inen). In the case of consonant-initial possessives, the genitive marker di is absent (Ferraz 1979: 69–70). Predicative possessives, however, use the obligatory genitive marker dji ~ ji:

(4)    Ke        sa     ji     mu.

         house  be     of      me

         ‘The house is mine.’

Genitive ji also selects the underlying genitive forms dê, dinansê, and dinen, resulting in a double genitive construction (e.g. ji dinen ‘of them’).

6. Verb phrase ⇫ ¶

Mood, tense, and aspect in Santome are expressed by means of preverbal elements, which occur in this order and can be combined. The core of the system consists of the following items: ka is typically used for habitual or future reference; sa ka ~ ska is a progressive marker; tava ~ taa expresses past; ká is a high-tone-bearing mood marker. In addition to these markers, the absence of marking yields perfective readings with dynamic verbs and present readings with statives. Syntactically stative verbs are those verbs that receive a zero marker for simple present and a past marker tava for simple past. This small group of verbs includes: mêsê ‘to want, to love’, sêbê ‘to know’, tê ‘to have’, kônsê ‘to know’, fata ‘to lack’, sen ‘to exist’, tê ‘to have’, sa ‘to be’. There is also a small group of verbs that are stative according to lexical aspect but whose syntactic behaviour is similar to dynamic verbs (Hagemeijer 2007, Maurer 1995, 2009). This group includes: kunda ‘to think’, ngosta ~ gosta ‘to like’, gôgô ‘to enjoy, to love, to like’, kontle ‘to hate’. These verbs take ka for present reference. Note further that some verbs of both stative classes may occur with the progressive marker ska, for instance fata and mêsê.

In Table 4, sa and tava (in the tava ka construction) can be treated as auxiliaries because, unlike ka, ká, and ska, they exhibit a number of verbal properties (Hagemeijer 2007). The combinations ka ska ~ ka saka, ka ka, sa ska, and ka sa ska are particularly common in temporal clauses.

(5)    Ola      non  ka   sa      ska     linga    kaleta [...]

         when   1pl   fut   AUX   prog   hoist    poor.guy,  […]

         ‘When we will be hoisting the poor guy […]’

In the case of ngosta ~ gosta, the difference between a habitual stative and an individual-level stative plays a role in TAM-marking, as shown in the following two pairs.

(7)    Mina   se         gosta  d’      ami          muntu. 

         girl      dem     like      of      1sg          much

         ‘The girl in question likes me a lot.’ (Hagemeijer 2007: 123)

Table 5 lists the relevant modal verbs in Santome according to subclasses.

The items in Table 5 precede the matrix verb, except for sela (pa) and milhon (pa), which do not exhibit verbal behaviour and occur in sentence-initial position.

(8)    (deontic necessity)

       Sela    non  fla        Santome    ben      fladu. 

         must   1pl   speak  Santome   well     spoken

         ‘We must speak good Santome.’ (Hagemeijer 2007: 166)

When pô is preceded by the aspect marker ka, it generally expresses epistemic possibility. Contexts without ka trigger a deontic interpretation.

(10)  (epistemic possibility)

         [...] punda          non  ka      pô        kloga.   

                 because      1pl   ipfv     may slip

         ‘[...] because we may slip.’

(11)  (deontic permission)

         Sun  pô       be.  

         you   may     go

         ‘You (formal) may go.’

Serial verb constructions form a core feature of Santome’s grammar (Hagemeijer 2000, 2001, Hagemeijer & Ogie 2011), as illustrated in the following examples.

(12)  (‘give’-serial)

         Ba    sama  dôtôlô     da       mu. 

         go     call      doctor    give     me

         ‘Go call a doctor for me.’

(14)  (directional)

         A         ka     subli  ba    Txindaji    ô.  

         indf     ipfv  go.up  go     Trindade  pcl

         ‘They go up to Trindade.’

(15)  (resultative serial)  

         Budu   da   kopu    kebla.  

         stone   hit    glass    break

         ‘The stone broke the glass.’

(16)  (comitative)

         Bamu  zunta kopla minjan.  

         let’s     join     buy     remedy

         ‘Let’s buy the remedy together.’     

(17)  (surpass)  

         Punda    sôtxi       Dêsu   ka     lêdê   pasa      xikotxi.   

         because  beating  God     ipfv  burn   surpass  whip

         ‘Because God’s beating burns more than the whip.’

(18)  (completive)

         Ami  ten       na        sêbê        kont’    e        kaba     fa.    

         1sg   also     neg      know     tell          3sg      finish    neg

         ‘I don’t know how to tell it (a story) all the way either.’

(19)  (‘take’-serial)

         Ê         ka        toma   labu        bana       moxka.  

         3SG     IPFV      take     tail          shake     fly

         ‘He (the cow) shakes off the flies with his tail.’

Note that several of these items, namely da, pasa, and kaba, do not exhibit any verbal properties (Hagemeijer 2000, 2001). Because of the widespread serialization strategy, the number of prepositions proper is small (di ‘of’, ni ‘in, at, from, on’, antê ‘until’, djina ‘since’, sê ‘without’, ku ‘with’, pla ‘for’, plô ‘for’). There are also a small number of nominal prepositions (wê ‘(in) front (of)’, tlaxi ‘behind’, ômê ‘(in the) middle (of)’, bodo ‘next to’, glêntu ‘inside’, basu ‘underneath, beneath’, liba ‘on top of’) (Hagemeijer 2005). There are a few items that derive historically from serializing constructions, such as fada ‘to tell’ (< fa ‘say’ + da ‘give’) and tanda ‘hand over’ (< tan ‘to take’ + da ‘give’).

Sentence negation in Santome is expressed by a default discontinuous negation pattern with na…fa (Hagemeijer 2007): na occurs in preverbal position; fa (or its emphatic variant fô) occurs in clause or sentence final position.

(20)  Ê     na    fada  mana   dê     kwa     ku        kod’           e       fa.   

         3sg   neg   tell    sister   poss thing   rel      wake         3sg  neg

         ‘He didn’t tell his sister about what woke him up.’ (Hagemeijer 2007: 175)

The placement of fa shows sensitivity to clause types. Complement clauses and non-peripheral adjunct clauses occur to the left of fa, whereas peripheral adjunct clauses occur to its right.

(21)  Ome se         na    fla     kuma ê       sa     kunhadu            bô        fa.   

         man dem     neg   say   that     3sg   be     brother-in-law  poss    neg

         ‘That man didn’t say he’s your brother-in-law.’ (Hagemeijer 2007: 178)

(22)  Ê      na    ka     nda   sê        pa ê       da     topi      fa.

         3sg   neg   ipfv  walk without  for 3sg   give  trip      neg

         ‘He doesn’t walk without tripping.’ (Hagemeijer 2007: 180)

(23)  Xi  ê       na    bê  faka     fa,    ê       na       bêbê     vin    fa.

         if    3sg   neg   see knife   neg   3sg   neg      drink  wine neg

         ‘If he doesn’t find the knife, he won’t drink wine.’ (Hagemeijer 2007: 184)

Santome further exhibits two complex preverbal negation markers that can occur in the place of na, namely naxi ‘not yet’ and nanta ~ nantan ‘no longer, not anymore, never (again)’.

There are a number of contexts that lack the final marker fa. These constructions typically have in common a lack of commitment to the truth condition of the negation.

For constituent negation, fa is used (e.g. bô fa! ‘not you!). Santome is a strict negative concord language, as illustrated in the following sentences with negative quantifiers.

(27)  Nê   ũa   ngê        na    glita        fô!

         not   one   person   neg   scream   neg.pcl

         ‘Nobody screamed!’

(28)  Ami  na    tê         nadaxi  di      da        nansê  fa.

         1sg   neg   have    nothing  to      give     2pl      neg

         ‘I don’t have anything I can give you.’    

7. Simple sentences ⇫ ¶

Santome is a rather strict SVO language. With very few exceptions, referential and expletive subjects are always overtly realized. In double object constructions, the indirect object always precedes the direct object. Adverbial material occurs typically in sentence-initial or sentence-final position. This yields the following typical linear order for clauses:

(29)   adv – subj – neg₁ - mood – tns – asp – V – obj – obj - adv – neg₂

Only a restricted number of focalizing adverbs (ten ‘also’, tan ‘only’, etc.), including the focus marker so ~ soku, follow the focalized constituent (ten ‘also’, tan ‘only’, etc.).

(30)  Ami  tan  so     fi­ka.

         1sg   only  foc   remain

         ‘It is only I who remained.’

Santome lacks a passive voice. There are several strategies to express reflexive voice, namely valency reduction, body-part reflexives, and pseudo-reflexives:

(31)  N      ga     ba     kenta      Ø.

         1sg   asp   go     warm

         ‘I am going to warm myself.’ (Ferraz 1979:72)

(33)  N      be     mu          fela. 

         1sg   go     refl        market

         ‘I went away to the market.’

Reciprocal voice is expressed by ũa…ôtlô.

(34)  Ũa   ska      mata    ôtlô.

         one   prog   kill       other

         ‘They are killing each other.’

The copula verb sa is overtly realized in both equative and locative constructions. 

Santome exhibits several highly productive particles that modify clauses or constituents. The syntax, semantic, and pragmatics of these particles has not been studied in detail (but see Ferraz 1979: 113; 116–8).

The following sentences illustrate the use of the particles in Table 6.

The presentational marker is ya or yale, which is arguably derived from Portuguese olha ‘look’.

(38)  Ya       ngê         ku        txila     non     en. 

         pres    person   rel      take     1pl      pcl

         ‘There is the person who took us out.’

Interrogative phrases are typically sentence-initial and usually trigger the presence of the  complementizer ku.

In focus constructions, the focused constituent occurs to the left of the focus marker so ~ soku.

(40)  Ise    maxi    glavi    ku     sa     ala       so           n          mêsê.

         dem  more   pretty  rel   be     there   foc         1sg      want

         ‘It is the prettier one over there that I want.’

In relative and interrogative constructions, prepositions are normally stranded with an invariable spelled-out trace (or resumptive element) corresponding to 3SG.

(41)  inen         kwa se     ku     a       ka     da           ngê         sôtxi    ku     {ê/*inen}

         pl     thing   dem  rel   indf  ipfv  give  people    beating  with    {3sg/3pl}

         ‘those things they beat people with’

Topic interpretations are obtained by fronting and a pause.

(42)  Tudu inen            bisu,            ê             ka    limpa     lolo.

         all        pl     animal   3sg   fut      clean      completely

         ‘All these animals, he will clean completely.’

8. Complex sentences ⇫ ¶

Santome has the following coordination conjunctions: i ‘and’, a zero conjunction, maji ‘but’, ô ‘or’, and polar nê ‘neither, or’.

Complement clauses are headed by the following complementizers: kuma (declarative, epistemic, and perception verbs), which can be ku or a zero marker in certain cases, pa (volitional verbs), and xi ‘if, whether’ (indirect interrogatives). Adverbial clauses are headed by, for instance, temporal ola (ku) ‘when’, conditional xi ‘if’, causal punda and da ‘because (of)’, mo ‘like, as’, circumstantial negative sê (pa) ‘without’, temporal final zo (pa) ‘(and) then’, comparative dôkê ‘than’, conformative mo ‘like’, temporal-spatial antê (ku) ‘until’ and djina ~ jina ‘since’, and purposive pa. Relative clauses are headed by ku. There are also cases in which clause-linking is performed without an overt conjunction, as in the case of concessive clauses.

9. Morphology ⇫ ¶

Santome lacks inflectional morphology, but exhibits two productive derivational suffixes and extensive reduplication. The derivational suffixes are the past participle -du (tasondu ‘seated’ < tason ‘to sit’, mundjadu ‘stopped, upright’ < mundja ‘to stop’) and the agentive -dô (sublidô pema ‘palm tree climber’ < subli ‘to climb, to go up’, dadô soya ‘storyteller’ < da ‘to give, to tell, to hit’). There are several other suffixes that are not productive and are therefore arguably directly borrowed from Portuguese, such as -mentu (suflimentu ‘suffering’, kazamentu ‘marriage’) and -in (flaskin ‘small recipient’, maxibin ‘young man’, pombin ‘dove’) which are respectively related to Portuguese noun forming -mento and the diminutive -inho. Compounding is another productive strategy, for example in kota-bega ‘last-born’ (lit. ‘cut-belly’) and vwa-sata ‘shortcut’ (lit. ‘fly-jump’).

Reduplication applies to most categories and expresses intensification and distribution. A few examples are:

(46)  (intensification) 

         N      ga        bi         myole-myole    me.   

         1sg   ipfv     come   now-now     right

         ‘I’m coming right now.’

Santome further exhibits a large number of ideophones (more than a hundred), which typically modify nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but sometimes stand on their own. Ideophones are mostly reduplicated items on the surface but lack a non-reduplicated counterpart. Each ideophone occurs with one lexical item or a restricted set of semantically related lexical items. Some examples are txibitxibi ‘so so’ (answer to ‘how do you do?’), kebla nwininwini ‘scatter’ (break+ideophone), sola potopoto ‘cry intensely’, monhadu potopoto ‘extremely wet’, betu blalala ‘wide open (open+ideophone)’, fyô kôkôkô ‘very cold’.

10. Address forms ⇫ ¶

The address forms in Santome have not yet been carefully studied and are quite intricate. In a nutshell, Santome distinguishes between informal (bô ‘you’) and formal address forms. The latter have a feminine and a masculine form, san ‘you, she’ and sun ‘you, he’, respectively, which are used as pronouns.

San can also be used with the meaning ‘lady’ or ‘Mrs.’ (san Zwana ‘Mrs. Joana’) and sun as ‘Sir, Mr.’ (sun Me Kolema ‘Mr. Manuel Quaresma’). The long formal forms sangê ‘lady’ (derived from san+ngê ‘lady+person’) and sungê ‘Mr., Sir’ are generally less intimate and, unlike san and sun, are also used as vocative forms (sungê, bi ô ‘You/Mr., please come’) and do not precede proper names (*sangê Zwana). The plural of these forms is inen san and inen sun ‘you, they’, but pronouns inansê ‘you (pl.)’ and inen ‘they’ are also used. Instead of san/sangê and sun/sungê, the forms sumu and samu are sometimes used (plural inen sumu, inen samu); these also enter the complex forms samungê ‘lady’ and sumungê ‘sir’. Important personalities can also be addressed with sumu sun (masc.) and samu san (fem.), as in sumu sun alê ‘his majesty the king’. Finally, proper names can be used as a polite way to address people.

(48)  Sela     pa     Sabinu da     non  mina    soya     pa     non  têndê.

         must   for    Sabinu   give  1PL  small   story   for    1PL  listen

         ‘You must tell us a little story to listen to.’