Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Introduction ⇫ ¶

Guinea-Bissau Kriyol is a variety of Afro-Portuguese spoken in the Republic of Guinea-Bissau and in Ziguinchor, in the south of the Republic of Senegal. Locally it is called Kriyol. It has about 600,000 speakers, and it is the native language of some 100,000 Guineans. It is a creole whose regional and ethnic varieties are recognized by linguists although they have not been sufficiently studied. There is a consensus that there are three main regional varieties: a Northern variety (in the towns of Cacheu and São Domingos [in Guinea Bissau] and Ziguinchor [in Senegal]), a Central variety in Bissau and Bolama, and an Eastern variety in Bafatá and Geba. Kriyol is the country’s most widely spoken language, especially as a lingua franca. The Casamance variety spoken around Ziguinchor in Senegal is treated separately by Biagui & Quint (2012, in this volume).

Map 1. Guinea-Bissau in West Africa

2. Sociohistorical background ⇫ ¶

Guinea-Bissau is a small country located on the West Coast of Africa and includes a number of islands (the Archipelago of Bijagós). It has an area of 36,125 km² and a population of some 1,700,000 inhabitants according to the preliminary results of the 2009 census.

For centuries the present territory of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau was a refuge for many ethnic groups driven out by the successive invasions and occupations of their homelands by more powerful African conquerors such as the Mali Empire under Sundiata Keita (13th century, Djau & Ambona n.d.: 11) and Samory Touré, or the Fula conqueror Koli Tenguela (18th century, Djau & Ambona n.d.: 13). The smaller empire of Gabú, located to the east of modern Guinea-Bissau, was unable to repel Fula attackers coming from the south and east from Futa Djalon, where they drove out the populations which had previously inhabited these regions, forcing them to move toward the coast (Handem 1986).

The internal migrations were also motivated by economic pressures related to agriculture, herding, fishing, and commerce, which disrupted the older order. The presence of the Portuguese explorers who arrived in 1446 did not significantly alter this scenario. It should be noted, moreover, that the Guinea of the 15th and 16th centuries was not limited to the territory of the modern Republic of Guinea-Bissau. Jacobs (2010) argues that proto-Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole emerged and was nativized in the late 15th to early 16th century on Santiago, one of the Cape Verde islands, from where it was taken to the African mainland by native Cape Verdeans who settled in and around Cacheu in what is today Guinea-Bissau in the late 16th century. On the other hand, Rougé (1984) suggested that it was possible that this Portuguese lingua franca emerged well before the exploration of the coasts of sub-Saharan Africa during commercial contact between the Portuguese and the Arabs. This persisted until 1883, which brought the artificial national boundaries that often divide peoples, cultures, and languages in most of Africa.

3. Sociolinguistic situation ⇫ ¶

Today Guinea-Bissau has some 22 languages, although it is not always clear if some of these are merely dialects of the same language (Grimes 1988: 240–241). Apart from this polemic, the literature distinguishes between two principal groups of indigenous languages: the Atlantic group and the Mande group, which both belong to the Niger-Congo family. To these languages are added Kriyol (with more than 100,000 native speakers) and Portuguese (for which there are no credible figures for the number of native speakers).

The sociolinguistic situation of Guinea-Bissau is very complex. Simões (1935) called what was then Portuguese Guinea a “Negro Babel”. Of the more than 20 languages and dialects referred to above, some are under a serious threat of extinction due to loss of speakers resulting from interethnic marriages, namely Sarakolé, Kassanga, Banhu, Kobiana, Djakanka and Tanda (see Intumbo 2008).

Portuguese colonization took place in a multiethnic and multilingual context that produced the Guinean creole, a hybrid with the characteristics of the languages in contact. The turmoil that this contact brought was such that neither Portuguese nor any of the local African languages could take its role as a true lingua franca, known and accepted by the majority of the population for use in daily transactions. Today Kriyol is incontestably the true lingua franca of the country, used in daily life, in commerce, in the public services, and recently in schools as part of an experiment in bilingual education (Intumbo 2008).

Despite Kriyol’s role as a lingua franca, Guinea-Bissau’s sociolinguistic situation has been described as diglossic/triglossic by Benson (Benson 1994: 4, 27): there is one diglossic relationship between local African languages and Kriyol since the former are used less formally and carry less prestige than Kriyol, and another diglossic relationship between Kriyol and Portuguese since the latter has more prestige and formality as the language of education, high culture, science, and international cooperation. However, there has been a growing tendency for teachers and students to communicate in Portuguese rather than Kriyol, even in informal circumstances outside the classroom. The propriety of this tendency has been a topic of debate at the Ministry of Education and other cultural institutions.

Kriyol is a language of some heterogeneity. The variety spoken by younger urban people tends to be more “progressive”, i.e. with more phonological and morphological interference from European Portuguese, including verbal inflections to mark tense and aspect. This kind of influence in one’s speech is associated with social prestige. However, this variety has also taken on the Angolan Portuguese youth slang popular in Lisbon and among younger Portuguese in general. A more basilectal variety of Kriyol is used by conservative speakers, particularly older rural Guineans; it is structurally closer to the local African languages in its morphosyntax, using only verbal markers rather than inflections to express tense and aspect.

There are other lectal differences that are regional or ethnic. No comprehensive studies of varieties influenced by their speakers’ ethnic language have yet been completed, let alone studies of the degree of this influence, which is stigmatized (but cf. Intumbo 2013+). However, there is general agreement regarding the existence of the three regional varieties discussed above, i.e. Northern, Eastern and Central.

In sum, Kriyol reflects continuing influence (particularly lexical, but also on other linguistic levels) not only from local languages, including Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau and French in Senegal, but also from those languages with which the Guinean diaspora is in contact, whether in Cape Verde, Portugal, France, Britain, Russia, Brazil, or the United States.

4. Phonology ⇫ ¶

The Guinea-Bissau Kriyol vowel system has three degrees of height and three degrees of fronting according to Mbodj (1979: 48) and Rougé (1984: 42) (see Table 1).

All of the oral vowels have corresponding nasal vowels, which occur word-initially or word-internally if this vowel is followed by a consonant or a sequence of consonants of which the first is nasal, e.g. [sãntʃu] ‘monkey’ (Mbodj 1979: 39). Nasal vowels occur at the absolute end of words but can also occur as oral vowels followed by a velar nasal, e.g. [irã] or [iraŋ] ‘divinity’.

The opposition of an oral or a nasal vowel is not distinctive in this position (Mbodj 1979: 39). Wilson (1962) and Scantamburlo (1999) maintain that mid vowels can be either tense or lax (e.g. /sera/ ‘wax’ vs. /sɛra/ ‘saw’, or /bota/ ‘throw away’ vs. /bɔta/ ‘boot’). Do Couto (1994: 74) adds that there are two semi-vowels, the glides /w/ and /j/. These occur after vowels and are written <u> and <i> respectively. Rougé (1984: 41) confirms the existence of these two semi-vowels in Kriyol “…where they are consonants, serving to re-establish the canonical syllabic pattern CVCV” [our translation].

Guinea-Bissau Kriyol has 24 consonants, although in some ethnic lects some of these are in free variation, such as the voiceless velar stop and its voiced counterpart in the Kriyol of Balanta speakers, or the voiceless bilabial stop and the voiceless labio-dental fricative in the Kriyol of Bijagó speakers. The voiced bilabial stop is often weakened to a fricative or even deleted in intervocalic positions, especially in the mesolect and acrolect. Similarly, modern Guinea-Bissau Kriyol has borrowed new words from Portuguese which brought with them some phonemes that are included in Table 2 but not in all proposed orthographies: the voiced alveolar fricative /z/ in zinku ‘zinc’, the voiceless post-alveolar fricative /ʃ/ in xá ‘tea’, and the voiced post-alveolar fricative /ʒ/ in beju ‘kiss’.

5. Noun phrase ⇫ ¶

The Kriyol noun phrase may consist of a bare noun or of a noun with its modifiers, which may agree with it in acrolectal varieties. As noted by Baptista et al. (2007), Kriyol nouns without modifiers can be interpreted as indefinite, as in example (1) below, or as generic.

(1)      N      kumpra       Ntoni           Ø            karu.

           1SG  buy             Anthony     Ø            car

           ‘I bought a car for Anthony.’

Nouns that are [+human] can take a plural marker -s (or -is after consonants) unless they are preceded by a quantifier. In the mesolect and acrolect, due to pressure from Portuguese, such plural marking can occur even after quantifiers, but modifiers are invariable for number and gender in the basilect, mesolect and sometimes the acrolect (2):

(2)      dus       mininu    (-s)       djiru            Ø

           two       boy          (PL)     intelligent   (PL)

           ‘two intelligent boys’

Kriyol does not use inflections to mark gender like Portuguese; instead a word is juxtaposed to indicate natural sex such as matcu ‘male’ or femia ‘female’ as in (3), parallel to substrate/adstrate languages like Balanta in (4):

(3)      Kriyol    ermon      matcu                   ermon        femia

(4)      Balanta bia-iada   lante                     bia-iada     nin

                          sibling     male                     sibling       female

                          ‘brother’                              ‘sister’

The use of a determiner is optional; when it is used, it occurs before the noun and is never marked for number. It can be a definite or indefinite article, a demonstrative, a possessive, an interrogative or a quantifier. The demonstrative e(s) ‘this, these’ and ki(l) ‘that, those’ can also be used as definite articles:

Note that definiteness is expressed in Guinea-Bissau Kriyol by using the demonstrative determiners e or ki or their allomorphs in the prenominal position; i.e. it is presumed that the noun thus modified is identifiable by both the speaker and the hearer.

(5)      e ~ es       omi

           ki ~ kil     omi

           DEF         man

           ‘the man’

The indefinite article is un, but utru (cf. Portuguese outro ‘other’) functions similarly and can also be used with a plural noun in the sense of ‘some’ (cf. 7).

(6)      un          omi            musulmanu

           INDF     man           Muslim

           ‘a Muslim man’ (Kihm 1994: 137)

(7)      utru           omi-s

           INDF        man-PL

           ‘some men’

6. Pronouns ⇫ ¶

Guinea-Bissau Kriyol divides personal pronouns into independent and dependent, and the latter into subjects versus objects. Guinea-Bissau Kriyol independent pronouns are never the argument of a predicate, whereas dependent subject pronouns must be the argument (Kihm 1994: 151). Dependent pronouns are marked for case depending on their grammatical function: nominative (subject), objective (direct and indirect object), and oblique (object of a preposition) (Kihm 1994: 151). Oblique pronouns are like the independent forms except they do not begin with a- in the first two persons (cf. Table 3).

*ŋ is a nasal taking the place of articulation of the following consonant; before vowels it is velar.

The reflexive pronoun is formed by joining the possessive determiner to the word meaning ‘head’, e.g. nha kabesa ‘myself’:

(8) I           mata       si               kabesa.

     3SG     kill          POSS        head

       ‘He killed himself.’

7. Verb phrase ⇫ ¶

7.1. Tense-aspect markers

The Guinea-Bissau Kriyol particles na, ta, and ba are markers placed before or after verbs to indicate tense, mood and aspect. The early work on these by Bocandé (1849) and de Barros (1897) was developed by Wilson (1962), Chataigner (1963), Scantamburlo (1981), Peck (1988), Kihm (1980, 1994), do Couto (1994) and others.

These verbal markers can be combined to signal a variety of tenses and aspects. The unmarked verb can be used alone; it usually indicates the present of stative verbs (9), the past of non-stative verbs (10), or the imperative mood (Peck 1988: 204).

(9)   N           tene          kaneta.

       1SG      have         pen

       ‘I have a pen.’

(10) N             kumpra     kaneta.

         1SG        buy            pen

         ‘I bought a pen.’

The preverbal marker na indicates progressive aspect or an imminent future. It is identical to the Guinea-Bissau Kriyol preposition na ‘in’, instantiating the universal semantic link between progressive aspect and location (Holm 2000: 180):

(11) N          na            tarbadja.

        1SG     PROG     work

        ‘I am working.’

The preverbal marker ta indicates habitual aspect or a less imminent future.

(12)   Manel        ta        tarbadja.

          Manuel     PROG   work

          ‘Manuel works.’

The postverbal marker ba indicates anterior tense, i.e. a time before that in focus. It shows that the action of the verb occurred before another action that was in the past when it follows a non-stative verb and is combined with dja.

(13)     I          ka          lembra            ke         ku       n          konta-l   ba      dja.

            3SG     NEG     remember      what    that     1SG     tell-3SG ANT   COMPL

            ‘He didn’t remember what I had told him.’

(14)   E       bai   ba       dja            kontra  no      tciga.

          3PL   go    ANT   COMPL   when    1PL   arrive

          ‘They had (already) left when we arrived’

The same combination of ta and ba can be interpreted as indicating an anterior habitual action:

(15)    Na      tempu      antigu    djinti-s              ta       bay     ba     sinema

           In       time         old         people-PL        HAB    go       ANT  movie

           ‘In the old days people used to go to the movies.’

The particle dja indicates that an action was completed. In (16) below, dja can occur in no other position:

(16)   N       kusnha dja         aonti         par       manha.

          1SG  cook     COMPL   yesterday PREP   morning

           ‘I cooked yesterday morning.’

It should be noted that both ba and dja can act as adverbs, occupying the syntactic position of adverbs, and that they can occur together postverbally to indicate the pluperfect, i.e. that one action took place before another action in the past (17):

Table 4 shows a summary of the verbal markers.

Adjectives in European languages often correspond to adjectival verbs in Guinea-Bissau Kriyol. These refer to basic qualities (e.g. ‘happy’, ‘red’) and are not preceded by a copula but rather take the verbal markers discussed above:

(18)           I             kumpridu ba.

                  3SG       tall               ANT

                  ‘He was tall.’

In Guinea-Bissau Kriyol transitive verbs can take a passive suffix -du from the Portuguese past participial inflection -do. It gives verbs a passive meaning so they can form passive constructions in the acrolectal variety:

(19)     Djintis   ta         papia   kriol     li.

            People   HAB   speak  Kriyol  here

            ‘People speak Kriyol here.’

(20)     Kriol     ta         papia-du         li.

            Kriyol   HAB   speak-PASS   here

            ‘Kriyol is spoken here.’

7.2 Irrealis mode

Guinea-Bissau Kriyol has no markers that indicate irrealis exclusively; irrealis mode is expressed through markers that also convey progressivity, habituality, or anteriority.

7.3 Future (= progressive marker)

In Guinea-Bissau Kriyol the future is usually expressed by ta, also the marker of habitual, and less often by the progressive marker na. Morais-Barbosa (1975: 139) claims that ta refers to a future less imminent than that expressed by na. Intumbo analyses na as indicating that a future event is only possible, while ta means that it must happen. Guinea-Bissau Kriyol na unambiguously refers to the future when optionally followed by bin ‘come’:

(21)    N          kuda   bu        na          (bin)      kontenti

           1SG     think  2SG     PROG   come      happy

           ‘I think you will be happy.’

7.4 Anterior plus irrealis (= conditional)

In Guinea-Bissau Kriyol either future marker (progressive na or habitual ta) can be used before a verb followed by the anterior marker ba to indicate the conditional (cf. 22).

         (Baptista et al. 2007: 60 citing Peck 1988: 326)

7.5 Anterior plus irrealis (= future in the past)

In Guinea-Bissau Kriyol, the constructions ta V ba or na V ba can convey future in the past; the anterior marker ba can be omitted when past meaning can be inferred from the context:

           (Baptista et al. 2007: 60 citing Kihm 1994: 191)

7.6 Other auxiliary-like elements

Baptista et al. (2007: 61) note that Kihm (1994: 109–110) identifies the idiomatic use of Guinea-Bissau Kriyol preverbal marker na with bin ‘come’ for “an event or state of affairs that is supposed to occur or obtain at some point in the future (not repeatedly over a future period of time)”

Baptista et al. (2007: 62) point out another combination of markers, Guinea-Bissau Kriyol na ba ta, which Kihm (1994: 113) analyses as prospective na plus a reduced form of the verb bai ‘to go’ and habitual ta, the combination referring to an event or state of affairs that will occur continuously or repeatedly within an extended future. Intumbo (2008) notes that the combination na ta can represent a reduction and loss of the auxiliary ba from na ba ta to na a ta to na ta (24) referring to a habitual future:

Baptista et al. (2007: 62) note, too, that in Guinea-Bissau Kriyol modals can be followed by the anterior marker ba (cf. 26).

(26)       N           pudi      ba           fasi           kila      /

             1SG       can         ANT       do             that      

             N           pudi      fasi       ba            kila       

             1SG       can         do           ANT        that      

           ‘I could do that.’ (Baptista et al. 2007: 62 citing Peck 1988: 248)

8. Complementizers ⇫ ¶

8.1 Zero infinitive marker

Guinea-Bissau Kriyol does not usually use a complementizer to mark bare verbs as infinitives (cf. 27). In Portuguese and other Romance languages this never occurs; instead, the verbal stem takes a final -r inflection.

(27)      N        medi     bai  kil     ladu.

             1SG    fear      go     that  side

           ‘I'm afraid to go that way.’ (Baptista et al. 2007: 62 citing Kihm 1994: 62)

8.2 Pa as infinitive marker

Guinea-Bissau Kriyol pa (cf. Portuguese para ‘for’) sometimes behaves like the English infinitive marker to (but unlike its Portuguese etymon) in that it can mark the nominal use of verbs (28). Kihm notes a similar construction in Manjaku with the class prefix pë-, e.g. pëlenp ‘(the fact of) working’ (Holm 1988: 170).

8.3 Pa as a (quasi-) modal

Baptista et al. (2007: 63) note that in Guinea-Bissau Kriyol pa can follow a copula to indicate weak obligation (cf. 29), but they do not consider this use to be that of a true modal.

8.4 Pa introducing tensed clauses

Baptista et al. (2007: 63) consider it “not clear whether pa-clauses are tensed clauses which lack overt finite inflections” although Holm (2000: 193) makes a case for accepting preverbal TMA markers as the equivalent of finite inflections. If one does, then (30) is an example of pa introducing a tensed clause because of the presence of the TMA marker ta:

8.5 Subordinator from Portuguese que

In sentence (31) the Guinea-Bissau Kriyol subordinator ki (also ku, ke, k) is clearly from Portuguese que ‘that’.

(31)     I          ku      kontentamentu garandi  ki          N          bin        li.

           COP   with   happiness         great      COMP     1SG     come    here

           ‘It is with great enthusiasm that I came here.’

8.6 Distinct subordinator after verb of speaking

As Baptista et al. (2007: 64) note, Guinea-Bissau Kriyol uses a distinct subordinator kuma after verbs of speaking and thinking, noting that it may have been influenced by both older Portuguese como ‘as, how’ and Mandinka kuma or kó, both ‘say’, with the latter used as a complementizer after verbs of saying and thinking. Kihm (1994: 192) notes the Guinea-Bissau Kriyol use of kuma as a full verb meaning ‘to say’ and Intumbo (2008) points out that in his variety of Kriyol the syntactic function of kuma can be ambiguous as a full verb or a complementizer:

In the above sentence the deletion of the third person plural pronoun e gives the verb a passive meaning. In fact the first kuma could be replaced by faladu as in (33) below, but as a verb kuma itself does not take the passivizing -du suffix. The second kuma is ambiguous in that it could be either a verb preceded by a deleted subject e and followed by a deleted complementizer as in sentence (32) above, or a simple complementizer as in sentence (33) below:

(33)    Fala-du             kuma    bu      bin      festa.

           say-PASS            COMP  2SG   come   party

           ‘People said you came to the party.’

8.7 Zero subordinator

Baptista et al. (2007: 64) note the observation of Kihm (1994: 193) that the Guinea-Bissau Kriyol subordinator kuma can be deleted when the clause it introduces is interpreted as a state of awareness (34).

(34)        Bu     ta        fala    -l       Ø            n          tisi        -l           si        baka. 

               2SG   HAB   tell     -3SG COMP   1SG     bring   -3SG    3SG   cow   

             ‘You'll tell him I brought him his cow.’ (Baptista et al. 2007: 64 citing Kihm 1994: 193)

9. Simple sentences ⇫ ¶

Guinea-Bissau Kriyol has SVO word order; in intransitive constructions the indirect object precedes the direct object. Guinea-Bissau Kriyol is not a pro-drop language so when the subject is a personal pronoun it must be expressed.

(35)    I              kumpra  Djon   karu.

           3SG        buy         John  car

           ‘He bought John a car.’

The causative construction is formed with the suffix -nti (cf. 36) and reciprocal voice is formed with n’utru ‘each other’ in the object position (cf. 37).

(36)            Ntoni              kuri-nti          karu.

                   Anthony        run-CAUS     car

                   ‘Anthony made the car run.’

(37)    Mario         ku     Djon   suta   n’      utru.

           Mario         and  John  beat   one   other

           ‘Mario and John beat each other.’

Guinea-Bissau Kriyol has a sentence-final particle o which can signal increased emotion or special relevance (Holm 2000):

(38)    Mario         ku     Djon   suta   un     utru    o.

           Mario         and  John  beat   one   other   interj

           ‘Mario and John beat each other.’

10. Interrogative and focus constructions ⇫ ¶

The interrogative phrase is fronted to the beginning of the sentence. Only a vocative can be placed to the left of the interrogative phrase.

(39)    (Mario)         kuma   ku       bu      sta?

           (Mario)         how     REL   2SG   be

           ‘Mario, how are you?’

In focus constructions the focused element is placed after the copula i and before the relative pronoun ku or its allomorph ki:

(40)    I              Mario  ku      studa  lison.

     COP        Mario  REL  study  lesson

     ‘It was Mario who studied the lesson.’