Datapoint Cape Verdean Creole of Santiago/Size of speaker community

In 1980, the country had some 300,000 inhabitants, half of them living on Santiago Island. Today, the country's population is estimated at some 500,000 inhabitants, and Santiago's population must be somewhere in between 200,000 and 300,000. However, more than half of the Capverdians live abroad, especially in the USA (on the New England Coast, from Providence, Rhode Island to New Bedford to Massachusetts; in total another 500,000 people). More or less half of the emigrants may be descendants of people who left Santiago. There are other Capverdian diaspora communities on São Tomé and Príncipe, in Portugal (80,000), Angola (45,000), Senegal (25,000), the Netherlands (20,000) and Italy (10,000) (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabo_Verde, 12 October 2013).Many of the emigrants, though, are no longer fluent creole speakers.

Values

Less than 1,000,000 speakers

Confidence:
Uncertain