Even though we indicated that there are three dialectal areas (Central [Bissau and Bolama], North [Cacheu and São Domingos] and East [Geba and Bafatá]), ethnic variation is more important than geographic variation.
Ethnic varieties tend to incorporate lexical items from the relevant ethnic languages, e.g. the Kriol spoken by Balantas tends to have Balanta lexicon in certain semantic areas such as cooking, religion and in other distinct cultural spheres.