Language Contact in Cape Verdean Creole

Abstract

This chapter examines bidirectional influences in the speech of bilingual speakers of Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole in the Cape Verde islands, in two modalities (oral and written). All the data are drawn from two main sources: Costa (2013) that documents the influences of Portuguese onto Cape Verdean Creole and from Herbert Robalo (2013) from Cape Verdean Creole onto Portuguese. The observed contact effects include code-switching strategies and transfer in the domains of gender marking, number agreement, verb morphology, complementizers, and prepositions. One of the main findings is that although speakers practice insertional, alternational code-switching and congruent lexicalization, congruent lexicalization clearly emerges as the dominant pattern and the keystone behind speakers’ choices of code-switching sites in both the oral and written modes. Speakers preferentially switch on the sites that happen to be structurally isomorphic between Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese.