Figure - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Content may be subject to copyright.
Languages spoken in STP (1981-2012). Data from the national censuses of 1981 and 2012; adapted from INE (2016).
Source publication
This paper describes how the Portuguese language came to be widely spoken in the Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe and demonstrates how the spread of Portuguese language can be associated with the endangerment of other languages in the archipelago. A country that has been multilingual since its formation has moved towards monolingualism, marginaliz...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... this paper, we address how Portuguese came to be the major language in STP (see Table 1). In addition, we investigate which, if any, language policies in the archipelago promote or were put in place to promote the Portuguese language to the point of it being the main spoken language, as well as a threat to all other languages spoken in STP. ...Similar publications
How bilingual brains accomplish the processing of more than one language has been widely investigated by neuroimaging studies. The assimilation-accommodation hypothesis holds that both the same brain neural networks supporting the native language and additional new neural networks are utilized to implement second language processing. However, wheth...
![Figure 5. Languages used on the web [18]](profile/Syed-Andrabi-14/publication/357746885/figure/fig3/AS:1111061474353157@1641909106961/Languages-used-on-the-web-18_Q320.jpg)
Machine translation is an application of natural language processing. Humans use native languages to communicate with one another, whereas programming languages communicate between humans and computers. NLP is the field that involves a broad set of techniques for analysis, manipulation and automatic generation of human languages or natural language...
One of the fundamental questions about human language is whether all languages are equally complex. Here, we approach this question from an information-theoretic perspective. We present a large scale quantitative cross-linguistic analysis of written language by training a language model on more than 6500 different documents as represented in 41 mul...
Multilingualism is an ever-present feature in political contexts around the world, including multilingual states and international organizations. Increasingly, consequential political decisions are negotiated between politicians who do not share a common native language. Nils Ringe uses the European Union to investigate how politicians’ reliance on...
Introduction. In recent years, the Task-Based Teaching Method (TBTM) has gained recognition as an effective approach to teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in higher education system in Uzbekistan. This method emphasizes learning through tasks that are meaningful and relevant to students, allowing them to develop language skills in real-wo...
Citations
... It is possible to identify not only a situation of frequent linguistic contact but also issues related to linguistic standardization interfering with language usage. In general, Portuguese is considered the country's most prestigious language (Araujo 2020b). ...
... Apart from Portuguese, ST was the major minority language and the main urban language on São Tomé Island during the twentieth century. However, until 1990, Portuguese was not widely acquired through transmission between native speakers or through formal learning of the prestige variety; Portuguese thus represents the symbolic power of the former colonizing metropolis (Araujo 2020b, Bouchard 2017. ...
... Centrándonos más en el forro, que es la lengua escogida para esta investigación por ser el criollo más extendido (Araujo, 2020;Bouchard, 2022, p. 167), cabe decir que cuenta con cierta tradición escrita conformada por adivinanzas, proverbios, poemas, canciones, historias cortas o textos ligados a alguna manifestación cultural del país (Cardoso et al., 2015). Bouchard (2017 y 2020) señala que muchas personas han aprendido forro estando en el extranjero y lo utilizan como marca de identidad, pues lo consideran una herramienta de unión de santotomenses en la diáspora que les distingue de otros hablantes de portugués. ...
Sao Tome and Principe (STP) is a developing country where several languages coexist, although only one of them, Portuguese, serves as the official language. The rest of the languages are limited to private use and many of them are at risk of disappearing. As a pilot experiment to find formulas for the preservation of these languages, this work takes Forro Creole as a reference. Forro is no longer transmitted from parents to children, nor is it studied in schools, and it is mainly the elderly who maintain it. At the same time, elders form a social group that suffers abandonment and discrimination from their community. In this context, we wondered whether subtitling would be useful to preserve and promote Forro Creole and to contribute to the integration of the elderly into society; what the linguistic perceptions of Forro-speaking elderly and non-elderly Santomeans are; and, finally, what experts in International Cooperation (IC), Audiovisual Translation (TAV) and Linguistic Cooperation (LC) think of the possibilities of subtitling in this area. The results show the participants’ perception of Forro, the situation of elders and subtitling, and lead to a final proposal: the recording of videos in Forro, subtitled in Portuguese and aimed at children whose protagonists would be elders who would encourage Forro learning and the ancestral culture through stories or songs that could be screened in schools or in the communities as a mobile cinema.
... At the academic level, linguists have described the languages through grammars (Maurer (1995) for Angolar; Maurer (2009) for Lung'Ie), a Forro-Portuguese dictionary (Araujo & Hagemeijer 2013), and a pedagogical method of Lung'Ie (Agostinho 2015). The three native creoles of São Tomé and Príncipe are at different stages on the ethnolinguistic vitality scale: Forro is shifting (Bouchard 2019a), Lung'Ie is nearly extinct (Agostinho 2015;Maurer 2013), and the status of Angolar varies from shifting (Hagemeijer 2018) to vigorous (Araujo 2020;Eberhard, Simons & Fennig 2020), depending on the source, and where and how the data were collected. ...
This article examines Santomeans’ attitudes toward Angolares, a minority creole-speaking community descendant of maroons on São Tomé Island, and their language. The status of Angolar varies from vigorous to shifting, depending on the source, and according to Maurer (2013) , it is unclear whether Angolar is being passed on to new generations. In this article, it is argued that Angolares are shifting toward Portuguese, a process that has already commenced among Santomeans living in the capital. Since prevailing attitudes regarding a language are important for its use and maintenance, this study investigates the transmission of attitudes, beliefs and stereotypes as a possible explanation for the actual shift toward Portuguese in the country. Based on ethnography, analysis of interview excerpts, and questionnaires, an account of the attitudes held by Santomeans is provided, showing how different attitudes toward Angolares are intertwined and point toward rural, creole-speaking Angolares as being the lowest on the social scale of the island. This article demonstrates how attitudes held by Forros, the dominant ethnolinguistic group on São Tomé Island, as well as by Angolares themselves, may negatively impact the maintenance of Angolar Creole.
... However, the highest concentration of Portuguese etyma toponyms is in the Caué district (83.9%), in the countryside, where Creole languages are more frequently used than in urban areas (83.9%), in the countryside, where Creole languages are more frequently used than in the more urbanized districts (Bouchard, 2017). This dominance reinforces the presence of Portuguese in different parts of STP, not just in the capital or in urban areas, and shows its nationwide spread (Araujo, 2020b). ...
gabrielaraujo@um.edu.mo
ABSTRACT. This study describes the toponymic profile of the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe (STP), a former Portuguese colony. Here, we consider (i) its linguistic contact situation, reflected in the toponyms of non-Portuguese etyma (mainly from national languages), and (ii) the structure of the toponymic syntagma in Portuguese. Toponyms are created according to a place's geographic, social, historical, and linguistic reality. Therefore, STP's toponyms are the locus of the Santomean linguistic ecology and memory. Due to its linguistic diversity, the study of Santomean toponymy is transdisciplinary. It contributes to understanding different languages that share São Tomé and Príncipe's ethnicity and linguistic heritage, including multilingual synchronic and/or diachronic conjunctures and the political importance of Portuguese. STP's toponymy expresses a multilingual conjuncture common to the country since the arrival of the Portuguese and (mainly) enslaved Africans from different regions of Africa. Although the Portuguese language and culture have influenced most local toponymy, the Santomean toponymic profile contains endemic linguistic and cultural specificities. Thus, natural phenomena, along with political and historical events, among others, play a role in forming toponyms and characterizing the local toponymy as unique.
This paper addresses the first stage of a three-year project developed in the community of Santo Amaro — Sao Tome and Principe — where many older people are living in circumstances of exclusion or risk of exclusion. Based on an understanding of language as an essential element of culture, dubbing is presented as a playful and attractive initiative for all generations, allowing them to socialise with one another and contribute to the transmission of Forro Creole, and also serving to integrate the older people into the wider community. We started by designing a series of questionnaires to measure participants’ attitudes towards the language and its speakers. Secondly, groups of children and older people were organised to dub cartoons into Forro. Finally, the groups of children were surveyed again to learn about how they experienced these activities in terms of language and intergenerational interaction. We found that dubbing enhances socialisation between the participating older people and children, introduces Forro Creole to the youngest generation, and facilitates a change in the perception of Creoles and their speakers — mainly older people. It is also a useful tool for enhancing the well-being and integration of older people within coordinated projects for sustainable development cooperation in the community
Neste estudo, de caráter descritivo preliminar, focaliza-se a lateral em coda silábica interna e externa no Português de São Tomé e no Português de Moçambique, segundo os princípios da Teoria da Variação e Mudança (WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 1968), buscando-se determinar os fatores que condicionam a vocalização desse segmento. Para fins de comparação, faz-se uma síntese sobre o comportamento de /l/ no Português do Brasil e no Português Europeu. As análises variacionistas demonstram que, nas duas variedades africanas, a regra é ainda pouco produtiva (predominam as variantes velarizada e alveolar) e que variáveis tanto sociais quanto estruturais se mostram salientes para a implementação de [w] a depender da posição da sílaba.
In this work, we discuss how Araujo & Hagemeijer’s Santome/Portuguese bilingual dictionary defines and describes ideophones and realia lemmata. We show that ideophones were listed individually along with their expression counterparts. Realia lemmata (words and expressions for culture-specific items) or specialized lexical units were presented in their Santomean forms, followed by a description of their endemic specificities. Many realia items from Santome can also be found in Portuguese. We conclude that the authors contribute to the lexicographic record of ideophones, lexical items that did not exist in Portuguese, but relevant to the language and culture of Santome. On the other hand, with the documentation of realia entries, they collaborate for the validation of lexical units (originating in Santome) in the local vernacular variety of São Tomé and Príncipe’s Portuguese, a common historical practice in Portuguese lexicography.
