The Gulf of Guinea Proto-Creole and Its Daughter Languages: From Liquid Consonants to Complex Onsets and Vowel Lengthening

Abstract

Four Portuguese-based Creoles are spoken on the islands in the Gulf of Guinea: Santome, Angolar, Lung’Ie, and Fa d’Ambô. These languages are descendants of the Portuguese-based Gulf of Guinea Proto-Creole, which emerged at the beginning of the sixteenth century on São Tomé Island. Based on Bandeira (2017), we discuss the development of liquid consonants in Santome, Lung’Ie, Angolar and Fa d’Ambô using data from the reconstruction, and we examine the developments in the daughter-languages of the proto-phonemes *r and *l that led to the synchronic systems and the present configurations in the daughter languages, since the liquid consonants evolved differently from the proto-creole. We show that the relation between long vowels and liquid consonants, both in coda and in complex onsets, can be better understood if we consider the modern lexical items in these four languages as continuations of proto-forms, with characteristic modifications in each language governed by regular processes.