Cafundó language

Cafundó is the conventional name for a language spoken in the village of Cafundó, São Paulo (Brazil). The language is structurally similar to Portuguese, with a large number of Bantu words in its lexicon.

Speakers

The speaker community is very small (40 people in 1978). They live in a rural area, 150km from the city of São Paulo, and are mostly of African descent. They also speak Portuguese, and use Cafundó as a "secret language". A Cafundó speaker and an African-born Bantu (Angolan or Mozambican) speaking Portuguese and Bantu languages can understand each other, because Angolan and Mozambican dialects also added many Bantu words.

Cafundó was at first thought to be an African language, but a later study (1986) by Carlos Vogt and Peter Fry showed that its grammatical and morphological structure are those of Portuguese, specifically the Southeast countryside (Caipira) variety; whereas its lexicon is heavily drawn from some Bantu language.

References

• Peter Fry and Carlos Vogt (1996) Cafundó, a África no Brasil: Linguagem e Sociedade. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras. ISBN 85-71645-85-X.

• Sílvio Vieira de Andrade Filho (2000) Um Estudo Sociolingüístico das Comunidades Negras do Cafundó, do Antigo Caxambu e de seus Arredores. Secretaria da Educação e Cultura of Sorocaba. Also Ph.D. diss., University of São Paulo. ISBN 85-89017-01-X. Available on-line.

External links

• Web page on Cafundó (in Portuguese)
• Ethnologue listing: CCD