Title: The Influence Of African Languages On Brazilian Portuguese Portuguese, like many other languages whose speakers are

separated by geography, varies from country to country. Through this geographical difference and the inevitable linguistic changes that happen with time, the Brazilian variation of the language displays a marked difference from that of Portugal. Brazilian Portuguese has been influenced by many other languages, with which the Portuguese of Portugal did not come into contact. The contribution of Africa to the population and development of the language of Brazil has been remarkable and inescapable. A significant source of these differences in Brazil has been the African languages which were brought over to the New orld by the enslaved Africans during the period of slavery. The first batch of African !laves was brought to the north eastern coast of Brazil in the year "#$%. &ver the course of the slave trade, appro'imately $.# million Africans were transported to Brazil. Although the slave trade was abolished in "%#(, the illegal trade of enslaved Africans continued well into the "%%(s. )uring the period of slavery, Portuguese was considered to be the lingua franca when it came to the fields of !cience and maritime affairs. *n the early days, the Portuguese e'plorers would use Arabs as translators when they would go to Africa to source slaves. +ommunication became increasingly more difficult and as such ,enry the Navigator ordered that some of the Africans who were captured should be given lessons in Portuguese language so that they could, in the future, be used as translators. This, in addition to the months of travel across the Atlantic on slave ships, resulted in some of the enslaved Africans being able to speak and communicate in pidginized versions of Portuguese. There is evidence of influence from these pidgins in literature from as early as the "-th century. .rom the "/th century onwards the number of Brazilians of direct African ancestry and Brazilians of mi'ed African ancestry has always outnumbered all other ethnicities present in the country. This, together with the reasons stated above has greatly contributed to the linguistic comple'ities of Brazilian Portuguese. 0'perts estimate that there are close to four thousand words of African origin used in Brazilian Portuguese. These words are most likely to have entered the vernacular due to the code switching of African born speakers of the various African languages from their mother tongues to Portuguese. Their code switching would have undoubtedly influenced the speech of those slaves who were born in Brazil and this Africanising of Portuguese would be their native language. The Africans who arrived in Brazil came from five main linguistic groups1 2ande, 3ru, 4ru, 3wa and Bantu. !peakers from the Bantu group contributed between $#5-#6 of African slaves to Brazil and therefore contributed the highest number of words to the Brazilian variety, mainly 3imbundu 7Angola8, 3ikongo 7Angola, the 9epublic of the +ongo and the )emocratic 9epublic of the +ongo, :oruba 7 Nigeria8, and ;e<e=0we 7Benin8. Presently, some varieties of these African languages have been maintained in Brazil, albeit not on a nationwide scale. This can be seen in the case of the Afro5Brazilian syncretic religion

+andombl>, cryptolects or ?secret languages@ such as +alunga and Aingua do Negro da +osta, The language used in candombl>, is an old form of :oruba. +alunga, is an Afro influenced variety of Brazilian Portuguese spoken mainly in and around the town of Patrocinio in 2inas 4erais. *n BahBa, the most striking African influences on the language come from the NagC and the 4egD. This can be seen in the names of several dishes like acara<> 7kidney bean paste fried in dendD palm oil8, aber>m 7cakes of maize or rice flour8 and 'in'im 7chicken, shrimp and garlic8. According to 9enato de 2endonEa", the main influences from the African languages which can be seen in the way many Brazilians speak areF the intelligibility of their speech and the way they have changed the manner in which some phonetic utterings are pronounced. .or instance, the final ?l@ or ?r@ in a word is more often than not, not pronounced as in the case of Brasil which becomes Brasi. 2orphological influences can be seen in the usage of plural articles with singular nouns to indicate the plural form of the verb as in os flor. !yntatically, features also that can also be attributed to the influence of the African languages include the infle'ibility of the pronoun le, whose plural can be formed by adding the definite article os, as in osle1 the use of various verbs of direct African origin throughout the country, as seen carimbar 7to stamp81 the dropping of d in the gerund and participle forms of the verb, in the Paulista dialect, where andano which becomes andando11 the use of ad<ectives which have been incorporated into the local dialects of Pernambuco and AlagGas, some of which have been accepted into nationwide use, like cafula 1 e'pressions used in folklore, like ;odio 2urundum1 common e'pressions, as dengue5dengue1 offshoots of African words, as ma'i'eiro, and Huitandeiro1 e'pressions used in familiar treatment, as ioioi and sinha1 and many terms used by children in their speech, such as nDnem, tIta, mimi, and dindinho. *n conclusion, it can be inferred that natural linguistic drift and the contribution of African, indigenous and other languages contributed to the development of Brazilian Portuguese as it is known today. .rom both the large number of persons of direct or mi'ed African ancestry present in Brazil today and the significant number of African derived words in the vernacular we can assume that African born or influenced speakers of Portuguese were able to make a noteworthy linguistic contribution to the language.

Works Cited
Byrd, S. (2012). Calunga and the Legacy of an African Language in Brazil. University of New Mexico Press.

Renato de Mendona,

!nf"#encia africana no Port#$#es do Brasi", 112%11&

'(ristie, '. (1&)*, +cto,er). frican !nf"#ence in t(e Bra-i"ian Port#$#ese .an$#a$e and .iterat#re. Hispania, 26(2), 2/&%200. 1erriera, 1. (2002, 2ece3,er). 4(e frican 'ontri,#tion to Bra-i"ian Port#$#ese54o w(at extent did t(e s6eec( of s"aves inf"#ence t(e 3ot(er ton$#e7 Bridgewater Review, 2 (2), 12% 1). Mendona, R. (2012). A !nflu"ncia Africana no #ortugu"s do Brasil. Brasi"ia5 1UN 8. Sc(neider, 9. 4. (1&&1). $ictionary of African Borrowings in Brazilian #ortuguese. :a3,#r$5 :e"3#t B#s;e <er"a$.