São Tomean Portuguese

São Tomean Portuguese
Português Santomense
Native speakers
 2,600 (1993)[1]
Used by many as L1 until their late 20s[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 –
Glottolog None
IETF pt-ST

São Tomean Portuguese (Portuguese: Português Santomense or Português de São Tomé) is a dialect of Portuguese spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe.

It contains many archaic features in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, similar to Brazilian Portuguese. It was once the dialect of the owners of the roças and the middle class, but now it is the dialect of the lower and middle classes, as the upper class often uses modern European Portuguese standard pronunciation, which is now also used by lower and middle classes.

São Tomé is the third country in order of percentage of Portuguese speakers (after Portugal and Brazil), with more than 95% of the population speaking Portuguese, and more than 50% using it as their first language. The rest of the population speak Portuguese creoles.

One of its main characteristics is rhotacism: the merger of [ʁ] and [ɾ] into [ʁ], pronounced usually very weakly as an approximant [ʁ̞]. There's vowel reduction, but no so extensive as in European portuguese: /e/ and /ɛ/ may be reduced to [ɪ~ɘ~e], /u/ and /o/ to [ʷ] (labialization of the previous consonant), and /i/ to [ʲ] (palatalization of the previous consonant). Diphthongs [ej] and [ow] become monophthongs [e] and [o], respectively.

References

  1. 1 2 Portuguese (São Tomé e Príncipe) at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)

External links

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