The Presence of Portuguese in Some African Languages

The presence of Portuguese in Africa for more than five centuries has left a sensible trace even in the languages spoken on the continent. Exploiting a Data Base created to monitor the influence of Portuguese on the African languages, this paper tries to show how more than five hundred Portuguese loans are found in some one hundred and fifty African languages. The degree of assimilation and their numbers vary from language to language, but it is astonishing that we could find some Portuguese loans even in some languages spoken in the interior of Africa or far from the places where Portuguese presence was firmly established for a long time.