Impiegato Triglot Senior Member Sweden bsntranslation. Joined 5434 days ago 100 posts - 145 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, Italian Studies: Spanish, French, Russian
| Message 1 of 4 02 December 2010 at 1:31am | IP Logged |
How far from the varieties of Portuguese spoken in Africa is European Portuguese regarding grammatics, phonology, vocabulary and so on? Are there many differences also between the Portuguese spoken in Mozambique, Angola and Cape Verde?
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 4 02 December 2010 at 9:55am | IP Logged |
I have visited Moçambique, and the Portuguese there was pretty close to European Portuguese. I also visited Cape Verde shortly after I decided to learn Portuguese (i.e. before I knew the language well), and there I generally had the same impression - if I could understand the local people they spoke in European Portuguese. But among themselves they often speak some kind of Creole, and in those cases where I didn't understand them they may have spoken partly Creole. In Moçambique I didn't notice such 'degrees of creolization' (except maybe for isolated loanwords, which I didn't catch) - either I understood what people said or it was totally incomprehensible local languages.
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marmite Triglot Newbie Portugal Joined 5214 days ago 35 posts - 57 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French
| Message 3 of 4 05 December 2010 at 2:19pm | IP Logged |
I think a Portuguese speaker can understand a Mozambican speaker just fine. Just like with Brazilian Portuguese, there may be specific references, words and constructions that are different, but they're not too far.
Sorry, I'm not much help!
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Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5784 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German
| Message 4 of 4 10 December 2010 at 9:40pm | IP Logged |
Wikipedia has some samples of speakers from different countries in their article on Portuguese here
This is an important topic, because although at the moment the lusophone world is very lopsided (heavily tilted towards Brazil, with nearly 200 million people), there are projected to be nearly 80 mllion speakers of the different African dialects of Portuguese later in this century!
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