It is still said, sometimes by Cabo Verdeans themselves, that Kriolu is Portuguese spoken badly: a dialect, a slang, something to grow out of at school. The claim rests on one true observation and one false conclusion.
The true observation is that most Kriolu words come from Portuguese. The false conclusion is that a language is its vocabulary. English takes most of its words from French and Latin, and nobody calls it broken French. What makes a language is its grammar, the rules that turn words into meaning, and Kriolu's grammar is not Portuguese.
Time works differently
Portuguese marks tense by changing the end of the verb: como, comi, comia, comerei. Kriolu leaves the verb alone and puts small markers in front of it, the way many West African languages do.
- N kume: I ate.
- N ta kume: I eat (as a habit), or I will eat.
- N sta ta kume: I am eating right now.
- N kumeba: I had eaten.
Kume never changes shape. The work is done by ta, sta and the ending -ba, and the system is built around whether an action is complete, habitual or ongoing rather than simply past or future. A speaker of Portuguese who knows no Kriolu cannot work these out from Portuguese rules, because there are none to work from.
So do negation and plurals
Kriolu says no with ka before the verb: N ka sabe, I don't know. Portuguese uses não. Where Portuguese marks the plural on every word (as casas bonitas), Kriolu usually marks it once, or not at all when a number already says it: dos kasa, two houses. The pronouns, N, bu, e, nu, nhos, es, form their own set.
None of this is Portuguese done carelessly. Each is a consistent rule that children in Santiago learn without being taught, and that a learner from Lisbon has to study.
Where the rules came from
Santiago was uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived. The people who made it a society were Africans brought from the Guinea coast, speakers of Mandinka, Wolof, Temne, Balanta and other languages. Kriolu was formed in their mouths. Linguists who have traced its origins, including Nicolas Quint, find that West African influence goes far beyond a handful of borrowed words: it reaches into how sentences are built and how meaning is carved up.
The borrowed words are there too. Kotxi, to pound grain in a mortar, comes from Mandinka kócci. Xarem, pounded maize, from Mandinka sèreŋ. Kodé, the last-born child, from Bambara. The language page gathers many more, with their sources.
Why the myth lasted
The idea of broken Portuguese was never a linguistic finding. It was a social ranking. Under colonial rule, Portuguese was the language of school, church, courts and advancement, and Kriolu was what you were expected to leave behind to get on. The ranking outlived the regime that set it: Portuguese is still Cabo Verde's only official language, though the constitution commits the state to promoting Kriolu, and a national alphabet for writing it, ALUPEC, was adopted in 1998 and confirmed in 2009.
A language used by almost every Cabo Verdean at home, in music, in parliament's corridors and on the radio is not a dialect waiting to be corrected. It is the language the nation actually speaks.
Grammar examples follow the Santiago variety. Sources for African-origin words are kept on the language page and in the notes and further reading, including Quint's dictionary and his study of African words and calques in Kriolu.