Vestiges of Portuguese in the Languages of Sierra Leone

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Abstract
This chapter presents a very modest venture in the process of sorting the vocabularies of some of the languages of Sierra Leone. The stupendous nautical achievements of the Portuguese have unduly overshadowed their important successes in establishing human contacts and developing trade. Portuguese vessels at anchor off the favourite trading points. The Portuguese spoken on the Guinea coast and in the Congo had characteristics of its own. A study of the kind is primarily dependent on the available published lexicographical material. For most of the languages of Sierra Leone such material does not exist; not all the existing material is available in Sierra Leone. In West Africa the inhabitants were encouraged to learn Portuguese, not at first as willing students of the language. A ship making a landfall at a point where the people proved sparse or unresisting would seize a few and bring them back to Portugal to be baptized and taught the Lusitanian tongue.

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