History and morphosyntactic variation between kimbundu and portuguese in Angola’s Kwanza North province: plural formation, gender agreement, and augmentative and diminutive noun formation

Abstract

This research is based on the study of the coexistence of two languages – Kimbundu and Portuguese – inAngola’sNorthern Kwanza region of Cazengo-Ndalatando. A sociolinguistic observation of the contact and simultaneous use of these languages clearly denotes cases of Kimbundu interference in Portuguese (Angola’s official language). This observation is supported by the linguistic analysis of oral utterances directly collected at the aforementioned geographical area, and whose linguistic acceptance judgment was confirmed by one of the authors, a native speaker of Kimbundu. In this paper, we analyze three cases of Kimbundu interference in Portuguese, which indicate morphosyntactic variation in the oral records of Portuguese: plural formation, gender concordance, and diminutive and augmentative noun formation.

Keywords

• Interferência
• Formação do plural
• Concordância de género
• Formação do diminutivo dos nomes. Formação do aumentativo dos nomes