Native to Brazil Native speakers (40 cited 1978) Glottolog cafu1238 | ISO 639-3 ccd | |
Language family Indo-EuropeanItalicRomanceWesternIbero-RomanceWest IberianGalician-PortuguesePortugueseVernacular BrazilianCaipiraCafundó | ||
Cafundó ([kafũˈdɔ]), or Cupópia ([kuˈpɔpjɐ]), is an argot ("secret language") spoken in the Brazilian village of Cafundó, São Paulo, now a suburb of Salto de Pirapora. The language is structurally similar to Portuguese, with a large number of Bantu words in its lexicon.
Contents
Cafundó was at first thought to be an African language, but a later study (1986) by Carlos Vogt and Peter Fry showed that its grammatical and morphological structure are those of Brazilian Portuguese, specifically the rural hinterland Southeastern variety, caipira. Whereas its lexicon is heavily drawn from some Bantu language(s). It is therefore not a creole language, as it is sometimes considered.
History
The name cafundó means "a remote place" or "a hard-to-reach place", referring to the quilombo of Cafundó. The Brazilian film Cafundó also takes its name from the same location.
Speakers
The speaker community is very small (40 people in 1978). They live in a rural area, 150 km from the city of São Paulo, and are mostly of African descent. They also speak Portuguese, and use cafundó as a "secret" home language. A cafundó speaker and an African-born Bantu (Angolan or Mozambican) speaking Portuguese and Bantu languages can understand each other, because Angolan and Mozambican Portuguese also have their particular Bantu-derived characteristics.