Language Snapshots

Fa d’Ambô (Equatorial Guinea) - Language Snapshot

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Abstract

Fa d’Ambô is a Portuguese-lexifier creole language spoken in Annobón Island in the Gulf of Guinea and part of Equatorial Guinea. The language is genetically related to three other creoles spoken in the Gulf of Guinea, in São Tomé and Príncipe: Lungwa Santome or Forro, Angolar, and Lung’Ie or Principense. During fieldwork on Annobón conducted in 2012, I observed that all locals speak the language. There are a few elderly monolinguals but the majority are bilingual in Spanish, or multilingual. As a minority language in a multilingual country, there is no linguistic planning or policy for Fa d’Ambô in education, nor any standardization. However, its situation is stable, since children continue to acquire it as a first language. The language shares many lexical and grammatical characteristics with the other Gulf of Guinea creoles. Research on Fa d’Ambô encompasses a corpus, word lists, grammars, and research papers.

Keywords: Annobón Island, monolingual, Portuguese, creole, Gulf of Guinea, Spanish, multilingual

How to Cite:

Agostinho, A., (2021) “Fa d’Ambô (Equatorial Guinea) - Language Snapshot”, Language Documentation and Description 20, 123-134. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd39