New Words for Mindelo’s Urban Creole, 2014
Digital HD file, 16:9, 10 minutes and 26 seconds, sound
A series of neologisms created for the substratum Creole of Cape Verde, displayed one at a time. Cape Verde is a bilingual country where Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese are both spoken; the new Creole words — coined from the names of Portuguese colonial administrators and figures from Greek mythology — enrich Mindelo's spoken Creole with concepts that have no single-word equivalent in Creole, though they often do in Portuguese. Their proposed meanings draw parallels between the country's colonial past and the social dynamics that have shaped it since Cape Verde's integration into the global market economy in the 1990s.
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