Origins
Portuguese overseas exploration in the 15th and 16th century's led to the establishment of a Portuguese Empire with trading posts, forts and colonies in the Americas, Asia and Africa. Contact between the Portuguese language and native languages gave rise to many Portuguese-based pidgins, used as linguas francas throughout the Portuguese sphere of influence. In time, many of these pidgins were nativized becoming new stable creole languages.
As is the rule in most creoles, the lexicon of these languages can be traced to the parent languages, usually with predominance of Portuguese; while the grammar is mostly original and unique to each creole with little resemblance to the syntax of Portuguese or of other parent languages.
These creoles are (or were) spoken mostly by communities of descendants of Portuguese, natives, and sometimes other peoples from the Portuguese colonial empire.
Until recently creoles were considered "degenerate" languages unworthy of attention. As a consequence, there is little documentation on the details of their formation. Since the 20th century, increased study of creoles by linguists led to several theories being advanced. According to the monogenetic theory of pidgins, most of the pidgins and creoles the world derived from European languages actually descend from a single pidgin, the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, which was relexified by the Portuguese explorers and used by them throughout the empire. This theory was advanced to explain supposed similarities between all European-based creoles; such as the preposition na, meaning "in" and/or "on", which would come from the Portuguese contraction na meaning "in the" (feminine singular). However, the language bioprogram theory claimed that creole grammars are created by children from pidgins that have no grammatical structure; so the supposed similarities between creoles are a consequence of the unity of human innate linguistic abilities. However, some linguists have dismissed those similarities as being due to residual influences of the parent languages.
Read more about this topic: Portuguese-based Creole Languages
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