Dictionary Of African Borrowings In Brazilian Portuguese

The main purpose of this dictionary is twofold. On the one hand, it provides the scholar of African studies with a tool to identify the possible Portuguese origin of terms present in African languages and, on the other, it offers those who are interested in Portuguese culture an overview of the presence of its lexicon in African languages. No doubt the Portuguese were among the first Europeans to explore the world outside of Europe, and as such they were also the first to introduce that world to European concepts and words.This book is the result of a long and detailed work on texts in African languages, as also shown by the rich bibliography in the dictionary.

The Portuguese Language Continuum in Africa and Brazil is the first publication in English to offer studies on a whole set of varieties of Portuguese in Africa as well as Brazilian Portuguese. Authored by specialists on varieties of Portuguese in Africa and Brazil, the eleven chapters and the epilogue promote a dialogue between researchers interested in their genesis, sociohistories and linguistic properties. Most chapters directly address the idea of a continuum of Portuguese derived from parallel sociohistorical and linguistic factors in Africa and Brazil, due to the colonial expansion of the language to new multilingual settings. The volume contributes to the understanding of structural properties that are often shared by several varieties in this continuum, and describes the various situations and domains of language use as well as sociocultural contexts where they have emerged and where they are being used. As of 26 July 2021, the ebook edition is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Although millions of slaves were forcibly transported from Africa to Brazil, the languages the slaves brought with them remain little known. Most studies have focused on African contributions to Brazilian Portuguese rather than on the African languages themselves. This book is unusual in focusing on an African-descended language. The author describes and analyzes the Afro- Brazilian speech community of Calunga, in Minas Gerais. Linguistically descended from West African Bantu, Calunga is an endangered Afro-Brazilian language spoken by a few hundred older Afro-Brazilian men, who use it only for specific, secret communications. Unlike most creole languages, which are based largely on the vocabulary of the colonial language, Calunga has a large proportion of African vocabulary items embedded in an essentially Portuguese grammar. A hyrid language, its formation can be seen as a form of cultural resistance. Steven Byrd’s study provides a comprehensive linguistic description of Calunga based on two years of interviews with speakers of the language. He examines its history and historical context as well as its linguistic context, its sociolinguistic profile, and its lexical and grammatical outlines.

This work describes how slaves, mariners and merchants brought African music from Angola and the ports of East Afrcia to Latin America, and to Brazil in particular. The author examines how the rhythms and beats of Africa were combined with European popular music to create a unique sound.

After arriving from South Asia approximately a thousand years ago, cannabis quickly spread throughout the African continent. European accounts of cannabis in Africa—often fictionalized and reliant upon racial stereotypes—shaped widespread myths about the plant and were used to depict the continent as a cultural backwater and Africans as predisposed to drug use. These myths continue to influence contemporary thinking about cannabis. In The African Roots of Marijuana, Chris S. Duvall corrects common misconceptions while providing an authoritative history of cannabis as it flowed into, throughout, and out of Africa. Duvall shows how preexisting smoking cultures in Africa transformed the plant into a fast-acting and easily dosed drug and how it later became linked with global capitalism and the slave trade. People often used cannabis to cope with oppressive working conditions under colonialism, as a recreational drug, and in religious and political movements. This expansive look at Africa's importance to the development of human knowledge about marijuana will challenge everything readers thought they knew about one of the world's most ubiquitous plants.

This manual is the first comprehensive account of Brazilian Portuguese linguistics written in English, offering not only linguists but also historians and social scientists new insights gained from the intensive research carried out over the last decades on the linguistic reality of this vast territory. In the 20 overview chapters, internationally renowned experts give detailed yet concise information on a wide range of language-internal as well as external synchronic and diachronic topics. Most of this information is the fruit of large-scale language documentation and description projects, such as the project on the linguistic norm of educated speakers (NURC), the project “Grammar of spoken Portuguese”, and the project “Towards a History of Brazilian Portuguese” (PHPB), among others. Further chapters of high contemporary interest and relevance include the study of linguistic policies and psycholinguistics. The manual offers theoretical insights of general interest, not least since many chapters present the linguistic data in the light of a combination of formal, functional, generative and sociolinguistic approaches. This rather unique feature of the volume is achieved by the double authorship of some of the relevant chapters, thus bringing together and synthesizing different perspectives.

African Ethnobotany in the Americas provides the first comprehensive examination of ethnobotanical knowledge and skills among the African Diaspora in the Americas. Leading scholars on the subject explore the complex relationship between plant use and meaning among the descendants of Africans in the New World. With the aid of archival and field research carried out in North America, South America, and the Caribbean, contributors explore the historical, environmental, and political-ecological factors that facilitated/hindered transatlantic ethnobotanical diffusion; the role of Africans as active agents of plant and plant knowledge transfer during the period of plantation slavery in the Americas; the significance of cultural resistance in refining and redefining plant-based traditions; the principal categories of plant use that resulted; the exchange of knowledge among Amerindian, European and other African peoples; and the changing significance of African-American ethnobotanical traditions in the 21st century. Bolstered by abundant visual content and contributions from renowned experts in the field, African Ethnobotany in the Americas is an invaluable resource for students, scientists, and researchers in the field of ethnobotany and African Diaspora studies.