It is spoken on the Annobón and Bioko Islands off the coast of Equatorial Guinea,[2] mostly by people of mixed African, Portuguese and Spanish descent.
[4] The creole language was spoken originally by the descendants of intermixing between Portuguese men and African women slaves imported from other places, especially from São Tomé and Angola, and therefore descends from Portuguese and Forro, the creole of the freed slaves of São Tomé.
The government of Equatorial Guinea financed an Instituto Internacional da Língua Portuguesa (IILP) sociolinguistic study in Annobón, which noticed strong links with the Portuguese creole populations in São Tomé and Príncipe, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.
Practically all Annobonese are bilingual in other languages including Pidgin English, Spanish, Bubi and Fang.
[6] Some features of the Creole:[6] Fa d’Ambô follows a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order.
The table below displays one sentence translated across Fa d’Ambô, Portuguese, and English to further highlight this specific matter: The word-for-word English translation of Pay da mina dyielu would be "Father give child money."
Nouns of Annobonese Creole are generally invariable, without employing grammatical gender or class.
The indefinite article can appear as either wan or an for nouns in the singular form and zuguan for the plural counterparts.
Example: The Annobonese sentence Na may banku translates to English as "The white woman", where na is the definite article "the", may signifies "woman", and banku serves as the color adjective "white."
[citation needed] After Annobón passed to Spain, the language incorporated some words of Spanish origin (10% of its lexicon),[citation needed], but it is often difficult to say from which language a word derives, given the similarity between Spanish and Portuguese.