Portuguese-based creole languages
This may explain to some extent why Portuguese lexical items can be found in many creoles, but more importantly, it would account for the numerous grammatical similarities shared by such languages, such as the preposition na, meaning "in" and/or "on", which would come from the Portuguese contraction na, meaning "in the" (feminine singular).
The Portuguese word for "creole" is crioulo, which derives from the verb criar ("to raise", "to bring up") and a suffix -oulo of debated origin.
In Guinea-Bissau, the creole is used as lingua franca among people speaking different languages, and is becoming the mother tongue of a growing population.
The creole languages spoken in Baçaim, Salsete, Thana, Chevai, Mahim, Tecelaria, Dadar, Parel, Cavel, Bandora (modern Bandra), Gorai, Morol, Andheri, Versova, Malvan, Manori, Mazagão, and Chaul are now extinct.
The creoles of the Coast of Coromandel, such as of Meliapor, Madras, Tuticorin, Cuddalore, Karikal, Pondicherry, Tranquebar, Manapar, and Negapatam, were already extinct by the 19th century.
Their speakers (mostly the people of mixed Portuguese-Indian ancestry, known locally as Topasses) switched to English after the British takeover.
Most of the creoles of the Coast of Malabar, namely those of Cananor, Tellicherry, Mahé, Cochin (modern Kerala), and Quilon) had become extinct by the 19th century.
Portuguese creoles were spoken in Bengal, such as at Balasore, Pipli, Chandannagore, Chittagong, Midnapore and Hooghly.
[citation needed] The earliest Portuguese creole in the region probably arose in the 16th century in Malacca, Malaysia, as well as in the Moluccas.
The Luso-Thai communities of Kudi Chin and Conception still exist, numbering around 2,000, but the language has not been recorded for centuries.
[citation needed] Although sometimes classified as a creole, the Cupópia language from the Quilombo do Cafundó, at Salto de Pirapora, São Paulo, discovered in 1978 and spoken by less than 40 people as a secret language,[6] is better classified as a Portuguese variety since it is structurally similar to Portuguese, in spite of having a large number of Bantu words in its lexicon.
There is a Portuguese dialect in Helvécia, South of Bahia that is theorized as presenting signs of an earlier decreolization.
Ancient Portuguese creoles originating from Africa are still preserved in the ritual songs of the Afro-Brazilian animist religions (Candomblé)[citation needed].
[11] Some authors, like Swedish Parkvall,[12] classify it as a semicreole in the concept defined by Holm:[13] a semicreole is a language that has undergone “partial restructuring, producing varieties which were never fully pidginized and which preserve a substantial part of their lexifier’s structure (...) while showing a noticeable degree of restructuring”.
