This paper analyzes the diffusion of contact-induced linguistic innovations in Portuguese spoken in Maputo, Mozambique, in two datasets from 1993/4 and 2007, focusing on quantitative accounts of linguistic innovations at lexical, lexico-syntactic, syntactic and morphosyntactic levels. Overall, innovative features that registered in the two datasets are qualitatively the same. Results confirm an increase in the frequency of innovative features related to second language acquisition and language contact at all linguist levels, with particularly high diffusion rates of morphological simplifications. This increase may be related to bilingualism and changes in use of, access to, and input of Portuguese. Furthermore, the qualitative stability of features may be a sign of an emerging usage norm.

Resumo: O presente estudo analisa a fala da comunidade rural afrobrasileira de Cafundó, situada a 150 km da cidade de São Paulo. Entre 1978 e 1988, período em que os dados aqui analisados foram coletados, a comunidade contava com carca de 80 pessoas, descendentes de duas ex-escravas, irmãs, que herdaram as terras do seu dono. O livro publicado, em 1996, por Carlos Vogt e Peter Fry (com a colaboração de Robert Slenes) defende que a variedade denominada Cupópia apresenta estruturas do português regional e que parte do vocabulário é de origem Bantu. A análise morfossintática discute os casos de ausência de cópula, o uso da cópula em lugar do verbo possessivo, a ordem das palavras incomum no português, os substantivos sem determinante na posição de sujeito, o uso de artigos definidos em SNs preposicionais que correspondem a locuções adjetivas, bem como a concordância variável no SN e a concordância entre o sujeito e o verbo. Os resultados indicam que as características gramaticais da Cupópia não coincidem totalmente com os traços registrados no português falado pelos mesmos indivíduos, mas que são compartilhadas com variedades linguísticas mais reestruturadas do que o português falado em zonas rurais do interior do Estado de São Paulo.

The present paper focuses on the speech of a rural Afro-Brazilian community calledCafundó, situated 150 km from São Paulo. In 1978, when linguistic data were collected, the community constituted approximately eighty individuals, descendants of two slave women who inherited their owners’ proprieties. According to earlier studies, when the inhabitants of Cafundó spoke in their supposed ‘African language’,Cupópia, they used structures borrowed from Portuguese and a vocabulary of possible African origin. A lexical analysis shows that the etymologies match historical and demographical data, indicating that speakers of varieties of Kimbundu, Kikongo, and Umbundu dominated in the community. Through a morphosyntactic analysis, specific features were found in the data, such as copula absence and variable agreement patterns. By showing that some of Cupópia’s specific grammatical features are not derived from the Portuguese spoken by the same speakers but are instead shared with more restructured varieties, this paper defends the hypothesis that this lexically driven in-group code is not simply a regional variety of Portuguese with a number of African-derived words.

Language change is accelerated by language contact, especially by contact that occurs when a group of speakers shifts from one language to another. This has commonly been explained by linguistic innovation occurring during second language acquisition. This hypothesis is based on historical reconstructions of instances of contact and has not been formally tested on empirical data. In this paper, we construct an agent-based model to formalize the hypothesis that second language speakers are responsible for accelerated language change during language shift. We compare model predictions to a unique combination of diachronic linguistic and demographic data from Maputu, Mozambique. The model correctly predicts an increased proportional use of the novel linguistic variants during the period we study. We find that a modified version of the model is a better fit to one of our two datasets and discuss plausible reasons for this. As a general conclusion concerning typological differences between contact-induced and non-contact-induced language change, we suggest that multiple introductions of a new linguistic variant by different individuals may be the mechanism by which language contact accelerates language change.