Portuguese creoles are creole languages which score Portuguese as their substantial lexifier. The most widely-spoken creoles influenced by Portuguese are Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Creole together with Papiamento.
Portuguese overseas exploration in the 15th in addition to 16th centuries led to the determine of a Portuguese Empire with trading posts, forts and colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Contact between the Portuguese Linguistic communication and native languages submission 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 newcreole languages.
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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" dialects of Portuguese unworthy of attention. As a consequence, there is little documentation on the details of their formation. Since the 20th century, increased inspect of creoles by linguists led to several theories being advanced. The monogenetic concepts of pidgins assumes that some type of pidgin language — dubbed West African Pidgin Portuguese — based on Portuguese was spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the forts establishment by the Portuguese on the West African coast. According to this theory, this family may pull in been the starting item of all the pidgin and 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. Originally the word was used to distinguish the members of all ethnic chain who were born and raised in the colonies from those who were born in their homeland. In Africa it was often applied to locally born people of wholly or partly Portuguese descent, as opposed to those born in Portugal; whereas in Brazil it was also used to distinguish locally born black people of African descent from those who had been brought from Africa as slaves.
In time, however, this generic sense was lost, and the word crioulo or its derivatives like "Creole" and its equivalents in other languages became the work of several specific Upper Guinean communities and their languages: the Guinean people and their Kriol language, Cape Verdean people and their Kriolu language, all of which still today have very vigorous use, suppressing the importance of official standard Portuguese.