Abstract
History shows that creole vernaculars are just ordinary language varieties. Five hundred years ago, dialectal diversity was a well-known fact in Portugal itself. Whenever merchants moved to new places, they needed to create new trading routines including appropriate forms of communication jointly with the locals. Together with their African and, later on, their Asian interlocutors, Portuguese sailors and merchants going native on the continent developed new vernaculars identified as "Kust Portugees", which was also adopted by their European competitors. Dutch companies produced word lists of it that their crews could find handy. It became the lingua franca of that time on the African coast. European and African Portuguese varieties mirror the differences of their ecologies of their encounters and reflect both syncretism and hybridization.
