My interest in Portuguese started by chance, when I was asked to participate in a book tribute to the memory of a colleague, Erilde Melillo Reali, Professor of Portuguese and former Vice President of Istituto Universitario Orientale, who died long before her retirement. I had nothing to say about Portuguese, but I wanted to be among the group of colleagues paying tribute. After a while, I started collecting words of Portuguese origin in the Swahili language, which afterwards became the subject of my contribution. My purely coincidental interest in Portuguese loanwords in Swahili later turned into a curiosity about the presence of the Portuguese language in Africa and became one of the fields of my academic research, since it was a fascinating subject. The topic, I later discovered over time, has been the object of copious research by many scholars, who have approached it in different ways. The earliest works are interesting, in particular the dictionaries produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which often include terms of Portuguese origin, now obsolete in the languages spoken today. They often feature terms that come from Dutch, Danish and other Scandinavian languages, which in the past had established commercial settlements in West Africa, before the British took over. It would also be extremely interesting to study the contribution of these languages from a linguistic point of view, in addition to the historical view, as has been done until now.
The main purpose of this dictionary is twofold. On the one hand, it provides the Africanist scholar with a tool to identify the possible Portuguese origin of terms present in African languages and, on the other, it offers those who are interested, in various ways, in Portuguese culture, an overview of the presence of its lexicon in African languages. No doubt the Portuguese were the first Europeans to explore the world outside Europe, and as such they were also the first to introduce European concepts and their designations to that world. The Dutch, British and French often came too late to provide new vocabulary because all kinds of Christian and European fundamental concepts had already been borrowed from Portuguese by the time they arrived.
For this reason I tried to collect the greatest number of data on the subject, providing, among other things, a really wide bibliography. Early works are not easy to find in libraries and so I also provide references to the URL s of these thus allowing those interested to find the source of the information. In fact, I often came across works that mentioned terms, loanwords or anything else the source of which I could not find.
In 1978, having been appointed to teach courses in Sudanic languages at the Istituto Universitario Orientale (Naples), I began to teach Hausa. All the scientific interest that I had devoted until then to Swahili reoriented itself towards West Africa and I began to produce articles on Arabic loanwords in languages close to Hausa, such as Kanuri, Fulfulde, etc., languages which could best explain the route that Arabic loanwords had taken to arrive in Hausa, when the borrowing was not direct.
In this period of my academic life during which I investigated Arabic loanwords in African languages, I always had a special interest in Portuguese loanwords in those languages. For this reason, every time I had a dictionary of an African language in my hands, I continued to increase my database, which I am now able to publish, with the terms that I gradually encountered in my researches. I hope the attempt will have been helpful for future research in this field.
During these years, I benefited greatly from the help and suggestions, in primis, of the late Pierre Alexandre and Claude Gouffé, whom I cannot thank enough. There is also a long list of friends and colleagues who have supported me in one area or another, such as Flavia Aiello (Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”) for Swahili; Koen Bostoen (Universiteit Gent) for Kikongo; Kathryn de Luna (Georgetown University); Gonçalo Fernandes (Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro) for providing me with materials and ongoing advice on this work; Emmanuel Habamuremyi (Rwanda Journalists Association); Jacques Lwaboshi Kayigema (Adventist University of Central Africa); Benson Kituku (Computer Science Department, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology, Nyeri, Kenya) for Kamba; Rudolf Leger (Gœthe Universität, Frankfurt) for very useful discussions during our meetings for Erasmus courses; Jouni Filip Maho (Gothenburg University) for Bantu languages; Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi (Uppsala University) for Swahili; Michael Meeuwis (Universiteit Gent) for Lingala; Jack Merrill (Princeton University); Tony Naden (G.I.L.L.B.T., Ghana) for useful data on some Gur languages; Steve Nicolle (Trinity Western University) for Digo; Konstantin Pozdniakov (Institut Universitaire de France) for Wolof; Michael Schulze (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin); Bento Sitoe (Eduardo Mondlane University) for Changana and Ronga; Valentin Vydrin (LLACAN, Paris) for providing me with Russian material that was difficult for me to find; Henry Tourneux (CNRS/IRD, Paris) for his suggestions and his encouragement of the publication. Last, but not least, I thank Sander Adelaar (University of Melbourne), Philippe Beaujard (CNRS, Paris), Noël Jacques Gueunier (Université de Madagascar), Lucie Rabaovololona (Académie Malgache, Antananarivo), Martin Walsh (Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology), Monsignor Paolo Gualtieri (Apostolic Nuncio, Antananarivo) and my colleague, Martin Orwin (Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”), who went through the trouble of checking my English.
This dictionary was made possible thanks for a grant from the Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica (PRIN 2005) and by the agreement between the Istituto Universitario Orientale (now Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”) and ISIAO in Rome (2004/2005).