From the islands to the classroom and back
The Creole language of Cape Verde found reinforcement from an unexpected source - the bilingual-education law in Massachusetts. Now, that law has been repealed.
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In the absence of video coverage - since television is a luxury - the program does not advance the effort of making written Creole widely available, but she says it does enable students to catch information they may have missed or misunderstood in the Portuguese classroom.
However, given Creole's obscurity and the fact that there are scores of dialects scattered about the islands, some educators feel that it is politically and logistically difficult to use Creole in the classroom. For these reasons, Rhode Island teaches its large Cape Verdean student population in Portuguese rather than in Creole.
"When students come from Cape Verde, many speak Portuguese very well," says Maria Lindia, a bilingual- education coordinator in Rhode Island. "Since there are problems in spoken and written Creole, our students participate in a Portuguese bilingual program."
Those who arrive in Rhode Island without any schooling go into an English as a Second Language program, she says.
With more than 120 language groups to cater to in the system, schools would have a tough time implementing bilingual programs, Ms. Lindia says. "Often we don't have enough students - or the qualified teachers - for a bilingual class."
Forced homogeneity is what Creole supporters and bilingual advocates in other languages are fighting against.
"Language identifies us as a separate group," Tavares says. "Otherwise we are identified as Portuguese. Using Creole is not only to learn better, but to have an identity."
Just as agreeing on a language to use in class can be a prickly issue, capturing the language in writing can be similarly challenging. Like indigenous languages around the world, a written form for Cape Verdean Creole was devised in the 19th century when missionaries and colonial officials needed a basic written language to carry out their work.
These early writing systems generally used letters and accents from the colonizing language, which linguists are trying to expunge today.
As such, the modern alphabets are usually phonetically based, with one letter representing only one sound and representing that sound consistently.
For this reason, there is no "C" in the Massachusetts-developed Creole. "C" does exist in Portuguese, but Gonçalves says it is superfluous because, as in English, its soft sound can be made by the "s" (like "cyber") and its hard sound by the "k" (as in "cafe").
And with that, the name of the country changes from Cabo Verde in Portuguese to Kaboverde in Creole, a difference so dramatic even supporters like Tavares challenge it. "The argument against it is more emotional than scientific," she says. "It is strange to see Cape Verde spelled with a 'K'. I'm sure it makes sense from a linguistic point of view, but ordinary people like me don't like it or understand it."
Gonçalves says that the spelling difference is the essence of the language distinction.
Beyond the loss of funding for curriculum development to aid the Creole movement in Cape Verde, educators in Massachusetts are worried about how the demise of bilingual education will affect students.
Without a gentler transition through Creole, Gonçalves and Tavares say that culture shock - as well as catching up academically - may be harder for both new immigrants and students who are born into Creole-speaking homes here.
"It is a disaster," Gonçalves says. "Kids were able to learn in their own language and culture. We sent thousands of kids to college through bilingual education."
