Angolan Portuguese

Abstract Angola is the second largest Portuguese-speaking country in both area and number of inhabitants. Language contact has played an essential role in shaping the country’s past and current sociolinguistic profile, resulting in the development of a partially restructured vernacular, i.e. Angolan Portuguese (henceforth AP). The chapter gives a bird’s-eye view of the present-day language situation in Angola, the linguistic structure of AP and the linguistic, historical and social processes responsible for its development to reflect upon the positioning of AP on the continuum of Afro-Brazilian varieties of Portuguese proposed in Petter (2007 , 2008b ).