Fa d’Ambô: from past to present

This article addresses the historical and sociolinguistic evolution of Fa d’Ambô, a Portuguese-related creole language spoken originally on the small island of Annobón in Equatorial Guinea. It will be shown that Fa d’Ambô and the three creole languages spoken on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe (Santome, Angolar and Principense) descend from a single contact language that arose on the island of São Tomé and branched in the sixteenth century. After its permanent settlement in the second half of the sixteenth century, Annobón became strongly isolated until the twentieth century. Due to intense migration from Annobón to Equatorial Guinea’s multilingual capital Malabo over the last decades, Fa d’Ambô’s speech community has not only become divided but also more exposed to other languages, in particular to English-based creole Pichi, the capital’s lingua franca. Given the small size of the Fa d’Ambô speech community (approx. 5,000 speakers), it will be argued that these factors, in addition to the lack of government support for the country’s minority languages, pose an increasing threat to the survival of the language.