Cápa

Cápa
Cápo, Cábo, Kabo, Kabosje, isiKapa, Cape [of Good Hope] Creole
isiKápa
Pronunciation	[isi.kʰɐ́pɐ]
Created by	Jukethatbox
Date	2023
Native speakers	14,000,000 (2023)
Language family	Cape Creole Cápa
Dialects	Cape dialect Durban(KwaZulu-Natal) dialect Emonti(East London) dialect
Writing system	Latin
Sources	Afrikaans, Portuguese, Zulu, Xhosa, English
Official status
Official language in	Cape State
Recognised minority language in	Lesotho, Orange, Eswatini
Regulated by	Ministêrio iisiKápa

Cápa, also known as Cápo, Cábo, Kabo, Kabosje, isiKapa and/or Cape [of Good Hope] Creole, is an Afrikaans-Portuguese-English-Zulu-Xhosa creole language spoken in the area between the Orange River and the south African coast, commonly known as the Cape of Good Hope(cabo da boa esperança in Portuguese). The morphology is a mixture of primarily Portuguese and Dutch(later Afrikaans), whereas the grammar is heavily influenced by Zulu and Xhosa and the East Bantu language family as a whole.

The creole developed through the various colonisers of the South African region, and indeed, the language borrows elements from all the colonisers' languages(English, Dutch(Afrikaans), Portuguese) as well as native indigenous African languages in the area(Zulu, Xhosa).

Some more modern Portuguese loanwords derive from Brazilian Portuguese rather than European Portuguese, although in some cases both variations can be used, e.g. BP xícara and EP chávena, both meaning "cup", become shíxher(Cápa: [ʃík‖ʼɛɾ]), "cup" and sháfna(Cápa: [ʃɐ́ɸnɐ]), "glass(container)".

Phonology

Orthography

Cápa uses the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, with tone, stress and length(of a sound) marked by diacritics. These diacritics are mostly based on the Portuguese alphabet, with ⟨á⟩ and ⟨à⟩ indicating rising and falling tone respectively, and ⟨â⟩ indicating high tone, ⟨ǎ⟩ indicating low tone and ⟨ā⟩ indicating a lengthened allophone.

	Diacritics
Length	ā · ē · ī · ō · ū
High	â · ê · î · ô · û
Low	ǎ · ě · ǐ · ǒ · ǔ
Rising	á · é · í · ó · ú
Falling	à · è · ì · ò · ù

Consonants

Cápa, like its contemporary East Bantu languages, uses click consonants, however it only uses about half as many click consonants as Xhosa, with 9 in total, compared to Xhosa's 18 click consonants and Zulu's 15.

Click consonants

		Dental/Alveolar		Post- alveolar
		central	lateral
Click	tenuis/ejective	ᵏǀʼ ⟨c⟩	ᵏǁʼ ⟨x⟩	ᵏǃʼ ⟨q⟩
	aspirated	ᵏǀʰ ⟨ch⟩	ᵏǁʰ ⟨xh⟩	ᵏǃʰ ⟨qh⟩
	slack voice	ᶢ̥ǀʱ ⟨gc⟩	ᶢ̥ǁʱ ⟨gx⟩	ᶢ̥ǃʱ ⟨gq⟩
	nasal	ᵑǀ ⟨nc⟩	ᵑǁ ⟨nx⟩	ᵑǃ ⟨nq⟩

Prosody

Stress

Stress in Cápa is generally paroxytonic, where primary stress is placed on the penultimate syllable of a word.

Examples

• shíxher(cup)
• sháfna(glass)
• garáfa(bottle)
• péshe(fish)
• ixhésha(time)
• inja(dog)
• shoxoláti(chocolate)

Tone

Cápa, like its contemporary languages of Zulu and Xhosa, is a tonal language, with four tones- high, low, rising and falling.

High	Low	Falling	Rising
˥	˩	˥˩	˩˥

Syntax

Constituent order

Like in English, Xhosa and Zulu, Cápa uses an SVO(subject-verb-object) constituent order structure.