Meet our Spring Tinker Visiting Professor

March 21, 2024 (last updated on May 4, 2024)
Esmeralda Negrao

Esmeralda Negrão is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sao Paulo. She has conducted extensive work revisiting the origins of some features of Brazilian Portuguese. In particular, she has argued for some grammatical contributions from African languages, especially Kimbundu (spoken in Angola), whose speakers constituted a significant proportion of the enslaved African population. Her research is particularly important because Brazil has produced no creole, although it engaged in sugarcane cultivation about a century before the Caribbean colonies (including Suriname, Guyana, and Guyane) invested in this economic venture, whose enslaved labor produced various creoles.