Third person accusative and dative clitics

This article shows a contrastive analysis of 3rd person accusative and dative clitics and their variant forms in spoken Brazilian, Mozambican and Santomean varieties of Portuguese as compared with European Portuguese. We take as a starting point Duarte’s (2024) claim that these clitics have not been acquired as L2 in colonial Brazil by enslaved Africans and their descendants in close contact for about 350 years with Portuguese immigrants. Duarte’s evidence comes from (a) the long-lasting illiteracy in Brazil until the beginning of the 19th century and (b) the fact that Bantu languages do not have affixes and do not distinguish subject and object. This article adds further evidence to confirm the role of Bantu substrate in the non-acquisition of nondeictic clitics, marks of agreement, absent in the emergence of Brazilian grammar as attested by several studies of the first recordings of ‘educated’ speech exhibiting low rates of such clitics and the implementation of null objects, already present, although rare, in Old and Classical Portuguese, a case of drift, and the innovative use of the nominative pronoun in accusative function, in spite of the pressure of formal education inspired in Modern European Portuguese. Even though learned under different circumstances, the two African varieties add arguments in favor of our claim.