We present three new corpora of urban varieties of Portuguese spoken in Angola, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, where Portuguese is increasingly being spoken as first and second language in different multilingual settings. Given the scarcity of linguistic resources available for the African varieties of Portuguese, these corpora provide new, contemporary data for the study of each variety and for comparative research on African, Brazilian and European varieties, hereby improving our understanding of processes of language variation and change in postcolonial societies. The corpora consist of transcribed spoken data, complemented by a rich set of metadata describing the setting of the audio recordings and sociolinguistic information about the speakers. They are annotated with POS and lemma information and made available on the CQPweb platform, which allows for sophisticated data searches. The corpora are already being used for comparative research on constructions in the domain of possession and location involving the argument structure of intransitive, monotransitive and ditransitive verbs that select Goals, Locatives, and Recipients.

We present the process of building linguistic corpora of the Portuguese-related Gulf of Guinea creoles, a cluster of four historically related languages: Santome, Angolar, Principense and Fa d’Ambô. We faced the typical difficulties of languages lacking an official status, such as lack of standard spelling, language variation, lack of basic language instruments, and small data sets, which comprise data from the late 19th century to the present. In order to tackle these problems, the compiled written and transcribed spoken data collected during field work trips were adapted to a normalized spelling that was applied to the four languages. For the corpus compilation we followed corpus linguistics standards. We recorded meta data for each file and added morphosyntactic information based on a part-of-speech tag set that was designed to deal with the specificities of these languages. The corpora of three of the four creoles are already available and searchable via an online web interface.