The exchange of oral occlusive consonants in Mozambican Portuguese

In Mozambique, Portuguese is typically in contact with languages of the Bantu group and is a second language (L2) for most speakers. Data from the 2nd general population and education census carried out in 1997 by the National Statistics Institute1 shows that the number of speakers of Portuguese as a mother tongue in Mozambique corresponds to 6.5% of the population; Portuguese is spoken by 39.6% of the country’s general population; in urban areas Portuguese speakers reach 72.4% and in rural areas 25.4%. These figures prove that Portuguese is a second language for most speakers in Mozambique. It is known that there are more than two dozen languages of that linguistic group in Mozambique, including the Emakhuwa language, which is the subject of our research.