Portuguese-based creole languages used to distinguish locally born black people of African descent from those who had been brought from Africa as slaves. In time, however, this generic sense was lost, and the word "crioulo" or its derivatives (like "Creole" and its equivalents in other languages) became the name of several specific Upper Guinean communities and their languages: the Guinean people and their Kriol language, Cape Verdean people and their Kriolu language, all of which still today have very vigorous use, suppressing the importance of official standard Portuguese. The oldest Portuguese-based creole are the so-called "crioulos" of Upper Guinea, born around the Portuguese
Comparison of Portuguese and Spanish Portuguese (e.g., “"muié"” for "mulher", 'woman'), but it is much less widespread than in Spanish. The Portuguese letter ⟨ç⟩ (c-cedilha), based on a Visigothic form of the letter ⟨z⟩: "ꝣ". In Portuguese it is used before ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩, and ⟨u⟩ (including nasals), and never at the beginning or end of any word. It always represents the "soft "c"" sound, namely . In modern Spanish, it has been replaced by ⟨z⟩. Example: "calzado" (Sp.), "calçado" (Port.) 'footwear'. Various word endings are consistently different in the two languages. Both languages use diacritics to mark the stressed syllable of a word whenever it