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
Reading education in the United States of words and their structure is morphology, and the smallest units of meaning are morphemes. The study of the relationship between words present in the language at one time is synchronic etymology, part of descriptive linguistics, and the study of word origins and evolution is diachronic etymology, part of historical linguistics English orthography gives priority first to morphology, then to etymology, and lastly to phonetics. Thus the spelling of a word is dependent principally upon its structure, its relationship to other words, and its language or origin. It is usually necessary to know the meaning of a word in order