How it began
ALUPEC, the Alfabeto Unificado para a Escrita do Caboverdiano, emerged in 1994. It grew out of the alphabet proposed in 1979 at a linguistic colloquium held in Mindelo. In 1998 the Council of Ministers of Cape Verde approved it on a trial basis through Decree-Law 67/98; the text of the decree states that the alphabet is approved "a título experimental". The trial was set at five years, and its introduction in schools was to be considered only afterward.
How it works
ALUPEC is a phonemic system based on the Latin script. It states which letter represents each sound, with almost every letter standing for one sound and almost every sound written with one letter. Descriptions give 23 letters and four digraphs, such as dj, lh, nh and tx; k is used for the hard c sound and x for the sh sound. It does not fix spelling rules, so writers spell according to their own island variety. Accents mark stress and vowel quality.
Who pushed back
The system is not fully consistent. In the Barlavento varieties the letter e is written where a vowel is not pronounced, so some words can be read two ways. Because ALUPEC sets letters and not spellings, Cape Verdean Creole writing remains unstandardized. Official recognition did not make it mandatory, and the 2005 resolution allows other writing models if they are presented in a systematic and scientific way.
What changed first
In 2005 the government recognized ALUPEC as a viable system for writing Cape Verdean Creole, the first alphabet to gain that status. In 2009 Decree-Law 8/2009 institutionalized its use. A collection of Cape Verdean language laws at Université Laval records the same sequence, from experimental approval under Decree-Law 67/98 to the later act.
