Essential Portuguese phrases

'We're together.' The national sign-off — ending a call, leaving a meeting, closing a WhatsApp message. It carries an obligation, not just warmth: you are saying you are on the person's side. Answering it with a flat 'tchau' reads cold.

An elder, or anyone senior enough to be owed deference. Used as a title in front of a name and as a standalone address. Getting this right in a room is more important than your Portuguese grammar: Angola is a country where age order structures who speaks first.

A kid. Also thrown at an adult who is behaving like one. The counterpart to kota, and the pair together map the whole social hierarchy in two words.

A problem, a dispute, an argument. 'Há maka' means something has gone wrong; 'sem maka' means it is sorted. Useful precisely because it is vaguer than the Portuguese equivalents — people use it to flag trouble without naming it.

To leave, to clear off. 'Bora bazar' — let's get out of here. Nothing to do with a marketplace, which trips up every Portuguese speaker who arrives from Lisbon.

A lot, very, loads. 'Bué de trânsito.' Angolan in origin and now completely naturalised in European Portuguese slang — one of the clearest cases of the linguistic traffic running from Luanda to Lisbon rather than the other way.

To work — but with an edge of grind to it. 'Vou bumbar' is closer to 'I'm off to graft' than 'I'm going to the office'. Nobody says it about a comfortable job.

House, place, home. From Kimbundu. You will hear it constantly in rental conversations, and hearing it rather than 'casa' tells you you are talking to someone who grew up here rather than to an agency.

The blue-and-white Toyota Hiace minibus that carries most of Luanda, and also its driver. Routes are fixed but unmarked; the cobrador hangs from the door shouting the destination. Fares are unregulated and jump every time fuel does.

The woman who walks the traffic and the pavements selling from a basin on her head — fruit, phone credit, fish, hangers. Zungueiras are the retail layer of the informal economy and a genuine political subject here, with their own associations and a long history of run-ins with the fiscais.

Money. 'Não tenho kumbu' is the everyday way to say you are broke. Related street usage: 'guito'. You will hear both far more than 'dinheiro'.

The staple: a stiff porridge of cassava flour, eaten with the right hand, pinched and dipped. In the north it is cassava, in the south maize (pirão). Eaten with muamba de galinha or calulu, it is the plate Angola defines itself by.

Chicken cooked in dendém — red palm oil — with okra, garlic and jindungo chilli. The national dish, and the thing to order the first time someone takes you out. Muamba de ginguba is the peanut version.

Chilli, and the pepper sauce made from it that sits on every table. Angolan cooking is not itself very hot; the heat is added by you, at the plate. Ask for it — declining marks you as a visitor.

The slow, close partner dance and the music behind it, born in Luanda in the 1980s out of semba and Cape Verdean zouk. It is danced socially by everyone, not performed — and the word itself just means a party.