Language Matters | How the word ‘mangrove’ has contested etymological roots
- While most agree the word ‘mangrove’ derives from Portuguese, there is debate as to what its exact origin is
- July 26 is International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem; mangroves are disappearing three to five times faster than global forest losses
“[A]mongst all the rest there growes a kinde of tree called Mangrowes, they grow very strangely, & would make a man wonder to see the manner of their growing.”
This 1615 account from Bermuda was one of the earliest descriptions in English of the ecosystem once unfamiliar to Europeans – mangroves.
Inter-tidal forests, found on sheltered coastlines in the tropics and subtropics, mangroves comprise salt-tolerant trees bearing characteristic partially exposed networks of roots. Mangrove forests – hùhng syuh làhm 紅樹林 “red tree forest”, after the reddish wood of the Rhizophoraceae – are found in 60 locations across Hong Kong.
Other 17th and 18th century attestations in English also hark from the West Indies, while a 1597 English translation of an early European description of Central Africa (in Portuguese, translated from an Italian account) mentions “the tree which is called Manghi”.
These support the etymology of the word “mangrove” deriving from the 16th century Portuguese mangue – consistent with the significant influence of the Portuguese during the Age of Discovery – which, in turn, is suggested as coming from Taino, an Arawak language, spoken by the indigenous peoples then inhabiting the Caribbean region.
Mangue evolved into mangrove, possibly modelled after the English “grove”. In parallel, mangle was borrowed from Spanish, and is still used in Caribbean English.