What language is minha Mae?

Answer 1

It is Portuguese for "my mother." Florens (in Toni Morrison's novel Mercy) uses the phrase. The only reason Florens would use Portuguese, as far as I know, is that her first owner, called "Senhor" in the book, is from Portugal. I do not think her ancestors in Africa are likely to have spoken Portuguese. John Updike writes in the New York Times:

'Minha mãe,' research reveals, is Portuguese for 'my mother,' and in time we come to comprehend that it is 1690 in Virginia, and that the narrator is a sixteen-year-old black girl called Florens, who was, at her mother's plea, impulsively adopted, eight years ago, by a white proprietor ('Sir' to Florens), in partial settlement of a debt owed him by an insolvent slave owner from Portugal called 'Senhor.'

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I'm someone else adding to this answer:

As a woman of mixed black and Portuguese descent, I'd like to correct the above answer's statement that Florens' ancestors in Africa "are (not) likely to have spoken Portuguese". Since millions of Africans in dozens of Portuguese-African colonies all speak the language of my ancestors, especially in Cape Verde, and my own ancestors were black and Indian Portuguese but came from the Azores, how can you say this? Portuguese is the second-most-often spoken European language in Africa. Portugal was also one of the few European colonizers who treated their colonized with fairness and compassion, and mixed with them openly with no penalties for the race mixers. This is one reason Brazil looks and sounds the way it does.

"A minha mãe" is correct Portuguese for "my mother". You forgot the article. Unique among languages, Portuguese always retains the definite or indefinite article before all nouns, regardless of adjective inclusion. Not to be snarky, but you should know Portuguese before commenting on it.

I am Portuguese.

--- How can colonization and slavery be fair and compassionate?

---To correct a claim by the person of "black and Portuguese descent" above, Portuguese is not "unique among languages" in requiring an article before all nouns, "regardless of adjective inclusion." French is the same way. Perhaps some other Latin languages require articles as well.

Also, the Portuguese did not "treat their colonized with fairness and compassion". They have as brutal a record of murder, mutilation, and enslavement as any European country operating in Africa. And their genocide of the indigenous population in what would become Brazil is well documented, very much the same sort of behavior seen in other white nationalities. Like other Europeans in the Americas, they slaughtered, enslaved, and worked their charges to death in many instances. And while the Portuguese-founded Brazil did have the largest population of "freedmen" in the Americas, the country was also the last to officially renounce slavery, in 1888. Its current diversity is due in large part to the huge numbers of Africans brought to the country as slaves and is no more a sign of enlightenment and compassion than the fact that the US South has the greatest number of blacks in that country.

Answer 2

"Minha mãe" is Portuguese for "my mother."