Origins

The Kristang language originated after the conquest of Malacca (Malaysia) in 1511 by the Portuguese Empire. Until a takeover by the Dutch in 1642, Malacca served as one of the key ports in the trade and administration network of Portuguese establishments along with Goa and Hormuz, allowing Portugal control over main Asiatic trade routes. The lingua franca of Malacca then was a pidginised form of Malay known as Bazaar Malay or Melayu Pasar, used amongst the resident foreign population which then consisted mainly of Javanese, Tamils and Hokkien Chinese. The constant traffic of Portuguese and traders of other origins such as India eventually gave birth to Papia Kristang, one of many Portuguese-derived contact languages which resulted from Portuguese colonial expansion during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A pidgin Portuguese preceding the Kristang creole has also been proposed, whereby a reduced system based on Portuguese converges with other languages present in the contact situation.^[6]

The community of Kristang speakers descends mainly from interracial relationships between Portuguese men and local women, as well as a number of migrants from Portuguese India, themselves of mixed Indo-Portuguese ancestry. This was supported by Portuguese officials who advocated mixed marriages in the face of a labour shortage in the colonies, leading to the very first native speakers of Kristang as well as the development of the creole.^[7]

Even after Portugal lost Malacca and almost all contact in 1641, the Kristang community largely preserved its language. The demographics of Malacca in the mid-17th century was still predominantly made up of the Portuguese even under Dutch control. The Irmang di Greza (Brothers of the Church), a manifestation of the bond between language and religion in the Kristang culture, acted as an intermediary between the priest and the remnants of the Portuguese population despite prohibition by the Dutch. Liturgy and pastoral sessions were conducted in Kristang in Malacca, which contributed to the longevity of the language into a period as late as the 20th century.

Kristang also had a substantial influence on Macanese, the creole language spoken in Macau, due to substantial migration from Malacca after its conquest by the Dutch.

Attrition of Kristang

The ceding of Malacca by the Dutch to the British via the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 directly caused the decline of the Kristang language. By the mid 19th century, many Kristangs flocked towards clerical and auxiliary positions provided by their new colonial masters. As such, the Kristang language saw a decline in use compared to English. In addition, the rising affluence of the region meant more job opportunities, resulting in many Kristangs moving away from Malacca. Moreover, the language is not taught at school, although there are still some Church services in Kristang.

In the context of Singapore, Kristang arrived in the 1820s due to the large influx of Eurasian immigrants from Malacca.^[8] This resulted in a Kristang-speaking community large enough for the variety of the language spoken in Singapore to be acknowledged as a distinct variety of Creole Portuguese.^[9] However, there was little exposure and recognition of Kristang in Singapore, especially when English became entrenched as the sole language of education and the major language used in most spheres of society after the country gained independence in 1965. As a result, the intergenerational transmission of Kristang ceased almost completely.^[10]

The upkeep of Kristang can largely be attributed to its connection with the dominant religion of the Portuguese and their relative social standing in their communities between the 1600s to the late 1800s. The core Kristang-speaking communities gradually eroded due to better socioeconomic opportunities elsewhere. Post-World War Two, the new generation of Catholic priests that arrived to replace the pre-war priests who had been executed demonstrated little sensitivity towards the Kristang language and culture. Eventually, the bond between Kristang and religion was severed due to the association of the Portuguese Mission with the St Xavier's Church.^[11]

Migration overseas and intermarriage with other nationalities have also led to Kristang speakers leaving the Portuguese Settlement in order to live and work in other parts of Malaysia. Furthermore, the dominantly Kristang-speaking middle-class gradually began to speak English for practical reasons, altering the prestige of English with regards to Kristang. To many in the community, they grew to accept that speaking English was a key to employment instead of Kristang, facilitating a breakdown in the transmission of Kristang.

Revitalisation efforts

Papia Kristang is facing a steep decline in language use within the community.^[12] There has been an apparent language shift to English and Bahasa Malaysia due to the reduced prestige and accessibility of Kristang. However, revitalization efforts have begun in recent years in both the Portuguese Settlement in Singapore and Malacca. Such efforts have seen some success, nearly tripling the number of Kristang speakers of varying fluency.

Consonants

Orthographic note:
Using a Malay-based orthography, the sounds are represented orthographically by their symbols as above, except:

• /ɲ/ is written as ⟨ny⟩
• /ŋ/ is written as ⟨ng⟩
• /tʃ/ is written as ⟨c⟩ (or ⟨ch⟩, a pre-1972 Malay letter)
• /dʒ/ is written as ⟨j⟩

Portuguese words which begin with ⟨ch⟩, pronounced [ʃ] ("sh") in modern Portuguese, are often pronounced as [tʃ] ("ch") in Kristang, e.g.:

• Portuguese chegar /ʃɨˈɡar/ → Kristang chegak /tʃəɡak/ "to arrive"
• Portuguese chuva /ˈʃuvɐ/ → Kristang chua /tʃua/ "rain"

This may be due to Malay influence, or the preservation of an Old Portuguese pronunciation [tʃ] in Kristang. It is also worth noting that Northern Portugal also retains the Portuguese [tʃ] pronunciation.

Vowels

The inventory of vowel phonemes in Kristang is also highly similar to Standard Malay vowel phonemes, which can be seen in the table above.

Stress and rhythm

Kristang is a syllable-timed language (not unlike Malay which also displays syllable-based rhythm).

According to Baxter (2004), most polysyllabic words in Kristang can be classified into two large groups based on the stress position in the word.^[24]

Stress Rule A

Most words which end in a vowel have tonic stress on the penultimate syllable.

Stress Rule B

Most words which end in a consonant have tonic stress on the final syllable.

However, stress pattern is not completely predictable in Kristang, as there are also certain words which are exceptions to the above two rules.

Exception to Rule A

Verbs which end in a stressed vowel (e.g. kumi 'to eat'). Attention should be paid to the lexical stress in such instances as it brings about a difference in meaning (e.g. kaza 'house' vs kaza 'to marry").

Some vowel-ending words are also stressed on the antepenultimate syllable instead. (such as familia 'family', animu 'valour')

Exception to Rule B

Some consonant-ending words are stressed on the penultimate syllable (such as okel 'spectacles', nobas 'news')

Kristang also displays stress shifting in that many verbs display a tendency to shift their stress from the final syllable to penultimate syllable when followed by a stressed syllable in the next word, especially in rapid speech.

Syntax

Papiá Kristang has Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order in simple sentences. The direct human objects are case-marked by the preposition ku. The same preposition also marks indirect objects. Intransitive clauses, the case-marked indirect object may precede the direct object, especially when the former is pronominal. Noncore arguments are generally located either at the beginning or at the end of the sentence as shown in example (1).

Adversity Passive, which is used to talk about situations where a negative action happens to something, but the person or originator of the negative action is not mentioned something, is also present both in Kristang and Malay. The Adversity Passive is signalled by kena (Malay), and by tokah (Kristang).

For complex sentences, the phrases and clauses are joined by coordinating conjunctions ku "with, and", kě "or", and mas "but". There are also instances where object clauses may be headed by ki; however, this is rare and is only found in traditional formal registers, as in a wedding speech. The most frequent means of expressing nominal subordination is parataxis as shown in example (2) and (3).^[31]

Adverbial clauses are headed by antis di "before", kiora "when", chuma "as", kantu "if", padi "in order to", kauzu ki "because", kifoi "because", etc., yet may also be indicated by parataxis without conjunctions.^[6]

Relative clauses are headed by ki "what, who’"(and very rarely by keng "who"), yet also commonly occur with a pronoun head or may occur without it. This can be seen in example (4) and (5).

In Kristang, The noun phrase (NP) is a structure which can occur as subject of a verb, object of a verb, object of a relator or as a predicate.

There are five types of prenominal determiners in Kristang:

Quantifier:

Numeral:

Interrogative determiner:

Demonstrative article:

The demonstratives isi and ake(li) ‘that’ precede the noun and indicate a distance contrast.

Possessive NP + sa :

Adnominal possessives precede the noun and consist of possessor (noun or pronoun) + genitive marker sa (or sě).

In comparative constructions of equality, the adjective is marked by iguál ‘equal’ and standard is marked by ku ‘with’:

In the comparative construction of inequality, the adjective is marked by más ‘more’ and the standard by di ‘of’:

The superlative comparison consists of the comparative of inequality plus a universal standard:

There is only one set of personal pronouns that occurs in all pronominal functions. The 3SG and 3PL pronouns only refer to animates, principally to humans.

Morphology

Pluralisation is also the same in Malay as in Kristang. For example, in English and Portuguese, an ‘–s’ is added to make cats or gatos, whereas in Kristang and Malay, the entire word is duplicated, such as gatu-gatu in Kristang, and kucing-kucing in Malay. Reduplication is not only a feature of the noun class but also a feature of the adjective, adverb and verb classes.^[6] Adjectives and adverbs reduplicate to signify intensity: kěni~kěninu, “quite small, very small”, belu belu “quite old”, sedu sedu “quite/very early”. On the other hand, the interrogative pronouns reduplicate to signify indefiniteness: keng keng (who who) “whoever”, ki ki (what what “whatever”. As for the reduplication of the numerals, dos “two” and tres “three”, it gave the respective readings “in pairs” and “in threes”.^[31]

With nouns, reduplication can signal plurality, often involving partial reduplication: krenkrensa (= krensa + krensa) ‘children’, femfemi (= femi + femi) ‘women’. However, the reduplication of nouns with non-specific reference in object position may yield the meaning ‘all kinds of’ or ‘lots of’:

Without reduplication, the above sentence would simply express plural: ‘birds’.

To indicate verb tenses, the following appositions are used: jah (i.e. from the Portuguese já, meaning "already", or controversially a corruption of Malay dah, shortened version of sudah, also "already") for past tenses; ta (from está, which means "is") for present continuous tenses and logu or lo (from logo, which means "soon") for the future tense. These simplified forms correspond with their equivalents in Malay sudah, sedang, and akan, respectively.

Papiá Kristang has two overt markers of aspect (ja ‘perfective’ and ta ‘imperfective’), an overt marker of future tense (lo(gu)), and a zero marker.

This table summarised the functions of these markers:

Example (15) shows the zero marker (Ø) with a dynamic verb of past or present habitual representation:

Example (16) shows the marker ja with a dynamic verb, with perfective aspect representation:

The marker ta occurs with dynamic verbs in past or present contexts, with either a progressive reading, as in (17), or an iterative reading, as in (18):

The marker lo(go) conveys a future or conditional reading, as in examples (19) and (20), respectively where it occurs with a dynamic verb:

The Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM) markers do not normally co-occur. Combinations of markers are very rare and when they do occur they appear to involve an adverbial reading of the initial marker. Thus, when ja is seen to combine with the imperfective marker ta, ja has the adverbial reading ‘already’ of its Portuguese source:

Numbers

Much of the lexicon for Kristang numbers draws influence from Portuguese, a Romance language. However, unlike Portuguese, which distinguishes between the masculine and feminine forms of “one” (um/uma) and “two” (dois/duas), numbers in Kristang do not inflect for gender.

Pronouns

A peculiarity of the language is the pronoun yo (meaning "I") which is used in Northern Portuguese (pronounced as yeu), as well as Spanish and Italian/Sicilian.

Common phrases

Poem of Malacca

Keng teng fortuna fikah na Malaka,

Nang kereh partih bai otru tera.

Pra ki tudu jenti teng amizadi,

Kontu partih logu fikah saudadi.

Oh Malaka, tera di San Francisku,

Nteh otru tera ki yo kereh.

Oh Malaka undi teng sempri fresku,

Yo kereh fikah ateh mureh.

Portuguese translation:

Quem tem fortuna fica em Malaca,

Não quer partir para outra terra.

Por aqui toda a gente tem amizade,

Quando tu partes logo fica a saudade.

Ó Malaca, terra de São Francisco,

Não tem outra terra que eu queira.

Ó Malaca, onde tem sempre frescura,

Eu quero ficar até morrer.

English translation:

Who is lucky stays in Malacca,

Doesn't want to go to another land.

In here everyone has friendship,

When one leaves soon has saudade.

Oh Malacca, land of Saint Francis,

There is no other land that I want.

Oh Malacca, where there's always freshness,

I want to stay here until I die.

Malay translation:

Siapa beruntung tinggal di Melaka,

Tidak mahu ke tanah berbeza.

Di sini semua bersahabat,

Bila seorang pergi terasa rindu.

Oh Melaka, tanah Saint Francis,

Tiada tanah lain yang ku mahu.

Oh Melaka, dimana adanya kesegaran,

Aku mahu tinggal di sini hingga ke akhir nyawa.