Origins

Patuá arose in Macau after the territory was occupied by Portugal in the mid-16th century and became a major hub of the Portuguese naval, commercial, and religious activities in East Asia.

The language developed first mainly among the descendants of Portuguese settlers. These often married women from Portuguese Malacca, Portuguese India and Portuguese Ceylon rather than from neighbouring China, so the language had strong Malay and Sinhala influence from the beginning. In the 17th century it was further influenced by the influx of immigrants from other Portuguese colonies in Asia, especially from Portuguese Malacca, Indonesia, and Portuguese Ceylon, that had been displaced by the Dutch expansion in the East Indies, and Japanese Christian refugees.

Evolution

Like any other language, Macanese underwent extensive changes in usage, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary over the centuries, in response to changes in Macau's demographics and cultural contacts. Some linguists see a sharp distinction between the "archaic" Macanese, spoken until the early 19th century, and the "modern" form that was strongly influenced by Cantonese. The modern version arose in the late 19th century, when Macanese men began marrying Chinese women from Macau and its hinterland in the Pearl River delta. The British occupation of Hong Kong from the mid-19th century also added many English words to the lexicon.

Over its history the language also acquired elements from several other Indian tongues and a string of other European and Asian languages. These varied influences made Macanese a unique "cocktail" of European and Asian languages.

Macanese lawyer and Patuá supporter Miguel Senna Fernandes^[4] has said that Patuá was "not yet dead, but the archaic form of Patuá has already died," adding that "modern" Patuá could be considered a "dialect derived from archaic Patuá." He also underlined the fact that "modern" Patuá has been strongly influenced by Cantonese, namely since the beginning of the 20th century, adding that it was "quite a miracle" that Patuá has been able to survive for four centuries in Macau, considering that "Chinese culture is quite absorbing."

"Let's revive an almost lost memory," Fernandes said about efforts by Patuá aficionados to ensure the survival of Macau's "sweet language" that, after all, is part of its unique history.^[5]

Cultural importance

The language played an important role in Macau's social and commercial development between the 16th and 19th centuries, when it was the main language of communication among Macau's Eurasian residents. However, even during that period the total number of speakers was relatively small, probably always amounting to just thousands, not tens of thousands of people.

Macanese continued to be spoken as the mother tongue of several thousand of people, in Macau, Hong Kong and elsewhere, through 19th and early 20th century. At that time, Macanese speakers were consciously using the language in opposition to the standard Portuguese of the metropolitan administration. In the early 20th century, for example, it was the vehicle of satirical sketches poking fun at Portuguese authorities. A few writers, such as the late poet José dos Santos Ferreira ("Adé"), chose the "sweet language" as their creative medium.

On the other hand, Macanese never enjoyed any official status, and was never formally taught in Macau. Starting in the late 19th century, its role in the life of the colony was greatly diminished by the central government's drive to establish standard Portuguese throughout its territories. High-society Macanese gradually stopped using it in the early 20th century, because of its perceived "low class" status as a "primitive Portuguese". All people, including many Chinese learning Portuguese as their second or third language, are required to learn standard European Portuguese.

Present status

Macanese use was already in decline while Macau was a Portuguese territory, and that situation is unlikely to improve now that the territory is under Chinese administration. Still, its speakers take great pride in the fact that Macau has its own local language, something that Hong Kong does not have. They argue that Macau's unique status as a 500-year-old bridge between Orient and the Occident justifies deliberate efforts to preserve the Macanese language. The language is included in UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.^[2]

In spite of its unique character and centuries-old history, Macanese has received scant attention from linguists. Philologist Graciete Nogueira Batalha (1925–1992) published a number of papers on the language. A Macanese-Portuguese glossary was published in 2001.

Classification and related languages

Macanese is a creole language, that is, the result of a fusion of several languages and local innovations that became the mother tongue of a community. As such, it is difficult to classify within any major family.

Because of its historical development, it is closely related to other Portuguese- and Malay-influenced creoles of Southeast Asia, notably the Kristang language of Malacca and the extinct Portuguese-influenced creoles of Indonesia and Flores, as well as to the Indo-Portuguese creoles of Sri Lanka and India.

Lexicon

Phonology

The phonology of Macanese is relatively similar to European Portuguese, however there is a slightly tonal or sing-songy quality, possibly as an influence of Malay and/or Cantonese. Unlike Cantonese however, the tones largely do not differentiate otherwise homophones.

Grammar

There has been little scientific research of Macanese grammar, much less on its development between the 16th and 20th centuries. Its grammatical structure seems to incorporate both European and Asian elements.

Like most Asian languages, Macanese lacks definite articles (but has an indefinite article unga), and does not inflect verbs: for example, io sâm means "I am," and êle sâm means "he/she is".

Macanese also lacks pronoun cases (io or iou means "I," "me" and "mine"), and forms possessive pronouns using the suffix -sua or -sa; for example, ilôtro-sua or ilôtro-sa means "theirs", while iou-sua or io-sa means "my". Certain possessive pronouns are however retained from Portuguese; minha is used as a synonym to iou-sa in emotional situations as well as in the header of letters, while nôsso and vôsso are also used in Macanese for the first-person plural possessive pronoun and the second-person singular possessive pronoun respectively, in addition to nôs-sa and vôs-sa. su, from Indo-Portuguese su and earlier Galician-Portuguese seu, is also used in Macanese as a third-person (and rarely, second-person) reflexive possessive pronoun, used standalone instead of as a particle attached to a pronoun. In both speech and literature, -sa is more common than -sua, and the Glossário do dialecto macaense (1988) has -sa as one of its entries, only mentioning -sua in its description.

In general, pronouns in Macanese are not gendered, however some speakers may use êla to indicate "she" or "her", as opposed to using êle for all genders. Macanese is also nominally pro-drop, even despite the lack of verb conjugations; the subject of a sentence must therefore be inferred through context. Both pronoun features (gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, pro-drop) are likely influences from Cantonese.

Progressive action (denoted in English by the "-ing" verbal forms) is denoted by a separate particle tâ, presumably derived from Portuguese está ("it is"). Completed actions are likewise indicated by the particle já, presumably from Portuguese já ("right now" or "already"), while nunca is used for things in the past which did not happen. lôgo (from Portuguese logo ("soon")) may be used for the positive future tense, while nádi is used for the negative future tense. But in general, grammatical tense may not be indicated at all, and would require a listener or reader to infer from either context or time words such as onte ("yesterday") or amanhâm ("tomorrow").

Past participles are generally formed by appending -do to the verb root, same as in Portuguese. However, past participles in Macanese are relatively rare and often only serve as adjectives denoting the current state and change in state of something, for example estricâ rópa ("to iron clothes") → rópa estricado ("ironed clothes, clothes that have been ironed"), or durmí ("to sleep") → ficâ durmido ("to fall asleep", lit. "to become asleep"). Otherwise, some past participles, especially irregular ones, may be inherited directly from Portuguese, for example fêto ("done") from Portuguese feito rather than forming *fazedo from fazê ("to do").

Reduplication is used to make plural nouns (casa-casa = "houses"), plural adjectives (china-china = "several Chinese people or things"), and emphatic adverbs (cedo-cedo = "very early"), a pattern also found in Malay grammar. Otherwise, some nouns may be pluralized with no reduplication, especially when the amount of the noun is not important to the main idea of the sentence, and the pluralization is instead implied through context.

In older Macanese, it was more common for partial reduplication to take place, where only the first syllable of a multisyllabic word, or the first consonant (if any) + first vowel in a monosyllabic word, would be duplicated, for example fu-fula ("flowers") from fula ("flower"). This has nearly disappeared in modern Macanese in favour of full reduplication, that is a duplication of the entire word, i.e. fula-fula for "flowers". Among the most common Macanese words, only two still use partial reduplication: nhunhum ("men") from nhum ("man"), and nhonhônha ("women") from nhonha ("woman"). In other cases, partial reduplication has formed words with entirely different meanings to the original word, for example chuchupa ("paper cone used to hold roasted peanuts or chestnuts") from chupa, a (traditionally cylindrical) cubic measure descended from Malay cupak.

Similarly to Chavacano, na is used to indicate "in", "at", or "on"; but unlike Chavacano, pa (from Portuguese para) is used to indicate "to" or "towards".

di (literally "of", from Portuguese de) can also be used to connect nouns with adjectives, for example casa qui di largo meaning "large house", or combined with bêm ("well") to mean "very", for example bêm-di filiz meaning "very happy".

Superlative and comparative forms are usually simply created by using más ("more; most") before the adjective or adverb, for example más bôm (lit. "more good") and más bêm (lit. "more well") meaning "better". Some irregular comparative forms may be inherited from Portuguese, such as pió ("worse") from Portuguese pior.

There are also some other less significant grammatical constructions derived from Cantonese, for example the usage of verb-not-verb for asking yes-no questions, e.g. (vôs) quêro-nôm-quêro meaning "do you want".

Common function words (time words, indefinite article, etc.) may sometimes have apocopic or aphetic forms. For example, abrí unga janela ("open a window") may become abrí'nga janela, or já uví? ("did you hear?") may become j'uví?. This however depends on the speaker and is not standard or mandatory, unlike in French.

Writing system

Patuá has no standardized orthography. A common orthography was first proposed by José dos Santos Ferreira, and the current most common orthography is largely based on Ferreira's 1996 Papiaçám di Macau, itself based mostly on the Portuguese orthography.

In the de-facto standard orthography, the circumflex (â, ê, ô) or acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú) are used to indicate syllable stress and open-vowel pronunciation, especially in the case of monosyllabic words. This contrasts with the Malay-based orthography of Kristang, which often uses -h after a vowel to indicate stress. The tilde is generally not used, except sometimes in the word sã (usually written as sâm or sam).

Maquista Chapado (2004) recommends using the circumflex for closed stressed a, e and o, the acute accent for (semi-)open stressed a, e and o, as well as stressed i, u in a word-final position,^[9] although this is not always followed in practice. For example, the word meaning "bread" (which descends from Portuguese pão) is recommended to be written as pám, however other sources (including but not limited to certain parts in Maquista Chapado itself) may instead use pâm.

The -ão suffix in Portuguese usually becomes -ám in Macanese if stressed, for example coraçám ("heart") from Portuguese coração; or -a if unstressed, for example bênça from Portuguese bênção, although -âm is generally more common in monosyllabic words descended from -ão, as outlined with pâm earlier. -ám is also used to spell -ang from Malay/Indonesian or Cantonese, for example saiám ("what a pity!; missing") from Malay sayang. -âm is sometimes also used in multisyllabic words if the Portuguese word ends in a non-diphthongal nasal vowel, for example amanhâm from Portuguese amanhã.

In general, it is recommended both by Ferreira and Maquista Chapado to use -m for the word-final nasal consonant /-ŋ/, while -n may be used to denote a nasal consonant when following a vowel and preceding a consonant, for example /aŋˈkuza/ → ancusa rather than amcusa or angcusa.

One exception is the indefinite article unga, pronounced /ˈuŋa/, same as the Galician unha. Some Macanese sources may spell it instead as ung'a, to prevent the word from being pronounced as /ˈuŋɡa/ (which some speakers do anyway). This also applies to its derived terms, such as estunga ("this") or cadunga ("each"). Multi-word Cantonese loanwords may also retain ng, but monosyllabic Cantonese words generally still use -m, for example sôm ("food; a dish") from Cantonese 「餸」 (Jyutping: sung³), or tôm-tôm ("a piece of candy") from reduplication of Cantonese 「糖」 ("sugar; candy", Jyutping: tong^4-2).

When /e/ is reduced or otherwise morphed into /i/ or /ɪ/, it is often spelt phonetically with ⟨i⟩, for example fichâ and qui compared to Portuguese fechar and que. Likewise, when /o/ becomes /u/ in Macanese, or when Macanese inherits a dialectal Portuguese form which uses /u/ instead of /o/, it is also directly spelt as ⟨u⟩, such as durmí ("to sleep") from Portuguese dormir. Etymological ⟨s⟩ pronounced as /z/ may be written either as ⟨s⟩ or ⟨z⟩, for example cuza ("what, which") and ancusa ("thing") both derive from dated Portuguese cousa, but are spelt differently. /s/ between vowels is often written as "ss" like in Swiss German, for example in the word bassâ /baˈsa/ ("to lower").

Portuguese /ʒ/ may be written as either ⟨g⟩, ⟨j⟩ or ⟨z⟩, the former two deriving from Portuguese orthography, for example Portuguese fingir may become fingí or finzí. This sometimes leads to inconsistencies between the most common spelling and actual pronunciation, for example hoze ("today", from Portuguese hoje) may be pronounced /ˈɔd͡ʒi/ by some speakers.

Otherwise, the de-facto standard orthography tends to follow Portuguese orthographic rules, for example silent ⟨h⟩ in Portuguese words, -n or -m after a vowel to indicate nasalization (although -n may simply be /n/, especially in Cantonese loanwords), ⟨i⟩ before/after a vowel to represent /j/, or using ⟨c⟩ for /k/ before ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩, and ⟨u⟩ (compare Macanese cacús with Indonesian kakus), and ⟨ç⟩ for non-word-initial /s/ before those vowels, even in foreign words. Words borrowed from Cantonese may use an orthography similar to the Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation, for example leong-fan ("grass jelly") borrowed from Cantonese 涼粉.