Sri Lankan Portuguese creole

In 1517, the Portuguese, attracted by the island's spices and strategic position (midway between their holdings on the west coast of India and Malacca), sent an expedition from Goa to establish a trading post at Colombo.[3] They introduced Christianity to the island, and granted special favors to those who converted. Using the unstable political situation on the island to their advantage, the Portuguese soon gained the position of guardians of the nominal monarch of southern Sri Lanka. In 1557, Dharmapala, who was the king at Kotte, near Colombo, and had suzerainty over Kandy and Jaffna (the other two kingdoms) was baptized Dom João Dharmapala breaking a 1,850-year-old tradition as a Christian king sat on the Sinhalese throne. Several Sri Lankan aristocrats and others followed the King and converted.[2] In 1597, Dharmapala, the last king of the Kotte, died childless, and willed his realm to Philip I, king of Portugal. In 1617, with the annexation of Jaffna, Portuguese authority extended over the entire lowland zone.[3] Catholicism continued to spread, but the Portuguese did not train an indigenous clergy, so it was simply a microcosm of the church in Portugal.

The Dutch were in contact with the Kandyan court as early as 1602, but it wasn't until 1632 that the Kandyan monarch, Raja Sinha II, invited Dutch cooperation in expelling the Portuguese from the island. A long period of conflict ensued, including the Dutch takeover of Batticaloa in 1638, and ending with the fall of Mannar and Jaffna in 1658. When Raja Sinha II realized that the Dutch were not about to deliver their new conquests to him, the alliance quickly dissolved into enmity. The Dutch East India Company was primarily interested in commercial profits and resisted engaging in costly military operations against Kandy. During the Dutch reign, 1761–1766, was the only period of outright war.[2] The Dutch also maltreated the Catholics and forced conversions to the Calvinist faith, the Catholic Church fell to its foundations as Catholic marriages, practice of the faith, and priests were forbidden by the Dutch. Catholics met secretly at each other's homes to practice their faith. At this time, the Catholic Church may have disappeared completely in Sri Lanka had it not been for the work of Goan priests who came to the island to save Catholicism.[3]

The Portuguese reached India in 1498, before coming to Sri Lanka in 1505. By that time a distinct pidgin of Portuguese had probably begun to develop, and this was used as the basis for communication with the new territory's inhabitants. There is very little documented evidence of the linguistic situation at the time, however, it is clear that by the early 17th century a Portuguese-based pidgin was in use in the Portuguese controlled littoral, and was not unknown in the kingdom of Kandy because of its frequent dealings with outsiders. Also, a creole community had been established consisting of two groups or creole speakers: the Topazes (Tupasses, mestiços, etc.), "dark-skinned or half-cast people claiming Portuguese descent, and Christian profession, and Kaffirs (Caffres, etc.), or Bantus".[2]

The Topazes were children of local or half-caste mothers and Portuguese or half-caste fathers. They would have been exposed to pidgin/creole Portuguese at home. They identified with Portuguese, a natural occurrence, considering that the Portuguese were at the apex of the social order, though they probably had local family ties as well. The Portuguese brought a small number of Bantu slaves (Kaffirs) to Sri Lanka from the eastern African Great Lakes region. These people would have spoken pidgin Portuguese, and it is likely that many were native creole speakers, but maybe not of the Sri Lanka variety. Because they mainly served as domestic servants, they would have introduced the very young children of Casados (married men who had come with their Portuguese wives as settlers to Sri Lanka) to the pidgin/creole. There may have also been children of chance unions of Portuguese or Topazes with Kaffirs, but it is unclear which group they would have belonged to.[2]

Sri Lanka was a Dutch colony from 1658 to 1796. During this time there was Dutch influence on the language, and possibly the development of a Portuguese–Dutch Creole. There may still be a few speakers of this in Wattala, a suburb of Colombo.[5] However, the majority of Dutch Burghers spoke Dutch, Portuguese, English, or Portuguese Creole.[6][7]

Today, the language is spoken by descendants of Topazes and Mestiços, the Portuguese Burgher community, in the Eastern towns of Batticaloa (Koolavaddy, Mamangam, Uppodai, Dutch Bar, Akkaraipattu) and Trincomalee (Palayuttu). However, there are also speakers among the remaining Kaffirs, descendants of Bantu slaves, in the Northwestern province, in Puttalam and in Mannar. Additionally, in the village of Wahakotte near Galewala, in central Sri Lanka, there is a small community of Catholics with partial Portuguese ancestry, where the language was spoken until two generations ago.

Batticaloa is a medium-sized coastal town in the Eastern Province that has always been an isolated outpost, and has been able to retain many ancient habits. This isolation has been a factor in the preservation of SLPC, but very little information exists about the town's history. Tamil speakers are the overwhelming majority, but there is also a concentrated community of SLPC speaking Burghers. In the early part of the century most Burghers lived close to the center of the town, but more recently, many have moved to outlying areas. All of the Burghers in Batticaloa speak Tamil, many of them better than they do SLPC, and some also speak Sinhala and/or English. The group has no contact with any other creole speakers on the island, and the creole has for a long time been losing ground to Tamil. Currently, decreasing competence can be observed over successive generations: the younger a Burgher, the less likely they are to know the creole, and if they can speak it, their speech exhibits more Tamil features than that of their parents. Members of the burgher community are in constant interaction with Tamil speakers as they live, work, play, study, and worship together. Burgher children learn Tamil at the same time that they learn the creole. It is difficult to determine how many of Batticaloa's Burghers speak SLPC, but most probably understand it, though in many homes Tamil has become the predominant language.[3]

The language is facing extinction, as it is now only used at home and few are able to speak it well. Throughout Sri Lanka many SLPC speakers have emigrated to other countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States and Europe. There are still 100 Burgher families in Batticaloa and Trincomalee and 80 Kaffir families in Puttalam that speak the language. SLPC was very prominent in the past, continuing to be in use despite predictions that it would die out, but current prospects for its survival are equally as bleak as in the past.

An early sample of the language was collected by Hugh Nevill, a British civil servant stationed in Sri Lanka in the late 19th century. Among his large collection of oriental manuscripts is the Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole Manuscript, containing over a thousand verses and a long text in prose.

Precise phonological knowledge of the Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole (SLPC) is limited. The earliest analysis of the language comes from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but since the research was based purely on written data, it lacks insight on how speech was actually produced. The only complete study that includes phonological analysis of native speakers seems to be Ian R Smith's thesis which was published in 1978. His research surveyed the Creole-speaking people living in the Batticaloa area of Sri Lanka. It can be assumed, unless otherwise indicated, that the phonological information about SLPC in the section on vowels and consonants is solely from his thesis, due to the lack of similar resources of a precise nature.

Like many creoles, SLPC is made up of lexical items from an array of different sources. There is, of course, much influence from the indigenous languages like Tamil and Sinhala. Portuguese had a vast impact on this creole, and there are also traces of Dutch and English. It was also most likely influenced by other creoles and varieties of Indo-Portuguese, as the island was visited frequently by traders from Goa and other Portuguese settlements like Daman, and Diu. The similarities with other Indo-Portuguese creoles may also be, however, due to similar circumstances and traits of the languages from which they stem. There is also some Malay influences and loan words.[4]

Example of Portuguese origin words:

Example of Tamil / Sinhala origin words:

The normal sentence structure of standard Portuguese (SP) is subject verb object (SVO). In Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole (SLPC), SVO dominates, but SOV and OSV also occur.[4] The syntax structure is similar to that of Tamil. For example, the verb has been reduced to a single form, and tense-mood-aspect markers (lo, te, ja) indicate the future, present and past tenses; that is, lo leva (SLPC): levará (SP) 'he will carry'; te folga (SLPC): folgam (SP) 'they rejoice'; ja olha (SLPC): olhei (SP) 'I saw.' [8] (see 'phrase samples' below)

Also, 'se' the conditional marker, comes at the end of the utterance like in:[4]
ja pepiya se                   nosse jentis dos pesam tinhe se
'if [they] speak.'                  'if two of our people are [there].'

In standard Portuguese, the conditional marker 'se' usually comes at the beginning of the utterance:
se eu vou contigo, eu vou dirigir.             se soubesse do bem que me faz!
"if I go with you, I will drive."             "if [he/she] knew the good it does me!"

• Sri Lanka Kaffir people
• Portuguese period in Ceylon
• Burgher people
• Dutch period in Ceylon

• Callaway, John (1820). A vocabulary in the Ceylon Portuguese, and English languages, with a series of familiar phrases. Colombo: Wesleyan Mission Press.
• Dalgado, Sebastião Rodolfo (1900). Dialecto Indo-Português de Ceylão. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional.
• Smith, Ian Russell (1977). Sri Lanka Creole Portuguese phonology (Ph.D. thesis). Cornell University.

• Sri Lanka Portuguese Creoles at a Sri Lanka virtual library site.
• Documentation of Sri Lanka Portuguese Cardoso, Hugo C. 2017. London: SOAS, Endangered Languages Archive
• APiCS Online - Survey chapter: Sri Lanka Portuguese