Endangered Language in Macao: Review on Patuá Macaense
Language users might tend to take their languages for granted, especially their native languages. Not being aware of the linguistic phenomena could lead to adverse consequences to the language’s survival, i.e. language loss/language death, particularly those minority languages with fewer and fewer speakers left. Thus, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been attempting to examine the ethnolinguistic vitality of world languages and has identified some endangered languages (Moseley, 2010). Little people in Hong Kong know about the existence of a critically endangered language right next to them - the Macanese Patois (Portuguese: Patuá Macaense; Cantonese: 澳門土生葡語) spoken in Macao.
Background
The Macanese Patois, also known as Macau Creole Portuguese (MCP), represents the creole language natively spoken by the Macanese, Macao-born Portuguese Eurasians (Portuguese: Macaense or Maquista/Makista; Cantonese: 土生葡人). Before Macao became a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China in 1999, it had been colonized by Portugal for more than 400 years since 1557. A common misconception is that patois is a linguistic mixture of solely Portuguese and Cantonese. Instead, it is more like a ‘contact variety’ involved by hybridizing Portuguese, Malay and Sinitic (Yue, Min) origins (Ansaldo & Matthews, 2004). The early settling Portuguese men mainly married Malacca and Indian women, first developing the Malacca Creole, before the intermarriage between Portuguese and Chinese increased (Li, 2016) and the formation of Macanese Creole. The exposure to various racial groups also contributed to the creole development, as Macao was a port city along the trading route. Such unique socio-historical contexts brought up the blending of languages, cultures and traditions (Noronha & Chaplin, 2012). It could be observed from the lexicon of the patois, which is evident by the morphological processes involved in the creolization.
Ansaldo and Matthews (2004) identified four main structural features of MCP distinctive to Portuguese, the superstrate/lexifier language, namely the loss of copula (1), the absence of female gender (2), the absence of number distinction (3) and the absence of verbal morphology (4). Examples are drawn from the glossary by Fernandes and Baxter (2004):
- Êle tâ bêm-di filiz. (p. 20)
He so well-PREP happy.
‘He is very happy.’
Note: Presence of é (‘is’) in Portuguese.
- Chapâ perto di noiva. (p. 38-39)
Lean near PREP girlfriend.
‘To snuggle up to one’s girlfriend.’
Note: di would be marked as da in Portuguese since noiva is a feminine noun.
- Siára-siára quelóra comprâ sôm têm qui chipi-cherâ tudo ancuza. (p.43)
Ladies when buy food POSS which examine-in-detail every thing.
‘When women go shopping they look at everything in detail.’
Note: Absence of subject-verb agreement.
(4) Tudo dia sentâ bâs vai comprâ sôm. (p. 18)
Every day sit bus go buy food.
‘I take the bus every day to go shopping.’
Note: Verb form of ‘buy’ in Portuguese is comprar and verb form of ‘sit’ is sentar (1st person singular: sento).
Morphological Process
Reduplication
The reduplication patterns in MCP could be divided into nominal, adjectival, adverbial, verbal and numeral (Ansaldo & Matthews, 2004). The following section will provide examples to illustrate their features:
(5) filo son/child
filo-filo sons/children
(6) nhónha woman
nho-nhónha women
Note: Nhonhônha is the abbreviated form of nhônha-nhônha.
Both (5) and (6) are classic examples of nominal reduplication in the patois. They involved the reduplication of the whole noun, while (6) could be abbreviated to the form of only duplicating the first syllable. The characteristic of partial reduplication could trace back to the influences by Malacca creole and, further, other Austronesian languages, i.e. Malay and Indonesian (Holm, 1989). However, in Malay, partial reduplication does not always indicate plurals like the case in Macanese.
(7) Êla sâm ung’a Maria chalâ-châla.
She be one Maria unkempt-unkempt.
‘She looks very unkempt.’ (Fernandes & Baxter, 2004, p.38)
(8) Gente raba-raba
people common-common
‘common people’ (Fernandes & Baxter, 2004 , p.141)
(9) Nhonhónha chistosa
women attractive
‘Attractive women’ (Santos Ferreira, 1996, p.234)
There are two main observable usages of adjectival reduplication: intensifying the adjective (7) and agreeing or conjugating with plural noun phrases (8). The latter form is not compulsory; another method is conjugating the noun through reduplicating the noun itself (9).
(10) Ele vagar-vagar andâ.
He slowly-slowly walk.
‘He walks slowly.’ (Fernandes & Baxter, 2004, p. 167)
(11) Nhu-nhum mánso-mánso tocá “ti-ti-lim, ti-ti-lim”.
man-man sweet-sweet play [onomatopoeia].
‘The men sweetly play “ti-ti-lim, ti-ti-lim”.’ (Santos Ferreira, 1996, p. 110)
(12) Osh omens tocam suavamente “ti-ti-lim, ti-ti-lim”.
‘The men play sweetly [onomatopedia].’
The reduplicated adverbs in (10) and (11) are both preverbal, which is considered a distinct feature in Macanese Creole. In Portuguese, the identical meaning is conveyed by a postverbal adverb (12), which is also the case in Malay. The preverbal feature could be evidence of the influence of Sinitic grammar. According to Matthews and Yip (1994), in Cantonese, reduplicated adjective or stative verb could occur preverbally to work as adverb (13).
(13) 慢慢 嚟
maan6-maan2 lai4
slow-slow come
‘come slowly’
(14) Ôlo baté-baté
Eye beat-beat
‘To blink quickly’ (Fernandes & Baxter, 2004, p. 119)
Comparing with other word classes, especially noun and adverb, reduplication in verbs is less commonly found in Macanese Creole. Sneddon (1996) stated that reduplicated verbs are associated with the semantic meaning of casual action, repeated action or intensification in Malay, which is also believed to be the case in the patois. In example (14), the action of baté-baté tends to describe a repeated and intensified event of blinking simultaneously, which also belongs to the ‘iconic’ use of reduplicated verbs (Ansaldo & Matthews, 2004).
(15) Unga-unga ta falá.
one-one PROG speak.
‘(They) are speaking one by one.’ (Santos Ferreira, 1996, p.72)
(16) 佢哋 一 個 一 個 離開 。
keoi5dei6 jat1 go3 jat1 go3 lei4hoi1.
They one CL one CL leave.
‘They leave one by one.’
The distributive sense could be explicit by reduplicated numerals, such as unga-unga (‘one by one’) in (15) and dos-dos (‘two by two’). It has the pattern of being in a preverbal position. The impact of Cantonese could play a role in it. As (16) has shown, the reduplicated phrase jat1 go3 jat go3 (‘one by one’) is placed before the verb lei4hoi1 (‘leave’).
Reduplication is a salient morphological process in Macanese patois, in which traces of the adstrate languages, primarily Cantonese and Malay, could be witnessed. By analyzing the syntactic structures and sources of lexical items, the origins and independent development of the language could be manifested.
Concluding Remarks
As Ansaldo (2009) suggested, the Macanese patois carried cultural and emotive functions of the identity of Makista. The speakers, however, had undergone a process of language shift to Cantonese in Macao (Noronha & Chaplin, 2012) and later, diaspora during the post-colonial period. A recent interview with Makistas (Zhang, 2020) found that they no longer considered the Macanese patois as the essential bonding or symbol of their self-identities. Instead, the multilingual competence of Cantonese, Portuguese and English is valued much more. They viewed the patois as ‘laughable’ yet ‘interesting’. Under these circumstances, many believed that the path towards language death would be hard to reverse. Still, several new attempts emerged in the current decade to try to revive the language. A relatively successful one is the founding of the theatrical group Dóci Papiaçám di Macao. Its theatre performances in patois have raised local Macaneses’ awareness of the dying status of the language, and the organization has later become a member of the Macao Intangible Heritage. Zhang (2020) also proposed the salience of maintenance and inheritance within overseas speech communities. It could be the direction of upcoming language revival campaigns.
References
Ansaldo, U. (2009). Contact languages: Ecology and evolution in Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ansaldo, U. & Matthews, S. (2004). The origins of Macanese reduplication. Creoles, contact and language change: Linguistic and social implications, 1-19.
Baxter, A. N. (1996). Portuguese and Creole Portuguese in the Pacific and Western Pacific rim. In S. A. Wurm, P. Mühlhäusler & D. T. Tryon (Eds.), Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia and the Americas, pp. 301-338. De Gruyter Mouton.
Fernandes, M. S., & Baxter, A. N. (2004). Maquista chapado: vocabulary and expressions in Macao’s Portuguese creole. Instituto Cultural do Governo da Regiao Especial Administrativa de Macau.
Holm, J. (1989). Pidgins and Creoles, Vol. 2: A Reference Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Li, M. (2016). Macau Pidgin Portuguese and Creole Portuguese: a continuum. In A. Schwegler, J. McWhorter, & L. Ströbel (Eds.), The iberian challenge: Creole languages beyond the plantation setting, 113-134. Spain: Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert.
Matthews, S. & Yip V. (1994). Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.
Moseley, C. (Ed.). (2010). Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. UNESCO.
Noronha, M. A., & Chaplin, R. I. (2012). Preserving and interpreting intangible cultural heritage in an ethnolinguistic community: the case of Portuguese language, patois, and creole in Macau. US-China Foreign Language, 10(9), 1538-1546.
Santos Ferreira, J. dos. (1996). Papiaçám di Macao. Macao: Fudação Macao.
Sneddon, J. (1996). Indonesian Reference Grammar. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Tomás, I. (1988). Makista Creole. Review of Culture, 5, 33-46.
Zhang, J. (2020). Yinyu shequ shijiao xia de yuyin huoli: yi Aomen tusheng puyu wei li [Language Vitality in the Perspective of Speech Community: The Case of Patuá]. Yunnan shifan daxue xuebao (Zhexue Shehui kexue ban) [Journal of Yunnan Normal University (Philosophy and social science section]], 52(1), 32-39.