Macanese language

Spoken in

• Creole '

Mzs

Patuá or Macanesisch ( Macaista Chapado ) is a creole language that is based on the Portuguese language and spoken in Macao.

Patuá is known among linguists under many different names, including Macaista Chapado ( " the pure Macanesisch " ), Macao Creole, Macaense, Papia Cristam di Macau ( "Christian language of Macau " ), Doçi lingu di Macau ( "Sweet Language of Macau " ), and Doci Papiaçam ( " sweet language "). In Patuá papia means " speak ", just as in other Portuguese creoles also. And "Sweet Language" is a nickname for Portuguese, which she received from Cervantes.

Some Macanesen are very proud of the fact that Macau has its own local language. This is something that Hong Kong does not have, for example. They argue that Macao's status as a cultural city, one of the oldest meeting places of the Orient in the world and the West warrant a vigorous cultivation of the Macanese language, and that Patuá it deserve to be entered in the " Red Book of endangered languages ​​" of UNESCO as a means to internalize the public awareness of its existence threatened.

History

The Portuguese Patuá expression is derived from the French word patois, which means as much about how " rough language". In its present use patois features in many European languages ​​often the language of the common people of a region that is different from the default language of the rest of the country in various aspects.

Macao Patuá began to gradually develop after the Portuguese settled on the southern tip of the peninsula in 1557. The Portuguese settlement in Malacca began in 1511, nearly a century earlier than in Macau. In Malacca Portuguese men married Malaysian women what a local Portuguese- Malay creole 'absence, commonly referred to as " Papia Kristang " or Cristão ( "Christian language ") was known, and even today still spoken by an estimated 1,000 people in Malaysia and Singapore will. Papia Kristang is grammatically the Malay very close, but his vocabulary is derived mainly from Portuguese from.

Although the Dutch Malacca declined the Portuguese in 1641, the Papia Kristang has since survived as an active spoken mother tongue. Had the Portuguese- Malay creole language in the 17th century a great influence on the development of Patuá Macao, especially in view of its rich Malay vocabulary.

From the late 16th century " transplanted " Portuguese- Eurasian settlers from their Malacca creole to Macao.

The Portuguese settlement in Malacca and their Portuguese- Malay creole were an accelerating basis for the establishment of a Portuguese settlement in Macau in the second half of the 16th century. Therefore Patuá is heavily influenced by Malay, apart from some significant influences from Cantonese, some Indian languages ​​, English, Japanese, Spanish, and a bunch of other European and Asian languages. In a way Patuá is a unique cocktail of European and Asian languages ​​that had impact on Macao's social and commercial development between the 16th and 19th centuries in one way or another.

Patuá enjoyed his best time as the main language of communication among Macau's Eurasian population between the 17th and 19th century. However, the absolute number of speakers was relatively low, even at that time; probably they always only amounted to thousands or tens of thousands of people.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Patuá is still spoken by a few thousand people in Macau, Hong Kong and elsewhere as their mother tongue. At this time Patuá was by its users aware of the " metropoli between " Standard Portuguese language distinguished. In the early 20th century Patuá was used ironically, eg in mocking skits that mocked personalities of the administration or about colonial civil servants from Portugal.

Examples

This is an example of a poem on Patuá: