 You might get underway, it would be delightful to see such a crowd of people for our international guest today, Professor Stephanie Pillai. Stephanie is Professor of the Faculty of Languages and Universities at the University of Kamelea in Kuala Lumpur and she's actually had a connection with PsyS for quite a number of years. She was one of the early ELDP grantees and she received a grant to work on the language that she's going to be talking about today. And we first met actually about five years ago when Steph came for the ELDP training. At a time when staff who taught and did research on endangered languages were welcome to be part of the training that's offered at the ELDP. So Stephanie's expertise in several areas, English, the English language and particularly English as spoken and used in Malaysia. And she'll be one of our speakers at the University of Pakistan talking about the situation of English in Malaysia as part of that. I hope everybody wonders across the audience to participate. And perhaps more recently, she's been working on, I hesitate to name the language. It is, I'll talk about that. I see you're calling it Malacca. Yeah, I'm being safe. Some people call it Krustan with a C and some call it Krustan with a K. Puppy at Krustan and so on. It's actually quite a political potato in the back of the name of languages. But it is a Portuguese-based creole which has been spoken in Malacca for over 500 years and came with the Portuguese settlement probably via India in terms of historical intentions. Stephanie is in a unique position to be able to do documentary linguistic work with this on this particular language. Because her mother's family are members of the Malacca Portuguese creole community. So she's actually working with relatives and friends and people that she knew. Oh, no longer my friends. She's growing up with in Malacca. So it's a really unique situation of having somebody who's working on the language of their own heritage on the mother's side. She's recently completed, together with some colleagues, a textbook on speaking. You call it Puppy at Krustan here. In brackets. Notice the parenthesis. The whole thing about the spelling of the language and so on has been quite an issue. Should it be spelled like Malay or should it have accent marks and look funny like Portuguese and so on? So the topic of today is actually about the phonology of Malacca Portuguese. Thank you very much Peter and thank you for having me around. You can have a look at it. So some of the things I say might make more sense. I'm going to start a little bit about Malacca Portuguese Creole, which is what I'm going to call it kind of linguistically. And so that some of you who may not have heard of it or know much about it will get an idea about the context of Malacca Portuguese Creole. And then I will talk also a little bit about the sounds based on the research that I've been doing and some of the areas where we're still finding iffy bits. Because it's a Creole that's not many, we don't have that many fluent speakers. So it's not very stable with some of the sounds. So we still, we found some issues that we still need to deal with. And I also want to talk about the book and how we have tried to apply some of the things from the research on sounds into the book in terms of its spelling and deciding how to represent the pronunciation of the language. Okay, so I'll start with Malacca Portuguese Creole. Not many people know that we have a European based Creole in Malaysia. In Malacca in particular, we actually have three Creoles. Malacca Portuguese, Baba Malay and Chiti Malay. So kind of representative of the history of Malacca. So Malacca was a Portuguese colony from 1511 to 1641. And basically the Portuguese came, set up their fort if you like. And these are pictures of what it may have looked like then. And when they came, they actually, because of the Portuguese policy of actually marrying or having unions with local women. And as Peter said, basically they would have come from India. They did actually come from Goa to conquer Malacca. On the ships would have, looking at old letters and old documents, possibly been people of all sorts from along the Portuguese settlements in Africa, in India, right, who came to Malacca. So a lot of the unions were between Portuguese men and local women, but could be, Baxter says they're banned of followers who were also on the ships with them, right. So these are my family photos by the way. So the Portuguese married local women. Let's just keep it simple, but we know that the reality is not that simple. So there is now a community of Portuguese Eurasians in Singapore, in Malaysia, who claim heritage from 500 or more years ago. And these people then, well the Portuguese that came at that time, the language that came at that time would have been used alongside with whatever the local Malay sounded like then. The Patua of the Lingua Franca of that area was Malay at that time. But there were, because Malacca was so cosmopolitan, some people call it the New York of the 16th century, there were people, Arab traders, Chinese traders, you know, Indian traders, there were all sorts of people in Malacca from the Indonesian islands, so there was a whole range of languages probably spoken in Malacca at that time. So after a while with these unions, a creole began to develop, and it's really interesting because if you go to the graveyard in Malacca, the Christian Catholic graveyard, you can see the change, the shift in the language, right. Earlier, the ones that are still legible, you can see more sort of standard Portuguese of that time in written form. And then it changes to Cristang, but still spelled in a more Portuguese way, and then a more local way, and then English takes over. So you can kind of see the shift because there were Portuguese schools set up by the missionaries at that time in Malacca while the Portuguese were there. Of course, when the Dutch came, everything got stopped, including the language used in the church as well. So the descendants, how many of them actually speak the language? That is the thing. So now let me just talk a little bit about the language first. The vocabulary is largely derived from Portuguese, so I was at a class earlier, right, and you can recognize the words, right. So an example, like your Sonomi name is kind of familiar. There are things like kumi, which means eat, comer, if you speak Spanish. So you can see the Latin base in a lot of the words. But more and more, we find English and Malay words coming in and replacing what would have been the original Cristang word. So the word for aunt used to be tia. Now most people say aunt or auntie as in English, auntie. There are other words as well where Malay terms have come in. Okay, so this is how it kind of looks like or sounds like. The grammar and the phonology, we can see considerable influence from Malay. So the grammar is much simpler. So like my name is aunt, it's just your Sonomi aunt. So sir is a possessive marker that is used for everything, like your Libru or your Agu. Okay, so it is very much simpler. And you will also see that like elitifika namalaka. So for progressive ter or present, we use ter rather than the verb itself doesn't have, you know, it doesn't change. We use ter, we use logu for future time. We use jak for pas or yo jakumi. I have eaten. Okay, so it can be present or it can be pas as well. So that's kind of what it looks like in a very simple way. Right, Peter mentioned this and I'm glad he did because I was going to talk about it. So what's in the name you would think, you know. Okay. If you ask certain people in the Portuguese settlement, particularly, these are some of the things you will hear, right? Christianity, they call it the Christian religion, right? So Christianity ought to follow Akeli religion, Christang. How can we say that this language we are speaking is Christang? How can we say we are speaking Christian? Right, that is the argument with some of them. I have this interview on the Ila Akeli, actually. But Baxter shows us from documents, earlier documents, that the term Christang was used even way back then. And I only ever remember my grandmother referring to the language as Christang, not even as Portuguese. And most of my informants, I would say, eight out of ten of my respondents or the community members, if you asked them what do you speak, they would say Christang. If you asked them what they are, they would also say, oh, I'm Christang. Or if they meet each other and they say, oh, Christang, boss Christang. Okay, rather than boss Portuguese. Okay, or boss Creole. So, is it a three in one term then? I think Hancock says, and Baxter also say that Christang is really a three in one that covers religion, ethnicity and language here. So this is like typical of what we will get in interviews. We Christang, we have to talk Christang in our, at home. So we must teach the children also. So we Christang, I am Christang and I speak Christang. This is very common. In fact, the first one, which is the original meaning of where it would have come from Portuguese is hardly ever used. No one will ever say I am Christang to mean I'm Christian. Because generally, most of them are Catholic and they would say I'm Catholic or I'm whatever I am right now. So the word Christang is actually the original meaning is hardly used for religion. And this is normal with language, right? It changes its meaning and so on. But there are people in the community that want to, for whatever reason, are making a strong case for the fact that we cannot use the word Christang. But in most nine out of 10 cases, people use Christang to mean the language. So hence, you will see Papya Christang as in speak Christang. And it doesn't really mean, it doesn't mean Christian anymore. So the Padre Sechang where I do my work is also known as the Portuguese Settlement or Kampung Portuguese in Malacca. And here comes another name for it, right? In Malaysia, generally, Eurasians are, Eurasians of all, whether you're Portuguese Eurasian or Dutch Eurasian or whatever Eurasian or Pan-Asian, right? Referred to as Eurasian in English. But in Malay, the term Serani is referred, generally started, it was actually used to refer to people of Portuguese Eurasian descent. Nasrani meaning Christian again, right? So there are all these terms floating about. There are groups who say, let's just call us Serani. And people of Portuguese Eurasian descent say, no, we are Portuguese Eurasian Serani. It's everyone and everyone. So we don't want to be called that. So there are issues as a person describing the language. What word, which one to use? So Malacca Portuguese seems is safe, is more accepted. You won't have the controversies of using only Cristang, which is why in our book we have it in parentheses. Otherwise, we would have a riot. So this settlement was set up in the 1930s to house Eurasians or Portuguese Eurasians who were living all over Malacca, right? And the area still exists now. Of course, it's become a bit smaller because some of the land has been taken over for different purposes. So right now, we look at today, if we look at the latest census, it says that there are about 2,300 others. In Malaysia, we are all categorized by race, right? So you either Indian, Chinese, Malay, Bumi Putra, which covers the indigenous community and the Malays or others. And some East Malaysian groups now have their own ethnic groups that they can choose. So Eurasians and Portuguese Eurasians come under others, right? So you can now start to understand why the term actually has some controversy because it is about labelling yourself when the state defines you as others, not any important category. So among the 2,300 in Malacca, this would include other Eurasians, not just the Portuguese Eurasians. So it's not a very big number in Malacca. And Malacca is the largest concentration, next to Penang probably. And about 1,000 live in, actually it's less, about 800 probably live in the settlement itself. 1,000 if you count the surrounding areas, the flats, the apartments close by the settlement. So what's happening in the settlement right now is that generally you can hear it, although some people say, oh no one speaks it anymore in the settlement, that is not true. You still hear it, hear people shouting from one end of three houses across in Christang. You still hear it. If you sit, if you go under the trees while the fishermen are waiting after their boats have come in, you can still hear it. But generally they are older speakers, right? And if you might find them to be about 45, 46 and above, even then, only if they have lived in the settlement for a long period of time or in Malacca and they have lived with older speakers like grandparents and parents and so on. Most of the younger speakers, definitely the teenagers, they use more English and their variety of English. And there's a lot of code switching going on, code mixing going on with Christang. And you have to understand that Malaysia being Malaysia in the settlement itself, I put English as the biggest blurb there because English is the majority language that you will hear there. Albeit is their own variety of English, right? And then you will hear Christang as well in Malacca Portuguese Creole. Malay is definitely there. It's our national language. It is the medium of instruction of public schools. So everyone in the settlement would be able to speak Malay. Generally in the settlement, most people are bilingual if not trilingual with Christang, right? English Malay, English Christang Malay. Some very old speakers like, may only know Christang, very old speakers who generally are no longer around. And there are others as well because there's a lot of mixed marriages among Portuguese durations, right? Marry Chinese Indians. So they would also pick up some of those languages as well. So you will hear a whole gamut of languages. So the situation is a multilingual situation which may be different from some of the research sites that some of you may be working on where you solely have only that minority language or indigenous language, yeah? So it is considered endangered because of the number of fluent speakers. Outside the settlement, generally, people don't speak it anymore. My mother's family, none of her siblings actually speak it. They're now learning it from the book, okay? They heard their mother and father, but generally more their mother speaking it, but they didn't grow up speaking English. During the British colonisation, most people who wanted their children to be educated would insist on using English. And this wasn't just the Portuguese durations. It was also a lot of Indian families who grew up speaking English, okay? Right. Let me move on to the sounds of Laker Portuguese Creoles. So I do my research in the settlement itself, mainly, and we record speakers. We try to look for fluent speakers. Not easy to find them. Generally, the women, a lot of the men have worked outside and have a lot of influence from other languages. Whereas the women, many of them are stay-home mums or have not had much contact outside. So they still tend to use a lot of Kristang, yeah? And basically, I just want to go through some of the consonants. If you know Malay or if you look at Malay, you can see a lot of similarities with Malay in terms of the way the consonants work. Sorry, I was editing this and then I couldn't use my laptop, so just ignore the mistakes like buy and buy there. Okay, it should have been changed. Basically, the pie and buy, I will go through some of them, not all of them. We have an issue with the glottal stops, so we actually didn't include it in the first instance because we thought that it was just glottalization happening and possibly maybe it was an aliphonic variation because it usually only happens, but it always happens at the end of a word. Spelled in some books with a K, like a book in some books is spelled with a K. Like Malay, it is not pronounced as a K, in Malaysian Malay. In Malaysian Malay, we would never say, for example, deaf is Pekak. Spell P-E-K-A-K, we would never say Pekak. We would just say Pekak and there is a glottal stop at the end. We found that this was happening with Kristang, but when we wrote a paper for the Journal of IPA and they said that you should include this as one of your consonants, so I haven't signed up the revisions because we're still looking into this. I don't think it's a separate phoneme in the language. Okay, the verb and verb, you find that the verb doesn't occur very much in the beginning of words, but maybe because of the influence of English, you hear it a bit more and so words like binagre, which is vinegar, also pronounced as binagre. People who speak more English tend to use binagre and the older speakers, you will hear them saying binagre. That also happens sometimes with the ph and the per as well. We don't like Malay. In the initial particular, we don't find it aspirated and when it is, people get very influenced with English, so that's why we have to be really careful as to who our informants are. Those who have become very fluent in English who work outside the settlement, if they are highly educated or they are more educated, you will find more aspiration in their particular because they probably are using the English particular. But in the settlement, for those who are fluent in Kristang and use more Kristang than English, you will not find them. So when we measure aspiration acoustically, you don't find the VOT being very, very big. This is very similar to Malay and this is kind of expected. So we're still doing work on this and as I said, the final ker actually is very rare. This is something that, because the paper I was working on is with Baxter and I'm not convinced that even Balsak, there is a ker in there. It is actually glottalized because unlike Malay, we're unlikely to pronounce the ending, the end as a ker. Among all the fricatives that we find, sir at the end, but we usually don't find the very, very, we do, but very rare. And as I said, the B and the V are used interchangeably. Same with Bino and Vino for wine as well. Okay, this is where it's different from Malay. And basically where you can actually have things like the m, the nasal followed by a consonant B, Bezum, Poku, Nda. Although some speakers have a vowel in front. And this method when we were doing our book, whether to add the vowel or not, or just have the nasal. So whether you say mm, or it's just a mm, it's difficult too because different speakers will have a different way of saying it. So maybe they are just in free variation perhaps. I mean that you have two alternative pronunciations. So you do not have this in Malaya. In terms of the sound, it's not here, but in terms of the nasals, we share the similar inventory with Malay as well. We have the nir as in nyapo, which we don't have in English, right? The nir, we only have the mm. So there are some similarities, but you can see that it is not exactly like Malay as perhaps represented by some authors. This is another one that's different from at least Peninsular Malay. We have the tap, trill, r. So you have nortri or nortri with a r rather than nortri, English nortri. So in almost all cases, the r is actually produced as either a tap or a trill. And we find that it is a trill more when it is in consonant cluster like say when you have the r and either before or for example like nortri. Nortri, nortri. It's difficult for me to say it because I'm more of an English speaker, right? I don't have that trill. And in Peninsular Malaysia, generally in Malay as well, we don't have the trill. So we don't say merekka. We say merekka. You go to East Malaysia, you might hear merekka. Go to Indonesia, you will hear merekka, right? So the trill is not a common thing, but you can hear it in the settlement. But when they speak Malay, there's no trill, right? When they speak Malay. So that's, again, it's not the case that Malay and Kristang are exactly the same and people are able to shift from one to another. Still some work to be done here as well. Okay, the vowels now, this is why we got into so much trouble because we, if you look at previous work and even what Baxter had said or Hancock, it wasn't clear about these vowels here. The A and the O and the O, right? Because when we started to record, two things happened. One is we realized that there were these four sounds. Although previous work had said that they were there, they didn't really explain what was going on. They said maybe they are earphones or they only contrast in one or two words. But that's not true because we found many other instances. So we are actually working on these four sounds and it's a nightmare because we realize, again, are they in free variation? Are people just shifting? You know, using one or the other. It seems to be the case in some words, but in other words, it's like very clearly, no, no, no, you cannot say, for example, you cannot say bear, bear, you have to say, you have to say the A sound, right? Be, be, not bear, bear. But in other words, it's like you ask what person A, they will say, you know, a boss is another one which is not changeable. Some words just happen to be interchangeable and now we're trying to figure out, okay, what's going on here? Which ones are, you know, is it because of the etymology? Is it because of the word class and what is going on? So we haven't quite sorted that out. Then similarly to the A and the L, you have the O and the O. So boss, when a lot of English speakers try to speak, say, Christang go boss, which is you, right? But then you will get told up and say, it's boss, right? Is it bong or bong, pamyang? So which one is it? Because, you know, in English generally we don't, at least the English that we speak in Malaysia, the O that we use is usually to replace the diphthong like L, right? So we don't have boat, we have boat. But for the monathon, it's still a shorter all. We don't really have a distinction between the long and the short or the two O's. So it will be like boat and, I don't know, like port and port will sound the same, P-O-T, P-O-R-T, no difference, right? But in Christang, there is a distinction between using O and O. But again, the problem is that some words, different speakers and the same speakers sometimes could use O in the first instance and O in the other instance. Okay, so these are the problems that we face or the challenges that we face. With languages that are not being used as much as they should, then you seem to be having sort of individual styles and, you know, not like a standard usage, yeah? Okay, so this is work in progress. So, you know, it looks weird. The chart, this is just based on the formant measurements that we've had and we're just using it to track and see where the potential problem areas. When we do the scatterplot is even worse, right? Because especially between these two, they look so clearly defined but with some words there's a clear merger between these two and these ones as well. It's like possibly with some words, people just alternating between the two. So those are some of the areas that we really need to look at. The other thing that may be affecting the quality of the vowels is the stress. Now, this is again where Kristang is different from Malay and even different from English, Malaysian English because it has stress. It has like sickle stress, okay? Although again, we find that it can shift. Sometimes it's not as stable as we think it is but there is stress, right? You can hear it. And generally things like verbs, you find that the stress shifts to the word final. So like fika, aprende, okay? But for the other words, it's usually penultimate but then again, we need to look into more into this because like Malaysian English, one of the issues that we in Singapore English has, we do have phrase final lengthening, right? So if you take word level kind of data, elicitation, you will find that all the time your stress is going to go towards the end but that may not be what is actually happening because if each one becomes one international phrase then obviously the stress is going to be at the end of the phrase whether you have it in the sentence or word. So you need to be careful of your elicitation methods as well. So we're looking at more informal conversations to see what's happening with the stress because the patterns are quite different from Malaysian English, right? So in Malaysian English, there really is no stress pattern. It's syllable timed and even for focus or marking new information or important information, there is no clear stress on the syllable. So it's very hard to hear if you don't know the context. If you listen to our news, if you track the pitch in our news, for example, said in English, you will find that it doesn't have so much of the... it's very much more flatter. But in Kristang, and if you go to the settlement and even if you hear them speaking English, there is a different intonation pattern going on and that's something that we're also working on at the moment which I haven't shared because we are still in the process of analyzing the data. Okay, so let me talk about the applications. It's well and good to do the research and do the papers but now how did we apply it into the book? Okay, this was where the nightmare started because when we... an interesting thing as well because then we had a team to work on with the community. Let's see if I've got it here. So of course we have our recordings, right? And Peter's talked about this a lot and you know now on hindsight, because you start out doing your research not thinking that you're going to do something more impactful with it, right? You do your documentation and think that's it. I'm just going to put it up. That's the end of it. So because of that, you don't plan for how you're going to use or what materials you need for your documentation. Which means that when you come to the documentation you think, ah now I need to record some more or I need to come up with new things which you know if you have all the time in the world it's good but so this is where we had to record some new things. Sorry. But we also used things that we had recorded, things that were analyzed like the sound system for example because we knew what were some of the issues that were coming up from the analysis. We could discuss it with the speakers and ask them and then they would debate about no but I say and another person would say no I say a. So we went round saying okay you go ask five people older speakers and you go ask five older speakers or whatever or WhatsApp is the recordings or you WhatsApp send us by WhatsApp the recordings. So that helped because we are in KL and they are in Malacca. We couldn't always go there. Then we had some workshops to debate about this and because the pronunciation and the spelling are related we had huge fights, you know fights not literal fights but debates about how to what do we do with the spelling system. So for example if you've got you can have a, a, a. You can have a, a, a. So how do we represent this in the spelling? In Malay for example now we don't use any accent marks right we just use e. So you can have perang, perang, it's spelled the same way. Now what happens now in Kristang when you have a, a and a. So part of the choice was how about if we the people we worked with felt that we shouldn't follow Malay spelling which is phonemic basically 100%. Most of the other writers before us have followed a Malay spelling because it is easier to read right if you see B-A-K-A it is bakar. Okay although in Kristang it can be bakar. Okay which in Peninsular Malaysia as well we would say bakar. A ending is usually a schwa. Okay so what do we do now now because there was a feeling that if we just had a spelling system that just looked like Malay where was the identity of the language where was the Kristang in it where was the Portugueseness in it right so they were like can't we follow Portuguese spelling and thankfully I had a Portuguese teacher on my team okay and, and Angela would tell them no Portuguese spelling is horrendous it is you know even for me as a native speaker I still you know have to think about it sometimes so we do not want to go that way so we now had to like okay we can't do what kind of what kind of spelling system were Malaysian speakers okay likely to be to be used to right so my third point there most Malaysians would be familiar with English and Malay having learnt it in school but we know that Malay spelling in a way is because it's morphoenemic it's easier to represent sounds okay but there was an issue of identity having you know you don't want to be the same as someone else you still wanted to reflect the Portugueseness so how did we do it not everyone's going to agree with it and at the end of the day I know that practically right in terms of the context of use people are not going to use the accent markers okay because even among our whatsapp group of the team that did the book when we type we have to make a conscious effort firstly we have to tell them show people how to use the accent marks because we don't use that in English or Malay right but we put that in so that it is like surface level it looks like this but we know that alternatively people are going to spell it without the accent markers right so if you look if you had to look at the book you will see the spelling system so the spelling system generally one was the issue with the sounds having to deal with is this an O, is this an O, is it an A, is it an U, is it a A right so one was that okay the other one was to deal with okay how to represent these in the spelling system I'll give you another example right with the con with ch for example like chêru for example in Malay we have done away with CH right we use C now so when you see C in Malay you pronounce it as chê so cháwan is spelled C-A-W-A-N in old and I say old in old Malay not even old actually it used to be spelled C-H-A-W-A-N so you knew it was CH so one of the decisions we made was to keep the CH so that you knew when they saw CH it was CH right but when it came to the K sound there was a bit of a debate because generally if you look at Baxter if you look at John Marback's work it's all spelled with a K which is actually very much easier to read but again the question of identity, of reflecting something that didn't look exactly like Malay so we came to a compromise so I'm not completely happy with it but you will see that hence Kristang became CR rather than KR okay but that's not a big issue because you can see the KR is easy to read the problem is when you have C I know that some people are going to read it as CH right so Kumi do you spell it K-U-M-I which would be so easy to see but then we have an alternative CU-M-I which could be read as CHU-MI right so there's some compromises that we had to make yeah so these are some of the things that we had to think about in terms of the spelling the sound systems that we knew then stress was another thing you know where to place stress again for many words people were stressing differently and then we realized it really was contextual as well so we had to decide on where to put the stress like in a general sense but what would happen in actual conversation might be completely different yeah okay we also were thinking in terms of the spelling really for this right the teaching and learning because this book is being used to teach children and teach adults and many people are buying the book to try and learn Kristang so these were some of the considerations we had to take into account right I'll just show you very this is from from the book and you can see you know there are some things here you think why did you do that you know but so this is some this is some of the spelling systems that we use so you have the regular a at the end of the words and basically if you have a regular a at the end of a word it is actually a a schwa so you have like dia which is day right nunka which is no and then you have chuma which is like right chuma like so if you if you see the accent at a then you have the a vowel at the end okay so brinca, ola, papia generally verbs in particular will have that a at the end so a little bit complicated a little bit new formulations are not used to having these accent right but it makes it look different makes it look European I guess okay then we have the regular e which has two sound representations right so you have like the a the schwa and it also have the a sound there so this one is a little bit difficult because they wanted you know we discussed and we thought about you want to put this accent and that accent and we said no because it's just not going to work right it's too complicated but we have at the end of our book a pronunciation guide for all the words that appear in our book so we thought that would help them a little bit then we have the accented e right so which is used for like the a sound okay krensa, festa, mestri okay with the o there was no option we were not going to use any another accent so we just left the o and o as the letter o right and this is a bit complicated with as I said for English speakers even Malaysian English speakers who are more used to when they see an o having an o sound bo di yo which is not it's yo, it's bo di and it's boong so we have put it at the back of our book how you pronounce these words okay and the most problematic one for me is this the letter c okay but all these decisions were made after a whole big round of debate and discussions yeah so here come the language and the language you know teachers and say no no no you should do this but then when we discuss it with the community and take into account all the factors um that I talked about then we have to come to some form of compromise here okay um yeah so we've got the letter c, we've got c which we decided to keep the j, is still with like jading jenti, juda and one other thing that we we compromised on and we kept that was whether or decided we had to decide on whether to use k, u, a or q, u, a and we decided on q, u, a after several other rounds of debate okay okay so I'm going to leave more room for questions and answers for you so muitu grande merse which is thank you very much to you in Christang so let's have um I'm happy to answer your questions yeah if you have any I hope you have that was very quickly yeah so um in terms of um revitalization what's the relationship between Portuguese and um Mele because those that do so for example when when there's vocabulary missing the structure's missing maybe because it's endangered where do they draw on that from and do you apply some of the other some changes from Portuguese to Portuguese but okay um in terms of vocabulary it depends on when the word comes came in right so you'll find that at the time if it was like say maybe 20 years ago you may find more English words coming in but even now it depends also on the context so perhaps if it is to do with food right uh ingredients you'll find more local stuff you'll find more Malay words right if you if you look at the uh my recording of someone teaching you how to make fish accha a lot of Malay words in there then she'll also have a word like blend for for you know to blend but then the ingredients a lot of it she will say dintan manes dintan putes so she uses Malay right so depends on the context and depends kind of when the word comes in as well um in terms of the sound changes it's it's really funny because a lot of the sound changes again depends on the speaker rather than that's what we're finding now and that's why that there's variety people who went to school studying um with English as a medium of instruction apply more um English English rules in the sense yeah from Portuguese so for example um when you want when you want to make materials that um revitalize the language um there are changes between this Creole and Portuguese oh yeah definitely um and then there's the influence from Malay yeah so I get you yeah when you want to make a word which one is Chris and word yeah is missing in okay um good good question we try not to in at least in my group uh we try not to make up words right but I know the Singaporeans are doing that right they have gone another way and they actually have a they call it like a lab um where they are going to create and test new words out yeah our maybe we are more conservative because I work with some older speakers they actually went out to look for what was the word in Christang you know they asked older speakers uh what did what did we call this you know and we tried to bring it back even though now there may have been uh English borrowing or Malay borrowing um they tried to bring this word back even some of the words which were contracted they said this was actually the original um word yeah so they so that's what we did for hours so we didn't actually make up but I suspect that some of the words that they didn't realize was made up actually had come from Portuguese or were actually English English words so we we don't have a record of when exactly every word came in yeah so like for example you have celebrate some so did it come from English or was it originally in Christang already already right yes okay so I just looking at there seems to be more Spanish really than in the you know for instance for me for me it would have been Jantaro something you know had it come from from Portuguese and so it's very strange all those words started with M it's very strange what I'm saying is that I have to look for Portuguese it doesn't immediately come to to the surface it was one nowadays but it was just like Spanish I can't really remember what it is again again a lot of the words may have been something else and over time changed but then remember we had no Spanish contact yeah yeah we have like a Spanish but that comes from the Philippines and that's in East Malaysia but our contact is very much Portuguese and if you look at texts from Sri Lankan Portuguese a lot of the words are very similar they seem to be the same so perhaps what came to Malacca already was a a form of Creole or whatever that was being spoken by people on the ship that came from Africa that came from India you look at Sri Lankan texts you look at some Indian texts and after that from Malacca people went to Indonesia went to Macau so there are all these similarities so yeah so the whole myth about this being Portuguese Antigu or old Portuguese is really not true but some people hang on to this and say you know ancient Portuguese and this is the original Portuguese but it's clearly not so it is something that has beautifully developed and you know sort of metamorphosized into this language that we have today so that's why you have to look but people from Brazil, my Brazilian colleague was working with me on the book said a lot of the words she had it's familiar to her because in rural Brazil some of the words are still used which is kind of amazing yeah so yes going back to the end I was wondering if the end that we saw we saw a lot of them do you think that it could come from having re-analyzed the definite article along because for example in ancient we all the La of French is part of the now is it it is possible and that's why some of the oldest because feel that we should sometimes because feel when you write it you should separate it like you put poku and if you look in the book as well we spelt it with a U or an E depending on whether it's um or um because they felt it needed to be like a separate item I guess so it's possible it may have started and most Creoles you have this merger of words what did you in those M words I was wondering sometimes like I noticed that in you have M apostrophe but in you have M without the apostrophe it's actually the stress I said I was editing it on my laptop it was just a stress so you did put the stress between the M then stress will not be on the first you don't say like poku so the stress will always be on the consonant following the M or if there is a vowel following the preceding the M you still stress the consonant after the nasal never before and when you don't put in apostrophe that's it was meant to be an apostrophe it's meant to be a stress well noted though yes so you talked a little bit about this sort of way not between an orthography that reflects the Portuguese however imagine it is and the ease of use difficult things identification and ease of use when you talking with speakers what did you find is the most like the most important thing for them when using the orthography the teacher in our group the book was produced together with representatives of the Portuguese Eurasian Association the teacher among them wanted a simpler way that young children especially would be able to follow were not a good idea but the others in the group and when we started talking about identity issues then it seemed at least at the surface level something that looked different from the other languages in Malaysia seemed to be more important so identity is definitely a big thing and you need to understand the whole social structure the whole political structure now in Malaysia to understand why people feel it is so important to identify yourself among the Eurasians as well I have to say there is a bigger group but the group outside Malacca who feel that the Portuguese Eurasians should just combine and make a big sarani in fact Joan Mabak her recent books called it the sarani language and that did not go down well with the community how can you change it to sarani means everybody who is Eurasian and they are saying that we are like what 2% of the population and here you want to forge a smaller group within a minority within a minority but why are people doing it why do they want to identify with being Portuguese Eurasian in fact the word Cristang despite the fact that if you go on Facebook you can see the big wars going on even against the Singaporeans like Cristang as well if you look at the youth in the community you can see the identity is very important they are selling T-shirts I am Cristang, I know my Cristang I know where I come from I think it is very telling if you are looking at representation of these kind of things and the youth are coming up with it even if they don't really speak Cristang very fluidly they are trying to forge their identity through this kind of wearing this T-shirt very proudly that says Cristang in my DNA thank you what are the ways that they explain the T-shirts they are much more involved in the festivals, the organization of festivals previously you would see it is the village committee that comes up, we have festivals like Water Day, preceding land and then there is the festival of San Pedro St. Joang, big festivals we draw thousands of tourists Christmas, Christmas as well now we see the youth taking part a lot more, some people are unhappy about that because of course they also have all the modern things in there, the DJs and the foam parties and I think it is a real homecoming we have to storm Balik Kampong in Malaysia which is coming back to your village and literally you can see that during festivals, people from Singapore from KL this is where we can feel that we are Cristang you can hear people speaking you can practice your Cristang you get to eat all the lovely food meet your relatives and celebrate and there is a lot of street parties there is a lot of that Latin culture of street parties still there so that is where they really show their identity it is being different from an Indian, a Chinese or a Malay or like me half Indian any young singers any young singers I am not in the settlement they are, they perform within the community but not so much out there older singers the thing is about the Cristang community they don't sing so much Cristang songs they are very big on country music they love country music maybe you could mention Kevin because most of the time of course Kevin from Singapore he records a couple of versions of Coldplay and so on in Cristang which is really nice and in the young chapters 20 or something very early 20s hasn't even graduated I think amazing guy he has been studying at National University of Singapore doing linguistics this is his grandfather I think the connection is not through his mom his mom is your agent and so he has become champion champion he is a real activist they have a tiny community I think about 100 probably less but he has gone all out he has got YouTube videos Steph said singing and they have been the ones to answer Martin's question they have this whole kind of incubator incubator and so they have been they have these meetings to figure out new vocabulary for mouse and laptop which has been criticized by some people they feel it is a sort of a radical situation in terms of revitalization because the core community is a group that Stephanie is describing with maybe a thousand speakers and a hundred people were moved to Singapore a smaller group moved to Singapore that was during the British period the Japanese and the Japanese moved from there but that group is now sort of shrunk by a hundred people but that is the most active seat for all this stuff that is going on yet they are not the genuine so there is this kind of political tendency that is going on and yet there is this young guy who has just been so active doing great work I think what I thought about that was that if you were to compare it with Portuguese to some Gallegos yes for example the word one I think it's um so in Portuguese uma not uma so maybe there are these kind of changes that you need to compare it so when they are trying to make new words maybe they apply these changes and would they draw that or rather than Malay words or English words because the contact like say even Portuguese right it's not there the institute Portuguese language institute sends people to the settlement now and then to teach standard Portuguese that sometimes is in conflict with the Creole because some of them would come say things like this is a bastardized version that you are speaking it is a bad version of the argument with one of the guys that came because he said they should learn to speak they are being taught the wrong pronunciation and I'm like what pronunciation are you talking about here so that's the attention of these Portuguese people who come the thing is the reality is there's no real contact some people who have been to Portugal on scholarships or whatever come back and then they might have come back and see Asia then the others would say we never say that that's not how my grandmother say that so the contact is really Malay Malay and Malaysian English when I say English I wouldn't even say what's our contact with English it is our local variety so that is the if any sound changes are going to be applied it's going to come from there and all they make it their own so like aunt like I said instead of aunt is auntie instead of tia which is what they would have used how would you say grandfather or grandmother okay so abo family is a grandmother abo is just grandparents right yeah but they don't I mean they would call they are I call my grandfather dada and my grandmother nanny and that's nan or nanny is the usual term I use English terms most of the time but for brother and so on they tend to use more Christian words like baba nona because there's no English word for big sister big brother you see whereas in Malay in most Asian languages you have because you have to maintain hierarchy right yeah what is the other language that you said is being taught in the school Malay sorry Malay and English no I mean you said that oh oh hang on is this Samay I think it's Samay but I may be wrong yeah it's one of the orang as the languages of course in East Malaysia you have Karazah and you have Iban right so Iban those are big languages but in West Malaysia with the indigenous languages it's been a bit slow I don't do documentation so it is a naive question but I always wonder you know you were talking about the alphabet and then you had discussions and you know how to translate that so the first thing that would come to the mind of a linguist is that why don't they just go for the IPA and things will be sort of the way the words are pronounced but in the conversation you said we wanted to keep the identity is it the only reason why one would not adopt if you start from scratch the writing system is it why you didn't choose the IPA you can't really use I mean the IPA I think is for linguists right so for linguists is no problem because we can use the IPA to represent and we know how it sounds like and so in the book as well we have actually used basic IPA to represent to kind of give people how the pronunciation is based on our work but in terms of the spelling system you still have to use a romanized alphabet system I mean why? Having taught students the IPA it is not an easy system to learn so without the sort of really finding tuning of the IPA just roughly speaking not really because if you just take the a the a and a vowel then you'll have to teach that there are three representations for six students like remember which is a which is a the short is probably easy how do you represent that in spelling then they'll have to learn letters which are not familiar which they don't use in the normal romanized alphabet system not in Malay not in English so it is to us it is too complicated so it's not to keep the identity it's the complication of one of the so if you look at that whole list of things we have so many things that had to come into play one was ease of use I don't think the accents are easy to use if you ask me but that was then the compromise with identity and how it looks like so in terms of ease of use at the end of the day as I said like the O we just kept an O we didn't put accents on everything so the only accents we used were for the E and for the A so on the surface and the different C and the Q the QA for QA and the K for representation orthographies are more about ideology and politics we realize but she's not really saying it but it is, it is because that's what I thought the answer would be that it is to preserve the identity well no it's also ideological issues but you don't want it to look like Malay so you have to make sure that it's but if it is the IPE it will look like a robotic language so when you don't think about what she is you don't think about what she is but you do want to you see but then there's no way if they all did that if you did IPE then first I don't think IPE would work but second I think IPE is for the language and not for the normal person learner but the kids, that's what they learn that's cool, my little neighbor that's exactly what really did IPE now he has to learn how to read a book and the only thing he can read is IPE that's what they think that's cool, the little boy but they cannot read it I'm surprised, I mean they may be doing phonics rather than IPE I think it's photonic or something yeah that's not IPE that is a reading system but that is still using your romanized letters to say that C.H. is a chur and so that is that is not IPE at all do you have a question? when people are what's happening they're using the spelling Q.U.A. you have like 10 ways to do it that's the reality the book is basically for people who want to learn for us to teach people like others at romanity in reality people are going to spend it any old way who's the authority in it however now in the settlement to come up with a committee to work on like standards how far it's going to go I don't really want to be a part of it can you imagine the fights that are going to go on but it's good that they're thinking about it they know that they're thinking and I think that what Kevin is doing in Singapore is actually having this positive effect is that it's pushing people to say you know because otherwise we are going to lose it and the Singaporeans are going to grow it from nothing into something they will call their own this is the Singapore Malaysia tension thing sorry you have a question no are there any more questions I hope there's no problem with the word for God for God, Deus no thank you father for Deus actually before the book we actually came up with a CD collection of Catholic with Catholic prayers and hymns and at that point we were experimenting really experimenting with the spelling but nobody complained about the way people complain about the hymns because this is what happens because when they speak the ta is like a Malay ta it's not like in English it's more of a ta like like ta lah in Malay so it's more of a dental stop but when they sing and this happens with some Malaysian as well to do becomes to do to do and some people say oh you know why didn't you check the pronunciation in the hymns and I'm like when they sing they all tend to do that they go ta instead of ta what is the church sorry what is the church language English they used to say they used to have Mars in Christang in the 50s I'm not sure but I think in the 70s it probably stopped sometimes during festivals some of the prayers let's say our father Apostle's Creed might be in Christang and the hymns during funerals some of the songs hymns will be in Christang having the CD sort of like helped people to remember the prayers that they maybe said as a child in Christang there was that question I'm just going to ask something pretty soon oh okay clear why you had arguments with the others because I thought there was a writing already in Christang in fact the slides you showed was one of the signposts and so on so for the book why would you have to argue no no this is what I went in thinking yeah easy it's done because Baxter had talked about the had done the drama of Christang in the 70s or 80s I think and Mabak basically followed his spelling system and he said very clearly that he was following a Malay spelling system but this is where the problem was people were like who gave him the right and who decided on the spelling system for us and in terms of like someone asked people what said or text or wrote letters in those days what did they write in they basically wrote in a way that they saw fit they were English educated they would follow a more English spelling so there were actually in reality different ways if you look at even Facebook posts and so on you'll find different spelling but you know what it's been said there was a back in Baxter's dictionary and then there was a Singapore dictionary by Zizarte and but two ladies but the community were like who gave them the right to decide how to spell so now again someone else will say who did who you know this group of people even though there were community members there who gave you guys the right to decide so it's going to be which is why they want to try make this committee to decide on some things Kevin's take in Singapore is like you can spell it in ten ways and that's fine you know because it's really spoken rather than a written language right yeah is there an international Creole association yeah because I know there's a happy event yeah there is the association of Pigeon and Creole languages did the community have contact with them it's very academic I mean my job means that word revitalizing it do they have contact with other Portuguese face yeah I mean they do with people with some people in Macau and it depends on individuals so it's not like as a community there was an Asian Portuguese languages conference convened last year but again it's the politics of the whole situation so people were not aligned to the organizer were not involved and da da da it's difficult for me to explain by its politics its village politics its community politics anyone who does documentation revitalization will probably find yourself in that situation and it's how do you distance yourself when you know as a researcher and as a documenter not easy I don't have answers I go day by day and pray a lot today also to help me from getting into trouble and especially because I have I didn't live in the community but I have relatives there and good friends and so that makes it even more difficult my reputation is at stake as an academic and also as a community member it makes it easy and not easy at the same time you know what I mean I think this is an interesting historical case study to see the shift in the way linguistics has operated in the last 40-50 years Alan Baxter went there as an Australian PhD student in the 1970s and he wrote a grammar and a dictionary he decided this is the grammar this is the dictionary this is the spelling system and now Steph comes on 40 years later and it's all community based and it's all disputed and it's sort of socio-political shift that's taken place in linguistics is very much evident I must say I didn't start like that Peter being an ELDP grantee that workshop it really opened my eyes as to community community and you have to blame for me doing this now I have to thank being given that grant really opened my eyes otherwise I would still be doing the grab and go kind of linguistics right grab the research and run out and write my paper present so I must acknowledge that and the most thing is that Alan is now in Macau and he's back into it and I've been working with him which is the other thing and I remember one of the comments I got when I did the grant proposal was like you must site and get in touch with previous people who worked on this and that gave me the courage to actually approach Alan and he's been very kind enough to share his work with me and we've been writing stuff together as well so again thank you this is not an advertisement but it really helped because coming from Malaysia and working in that kind of vacuum that we are there's not much work on documentation which is Peter and I now have a Newton grant and we're working on trying to train some Malaysian researchers and students into thinking about documentation proper documentation techniques so that they can go and teach their students and fellow researchers because I do think that it's important we have about 130 languages most of them endangered and dying most of them being researched by people outside Malaysia which is I'm not saying it's a bad thing but we have very little access to those the data or even findings they're not archived with us so I think that it is important to share with people ethical and proper documentation techniques and also a sustainable way to one is to share your research so don't do it grab and go and the second one is to if you're doing revitalization efforts try to make it sustainable because there's no point now after the book I can just say okay done my job you know done my community one point out for me but what's happening did I share the way of doing this with my team so that they can now produce their own materials can they know how to use the book to teach in the classroom or in the settlement I think it's more we must also not stop at the producing the materials what goes after that we've run out of time I'm afraid to we can talk more Stephanie is actually here at SOAS for two weeks as part of the British Academy senior Newton publisher and we have a collaboration that's started last year for two years so she will be around next week as well and if you'd like to chat to her or you can come to the University which will begin in an hour's time I think we'll be at the Marlborough Arms in an hour's time so I think probably rather than the usual go down to the Institute of Education we were thinking we might actually wander over to the Marlborough Arms and start early if you would like to have a drink a soft drink or a tea or coffee or alcohol or whatever you want and chat some more with Stephanie then we can do that so so you've joined me in thanking Stephanie thank you so much