patu

This article is about the language. For the people of Macau, see Macanese.

Patu or Macanese (Macaista Chapado) is a Creole language based on the Portuguese language spoken in Macau. Patu is known among linguists by many different names, such as Macaista Chapado ("pure Macanese"), Macao Creole, Macaense, Papia Cristam di Macau ("Christian language of Macau"), Dci Lngu di Macau ("Sweet Language of Macao"), and Doci Papiacam ("sweet ?"). In Patu, papia means to "speak" as in several Portuguese creoles. And "Sweet language" is a nickname for the Portuguese language given by Cervantes. Some Macanese take great pride in the fact that Macau has got its very own local language, something that, for instance, Hong Kong does not have. They argue that Macau's status as a city of culture and one of the world's oldest existing meeting places of the Orient and the Occident calls for the vigorous "cultivation" of its Macanese language, and that Patu deserves to be included in the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages as a tool of raising public awareness of its threatened existence.

History

The Portuguese term Patu is derived from the French word patois which, according to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, means "rough speech". In its present-day usage in the English and other European languages, "patois" denotes the tonge of the common people of a region, differing in various aspects from the standard language of the rest of that country. Macau's Patu started to gradually develop after the Portuguese settled down on the southern tip of the peninsula around 1557. The Portuguese settlement in Malacca began in 1511, nearly half a century earlier than the one in Macau. In Malacca, Portuguese men married Malay women, resulting in the creation of a local Portuguese-Malay Creole, generally known as "Papia Kristang" or Cristo ("Christian language"), which is still spoken today by an estimated 1,000 people in Malaysia and Singapore. Papia Kristang is very close to the Malay language in terms of grammar - being the substrate, but its vocabulary is mostly derived from Portuguese, the superstrate. Although the Dutch took Malacca from the Portuguese in 1641, Papia Kristang has survived as an actively spoken mother language ever since. The Portuguese-Malay Creole had a strong influence on the development of Macau's Patu in the 17th century, namely in terms of its rich Malay vocabulary. From the late 16th century, Portuguese Eurasian settlers from Malacca "transplanted" their Creole to Macau. The Portuguese settlement in Malacca, including its Portuguese-Malay Creole, served as a forward base for the subsequent establishment of a Portuguese settlement in Macau in the second half of the 16th century. That is why Patu is strongly influenced by Malay, apart from more or less significant influences by Cantonese, several Indian tongues, English, Japanese, Spanish, and a string of other European and Asian languages. In a way, Patu is a unique "cocktail" of European and Asian languages that one way or the other had an impact on Macau's social and commercial development between the 16th and 19th centuries. Patu enjoyed its peak time as the main language of communication among Macau's Eurasian residents between the 17th and 19th centuries. 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. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Patu was still spoken by several thousand of people in Macau, Hong Kong and elsewhere as their mother tongue. At that time, Patu was consciously differentiated by its users from the "metropolitan" Portuguese standard language. In the early 20th century, Patu was also used in a "satirical" way, such as in humorous sketches poking fun at figures of authority, such as colonial government officials from Portugal.

Classification and related languages

Creole - Portuguese-based Patu started gradually to evolve in Macau in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, namely among Portuguese settlers and their mixed-race descendents from Malacca and Macau. Most of the Macanese Creole lexicon is from Malay and from the papis of Malacca and Indonesia, but also from the Indian and Singhalese languages. This makes it the dialect of Papia Kristang. The structure of the language is from Portuguese-Malay, but also in a manner Portuguese-Indian with Chinese syntax. There is also a strong influence of the dialects of southern Portugal. Colloquially speaking, one may describe Patu as a linguistic joint-venture between Europe and Asia. Patu is, therefore, a Creole, which has been defined by linguists as a mother tongue formed from the contact of a European language with local languages elsewhere, namely in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Caribbean. Even though Patu has a history of four centuries, relatively little research into it has so far been done. The most notable exception is Macau's late educationalist and philologist Graciete Nogueira Batalha, who published a large number of studies on Patu, which she described as the Macanese dialect. Ms. Batalha died a decade ago. Dr. Alan Baxter, an Australian linguist who says he is fluent in Malaccas Portuguese-Malay Creole, Papia Kristang, researches Patu as one of the facets of his work at the Department of Portuguese of the University of Macau.

Geographic distribution

Patu is the now nearly extinct original mother tongue of Macau's Eurasian minority, which is customarily known as Macanese, and that presently comprises some 8,000 residents in Macau, or two per cent of the special administrative regions population, and an estimated 20,000 emigrants and their offspring elsewhere, such as in Hong Kong, California, Canada, Peru, Brazil, Australia, Portugal, and United Kingdom. Unlike its "elder sister" Creole in Malacca, Macau's Patu is nowadays only actively spoken by just several dozen old people, mostly women in their eighties or nineties, in Macau and Hong Kong, and only a few hundred people among the Macanese Diaspora overseas, namely in California. Patu is certainly an endangered language, if not an almost extinct language. Others have, rather dramatically, described it as a "dying language."

Sounds

Grammar

There has been little scientific research of Patu's grammar, namely the different stages of its development between the 16th and 20th centuries. Its grammatical structure seems to incorporate both European and Asian elements. As in other Asian tongues, there is an absence of the definite article, and a peculiar use of pronouns and possessive adjectives. The word io means "I," "me" and "mine." The word ilotro-sua means "theirs." Patu does, on the other hand, not use Portuguese-style verbal inflection. For example, io sam means "I am," and ele sam means "he/she is." Macaus "sweet language" also uses certain particles to denote progressive (ta) and completed actions (ja). There is reduplication for plural nouns (casa-casa = "houses"), plural adjectives (china-china = "several Chinese people or things"), and plural adverbs (cedo-cedo = "very early") patterned from Malay grammar.

Vocabulary

The strong Malay influence on Patu also derives from the fact that Macau's early Portuguese settlers sought wives primarily from Malacca, as well as India and Japan, and not mainland China. Malay words adopted by Patu include sapeca (coin) and copo-copo (butterfly). Patu's vocabulary derived from Indian languages includes fula (flower) and lacassa (vermicelli). The British occupation of Hong Kong from the mid-19th century resulted in the inclusion of English vocabulary, such as adap ("hard-up," i.e. having very little money) and afet (fat). Over the centuries, in the same way as any other language or dialect, Patu underwent changes in usage, grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Cantonese has strongly influenced Patu since the late 19th century, when more and more Macanese men started to marry Chinese women from Macau and its hinterland in the Pearl River Delta. Patu words derived from Cantonese include amui (girl) and laissi (gift of cash).

Writing system

The Portuguese authorities determination, namely since the late 19th century, to teach the Macanese standard Portuguese doomed Patu's future as an actively spoken community language. High-society Macanese gradually abandoned Patu in the early 20th century because they started to regard it as "low class" and "primitive Portuguese". Patu never reached the status of a fully fledged written language, even though some writers, such as the late Jos "Ade" dos Santos Ferreira, penned poems in the "sweet language". Even nowadays, Patu has no standardized orthography. As a matter of fact, Patu has never been taught as a full subject by any education establishment in Macau. The Macanese customarily learned to speak Patu from their parents, namely their mothers. Literally speaking, Patu genuinely functioned as the Macanese communitys mother tongue. In other words, during its long history Patu has always been a basically family-based language that never enjoyed official recognition by the authorities. In fact, some teachers from Portugal tried hard to "erase" Patu that they discarded as "badly spoken Portuguese." Apart from some ivory-tower research, very little has been done in recent years to publicise Patu's endangered existence among the general public. An exception is the publication of a Patu-Portuguese glossary by the Macau International Institute in 2001. The glossary was edited by Miguel Senna Fernandes and Dr. Alan Baxter. Fernandes, a lawyer by profession and Patu supporter by passion, has said that Patu was "not yet dead, but the archaic form of Patu has already died," adding that "modern" Patu could be considered a "dialect derived from archaic Patu." He also underlined the fact that "modern" Patu has been strongly influenced by Cantonese, namely since the beginning of the 20th century, adding that it was "quite a miracle" that Patu 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 Patu aficionados to ensure the survival of Macau's "sweet language" that, after all, is part of its unique history. Some of the aficionados have proposed the setting-up of a dedicated Patu research centre in Macau. The centre would not only conduct linguistic and anthropological investigations but, most importantly, also provide language courses at a grass-roots level among all walks of life and different generations.

Examples

Here is an example of a Patu poem:

oung lady in the window
o fula mogarim	With a jasmine flower
ua mae tancarera	Her mother is a Chinese fisherwoman
eu pai canarim	Her father is a Portuguese Indian

Patu