Macaista
| Macaista | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Macau | |
| speaker | 50 | |
| Linguistic classification |
||
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-3 |
mzs |
|
Patuá or Macanese (Macaista Chapado) is a Creole language that builds on the Portuguese language and is spoken in Macau . It is the traditional language of the Macanese .
Patuá is known by many different names to linguists , including a. Macaista Chapado ("pure Macanese"), Macao Creole, Macaense , Papia Cristam di Macau ("Christian Macau"), Dóci Língu di Macau (" Macau sweet language"), and Doci Papiaçam ("sweet language"). In Patuá, papia means "to speak", as in other Portuguese Creole languages. And "sweet language" is a nickname for Portuguese that it got from Cervantes .
Some Macanese take great pride in the fact that Macau has its own local language - something Hong Kong, for example, doesn't. They argue that Macau's status as a city of culture, one of the oldest meeting places of the Orient in the world and the West justifies an energetic cultivation of the Macanese language, and that Patuá deserves to be inscribed in UNESCO's “Red Book of Endangered Languages ” as a means of internalizing public awareness of its threatened existence.
history
The Portuguese term patuá is derived from the French word patois , which means something like "rough language". In its current usage in many European languages , patois often denotes the language of the common people of a region, which differs in several respects from the standard language of the rest of the country.
Macaus Patuá began to develop gradually after the Portuguese colonized the southern tip of the peninsula around 1557. Portuguese settlement in Malacca began in 1511, almost a century earlier than in Macau. In Malacca, Portuguese men married Malaysian women, resulting in a local Portuguese-Malay Creole language commonly known as " Papia Kristang " or Cristão ("Christian Language"), which is still spoken by an estimated 1,000 people in Malaysia and Singapore today becomes. Papia Kristang is grammatically very close to Malay, but its vocabulary is mainly derived from Portuguese.
Although the Dutch took Malacca from the Portuguese in 1641, the Papia Kristang has since survived as an actively spoken mother tongue. The Portuguese-Malay Creole language had a major influence on the development of Patuá Macau in the 17th century, especially with regard to its rich Malay vocabulary.
From the late 16th century onwards, Portuguese-Eurasian settlers from Malacca “transplanted” their Creole language to Macau.
The Portuguese settlement in Malacca and their Portuguese-Malay Creole language provided an accelerating basis for the establishment of a Portuguese settlement in Macau in the second half of the 16th century. This is why Patuá is heavily influenced by Malay, apart from a few 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 in one way or another influenced Macau's social and commercial development between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Patuá enjoyed its prime as the main language of communication among Macau's Eurasian residents between the 17th and 19th centuries. However, the absolute number of speakers was also relatively small at that time; probably only ever amounted to thousands or tens of thousands of people.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Patuá is still spoken as a mother tongue by several thousand people in Macau, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. At that time, Patuá was deliberately distinguished by its users from the “metropolitan” Portuguese standard language. In the early 20th century, patuá was used in an ironic way, e.g. B. in mocking skits that made fun of personalities of the administration or of colonial civil servants from Portugal.
Examples
This is an example from a poem in Patuá:
| Nhonha na jinela | Young lady at the window |
| Co fula mogarim | With a jasmine bush |
| Sua mae tancarera | Her mother is a Chinese fisher woman |
| Seu pai canarim | Your father is a Portuguese Indian |