Alan N. Baxter

Early Notices Regarding Creole Portuguese in Former Portuguese Timor

The area of Bidau, in the East Timorese capital of Dili, was home to the only documented form of Creole Portuguese in Timor. Although Bidau Creole Portuguese is now extinct, by most accounts, a few scattered records allow a glimpse into what it must have been like, and reveal its clear relationship with other Southeast Asian Portuguese-based creoles; Baxter’s (1990a) study of Bidau Creole Portuguese was based mostly on a set of recordings made in the context of the Missao Antropologica de Timor [“Anthropological Mission to Timor”, 1953–1954]. In this article, Baxter (1990a: 3) mentions that “[s]o far, the earliest located reference to Bidau Creole Portuguese, and one which contains some impressionistic examples of conversations and the verse of a song, is Castro (1943: 56, 177)”. However, since the publication of this study, a few earlier references to what can be interpreted as Portuguese-based creole in Timor have been located in unpublished archival sources. These sources are letters sent to two important philologists of the late 19 th and early 20 th century, Hugo Schuchardt and Jose Leite de Vasconcelos, who were greatly interested in ascertaining whether a creole was spoken in Timor and what the local Portuguese was like. The present study introduces and contextualises these epistolary sources, discussing the linguistic and sociolinguistic material contained therein, and its relevance for the confirmation of different threads of language contact involving Portuguese.

Vowels in Malacca Portuguese Creole

Abstract This paper examines the vowel system of present day Malacca Portuguese Creole (MPC) or Kristang, based on recordings from interviews with five female native speakers of MPC. A total of 1083 monophthongs were extracted from the recordings. The first and second formants of these vowels were measured and analysed. Considerable variation was found within and between the speakers in the way each of the vowels was produced. There were also noticeable overlaps between /i/ and /e/ suggesting that they were being used interchangeably. The quality of some of the vowels found in this study was also found to be different from those previously described. Based on the reduced vowel inventory, the variation in the way that vowels are produced, and the overlaps between vowels, the findings suggest the possibility of phonological instability of this endangered language.