Macau’s Patuá classified among most vulnerable languages

A satire show staged by Doci Papiaçam di Macau

A recent academic paper on contact languages has found the Macanese Patuá to be “critically endangered”, placing it among the most vulnerable languages worldwide.

A contact language is a marginal language used for basic communication between people without a mutual language. The Macau Patuá, one such contact language, evolved from the descendants of Portuguese settlers in Macau, who often married Chinese natives or other peoples from nearby Portuguese territories, such as Malacca and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

In the paper, titled “Contact languages around the world and their levels of endangerment”, author Nala H. Lee of the National University of Singapore assessed 96 contact languages through a “Language Endangerment Index” that is based on four factors: intergenerational transmission, absolute number of speakers, speaker number trends, and domains of use. Each factor is rated on a scale of 0 (safe) to 5 (critically endangered).

Patuá is rated “critically endangered” –the most vulnerable category – for each of the factors except for the absolute number of speakers, despite there being only an estimated 50 proficient speakers.

This puts the creole language as one of the most endangered of the 96 contact languages in the assessment.

In justifying the ratings for each of the four categories, Lee writes that Patuá (like other similar languages) is “only spoken among a limited subset of people from the grandparents’ generation or older,” and is “spoken by a small percentage of the community [in which it is found], and speaker numbers are decreasing rapidly.”

According to an estimate from 2007, there may be as few as 50 proficient speakers of the creole language, although other estimates suggest thousands may have some familiarity with it.

Nevertheless its usage in the modern world is limited to very few domains, “such as in ceremonies, songs, prayers and in limited domestic activities.”

The most notable use of Patuá in Macau is an annual comedy and a satire show staged by Doci Papiaçam di Macau (literally, “sweet language of Macau”), a group that seeks to preserve the unique dialect through original productions.

Citing the previous work of other academics, the author draws attention to the worldwide scale of language loss. Some scholars suggest that half of the world’s languages will no longer be spoken by the end of the century, while more recent studies predict one language will be lost every three months on average.

But these predictions are based on lexifer (root) languages, rather than creoles or patois.

In the paper, Lee counters the notion that the disappearance of creoles and patois languages is part of the same evolution that brings them into existence in the first place. In this sense, she argues that efforts to preserve these endangered tongues are worthwhile.

“While often endangered by regionally dominant languages, contact languages are also born within the context of endangerment. Research on these languages must contend with the opinion that language shift may possibly be maladaptive, since it is language contact that leads to the emergence of contact languages, just as it is language contact that can lead to language death,” she writes.

However, “construed from another point of view, contact languages represent a halfway point between the indigenous language and the lexifer language, a point at which language shift can be halted.”

In 2009, UNESCO classified Patuá as a “critically endangered” language, and in 2012 Patuá-language Theater was inscribed on the list of Macau SAR’s Intangible Cultural Heritage.