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Then & Now | Creole language of Macau, patuá, nearly died before being revived by a curious younger generation – a fate other minority tongues share

  • Patuá, a mix of Portuguese, Cantonese and words from at least seven other languages, was in everyday domestic use in Macau for centuries
  • When people began emigrating from Macau in the 1840s they assimilated and neglected this creole language. Only now is a new generation taking interest in it

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Who are the Macanese?

Who are the Macanese?

Cultural identity markers once disregarded – such as critically endangered languages – sometimes unexpectedly reassert themselves, and re-emerge in the most unlikely corners. A resurgent interest in various forms of Portuguese/Macanese cultural identity among a certain subsection of Hong Kong people, and how that plays out through renewed appreciation of patuá, their creolised “ancestral language”, is an illustrative example.

Sometimes described as “Cantonese flesh on Portuguese bones”, this simplistic characterisation misses the extraordinary range of lexical borrowings, garnered over more than four centuries, that gifted patuá with words from languages as diverse as Japanese, Timorese, Malay, Konkani (spoken in Goa, India), Hindi, Dutch and English – as well as Cantonese and Portuguese.

In Macau, where the language originated and evolved from the 1560s, and then from the 1840s in Hong Kong, Shanghai and other Far Eastern cities where migrants from Macau settled, patuá largely remained a minority language, used in everyday domestic settings by – for the most part – minimally educated women.

Locally renowned Macanese poet and playwright José dos Santos Ferreira – popularly known as Adé – wrote skits, songs, poems, radio plays and stories in vibrant patuá that, for decades, had audiences rolling in the aisles from in-jokes and hilarious puns. Born in 1919, Adé’s voluminous body of work – frequently revived – recalls a time when patuá remained a living language, rather than a scholarly research subject.

But not everyone from the local Portuguese community was enamoured of patuá; more than a few thought even admitting to knowing it a bit lowering. Aspirational social attitudes maintained that people should either speak “proper” English or Portuguese in the public sphere, and not publicly converse in what was regarded – with some truth – as parrot-sounding kitchen chatter.

When he was president of Club Lusitano in Hong Kong in the 1960s, prominent lawyer Colonel H.A. de Barros Botelho objected strenuously to proposals for visiting patuá theatre productions from Macau at the club; eventually they were staged over his objections, “Bots” flatly refusing to attend performances in “that degraded pidgin”, as he more than once described patuá to me.

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