Student Projects

An Endangered Language: Unravelling The Intricacies of Kristang

Kristang is a critically endangered heritage language, specifically, the Malacca-Melayu Portuguese creole spoken by approximately less than 100 Kristang people in Singapore. It is on the verge of a language death despite its 500-year-old rich historical origins from the Portuguese- Eurasian community, that once prevailed through the 16th century. This calls for a pressing linguistic intervention to document this oral language and to increase public awareness of its alarming susceptibility to extinction. The rationale of this talk is based on the author’s inspiration to contribute to the Kristang community’s revitalisation efforts, that have caught the waves of the Singapore media in re- cent years. Eventually, the aim is to recreate a language identity and linguistic ownership for the speakers of Kristang. In this talk, Kristang’s original and intergenerational wedding traditions will be presented, as narrated by two sisters from a prominent Kristang family in Singapore. The linguistic features of Kristang will be unravelled, namely, its lexis, phonology, morphology and syntax. This linguistic analysis will provide us with an avenue to examine the influence of loanwords, socio-historical associations and cultural relevance, that will be meaningful for native Kristang descendants and its widespread interracial Kristang ethnicities. In addition, the relations between the wedding traditions and the community’s staunch Catholic beliefs, the motif of life transition, and culinary mastery will be discussed. The methodology of the study involves a fieldwork transcription of the sister’s narrative text and audio recording, concurrently integrating past Kristang literature that will depict a balanced overview of the language. In time to come, the annotation of these texts will provide the basis for a valu- able linguistic resource and language documentation for linguists, an- thropologists, sociologists and other scientists investigating Kristang.

Kimberly is driven by the passion to give back to the society through the study of linguistics and speech-language pathology. In addition, she aspires to revitalise and strengthen the minority status of endangered languages. Kimberly is a multilingual speaker of English, Mandarin Chinese, Thai and Swedish.

Research Interests: Language Documentation and Revitalisation, Anthropological

Linguistics, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Neurolinguistics