The Portuguese-lexified creoles of South Asia, spoken by small, close-knit communities in India and Sri Lanka, have received limited attention in both qualitative and quantitative studies of sociolinguistic variation; these include Sri Lanka Portuguese (SLP), an endangered language of Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka. This paper focuses on folk characterizations of sociolinguistic variation in SLP, from the perspective that traditional ideas concerning social and regional variation are useful means to ascertain how speakers acknowledge, perceive, and assign social meaning to linguistic variation.

In this paper, we collate the sparse previous accounts of sociolinguistic variation and report on a synchronic study that combines the qualitative analysis of metalinguistic commentary expressed in documentation interviews (Cardoso et al. 2019) and the results of an online survey, revealing SLP speakers’ metalinguistic awareness of dialectal and social variation, their interpretation of the roots of variation, and their attitudes towards it.

Results show that the speakers consider the language a discrete and relatively homogeneous system, comprised of maximally 2 geographically-defined varieties, differing in terms of prosodic, lexical and morphosyntactic features, with differences attributed mostly to the influence of Sri Lankan Tamil, and varying levels of linguistic competence among subsets of the community.  These beliefs interact with individual speakers’ linguistic competence and reflect adherence to a set of underlying ideologies of linguistic essentialism and authenticity/purism that intersect with the ongoing trends of language shift affecting this language community in general, and certain geographically- or socially-defined subsets in particular.

Reference

Cardoso, Hugo C., Mahesh Radhakrishnan, Patrícia Costa & Rui Pereira. 2019. Documenting modern Sri Lanka Portuguese. In Mário Pinharanda-Nunes & Hugo C. Cardoso (eds.), Documentation and Maintenance of Contact Languages from South Asia to East Asia, 1-33. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.