Malabar Indo-Portuguese

Malabar Indo-Portuguese is a creole language formed in a situation of language contact between the Portuguese colonizers and the native Malayalam-speaking community of the Malabar Coast in the 16th century; nowadays, it is spoken by a few last speakers in Cannanore. This book contributes to its linguistic description, which has so far benefited from Schuchardt’s work (Schuchardt, 1882, 1883, 1889a, b) and from recent fieldwork-based descriptions by Cardoso (2012, 2014a, d, c). By using linguistic data from the corpus of Malabar Indo-Portuguese (Cardoso, 2006-2015, 2007-2010), this work offers a description of several structures within the verbal system, such as TMA marking, copulative constructions, and subordination. Besides the synchronic description, Malabar Indo-Portuguese structures are also analyzed within a diachronic and contact-based perspective, through comparison with their Portuguese etymologies and Malayalam substrate/adstrate influences. This work shows that the grammatical functions and morphosyntactic structures within the verbal system have converged with Malayalam on a large scale, while maintaining semantic links to their Portuguese etymologies. The diachrony of Malabar Indo-Portuguese is studied in the context of grammaticalization and language ecology as creole-shaping mechanisms. Keywords: Malabar Indo-Portuguese, creole, verbal system, language contact, Portuguese, Malayalam, TMA, copula, subordination, grammaticalization, language ecology ISBN 9783862889099. LINCOM Studies in Pidgin & Creole Linguistics 20. 211pp. 2018.