Marco Carvalho
If there were any doubts remaining, Alexandre Lebel dispelled them. The Canadian researcher, who earlier this week defended, at the University of Saint Joseph (USJ), his doctoral dissertation in the area of creolistics, managed to prove through a phylogenetic approach that the functionally extinct Luso-Asian Creole of Macau – the patois – is closer to kristang – and, inherently, to Malay languages - than to Cantonese and other sinitic dialects. The Catholic Church, the researcher claims, might have played a role in the formation of both creoles.
You have defended your doctoral thesis earlier this week and your conclusions demolished, in a certain sense, the idea that the Macanese Patois is a sino-Portuguese creole. As you managed to prove, it is closely related to kristang, the Portuguese creole from Malacca. Your research is based on a new approach in terms of linguistics, a phylogenetic approach. What did you do exactly in terms of research?
Well, what I did was to collect the available documentation. These documents are often difficult to find. We have different sources: archive materials, old books and I tried to put them all together, to organize them, not only for the purpose of this research, but also to facilitate future investigations. In the future, if there are people willing to study the maquista [derived from “Macau” – ed.] all these documents are available to them. This could be a good starting point for other investigators, so they will try to find something new. At the same time, their work will help to build up the corpus.
Maquista is now part of the APICS database, the world’s largest database of creole structures. This means that most of the resources in maquista are already available digitally. Will this facilitate new investigations about the Patois in the future?
Yes, of course. The work that I did now would have been almost impossible ten or twenty years ago and that’s why it did not happen. In a certain way, I just happened to be there at the right time. Yet, there are all these archives online that are available now. It’s amazing because, with the pandemic, I was here in Macau and I didn’t have the chance to go anywhere and, nevertheless, I could have access to all those documents.
This allowed you to compare maquista with what was thought to be its main influences, like Cantonese, kristang or other Asian-Portuguese creoles. How does this database work?
Everyone can access the database. It’s online and there were researchers in different institutes that gave their contribution to this project. Each one was a specialist in one particular language. They had a framework, a list of categories that had been established and they just had to input their data. In the end, there are like 76 languages considered as creoles, one hundred thirty features, but there is one that is more used worldwide. The database is online, it can be exported, but I am not really sure in what kind of formats. Personally, I did it manually. It is based on existing literature, so we have like a thousand languages. Unfortunately not all of them are widely documented, some of the features are missing. There are still gaps and that was what I was trying to do, to fill a little gap in that huge database.
You have made a comparison between maquista and several other languages in more than one hundred categories and you managed to prove that the language with which creole has more similarities is kristang. Can this discovery of yours help bring a new vitality or a more fundamental basis to study and to rethink the Macau creole?
Well, the two communities – the kristang community and the Maccanese community – they are very different in socio-political terms and I don’t know to what extent they would really engage with each other. We can try, but it is not for me to try and then we will see what they take off the research.
Will this allow, nevertheless, a more solid knowledge of both maquista and kristang?
Well, it works a little bit like the database. It is the accumulation of data that eventually… We don’t know everything about our history, but nevertheless we know more about the sort of things that happened one thousand years ago. A few things were documented. We have certain documentation of historical Portuguese, of historical Malay and also historical Chinese. We were able to establish comparisons from a linguistic point of view, because we have those languages that have been documented. If, in the future, there will be other similar episodes of creolization and it happens like we see nowadays in Africa, where we witness the movement of populations, they will probably have their own language to communicate between people from different regions. We have such an example in Nigeria, with the English pidgin. And it will happen in different places. In an era of globalization, we will see more and more of these processes, but we don’t know what languages they will speak. Maybe they will speak English, maybe they will speak Mandarin, but then we will have to see what kind of Mandarin they speak and then, based on their origin, we can see what the final result can be. Maybe it is not the final result, but the progression of their communication. Either way, we can compare that to what happened with kristang and with maquista and see if there are any similarities.
Indo-Portuguese was during several centuries a sort of lingua franca, spoken all over East Asia. Was this lingua franca a sort of universal thing in Asia? Or is there the possibility of a missing linguistic link, a sort of proto-Indian Portuguese that we don’t know much about?
Yes, there are a lot of similarities between the Asian Creole Portuguese to point at the possibility that there was a monogenesis of creole Portuguese, a sort of Asian pidgin creole that they would use for trade. We are not sure if it was really Asian. It might have also come from Africa because, at the same time, it was also used among merchants. It is important to mention the importance, in the different colonies, of the work of the missionaries that would teach Portuguese to the local populations. There was some sort of reciprocity between that and, I would say, a Pan-Asian creole pidgin. But, on top of that, there was communication between the different colonies: they were isolated, but they were also in communication because of the Church. There were lots of priests that would go from one place to another because of their missions and that is why we have early documentation on all these different languages. That idea of a common origin is debated in the field.
You mentioned in your investigation also the possibility of revitalization. This is a very rare process: we have two very well known examples, Hebrew and Welsh. There are other attempts by smaller communities, like the Livonians in Estonia. Having in mind that we barely still have any native speakers of maquista, people that have maquista as their first language, is it still possible to revitalize the Patois?
The remaining native speakers are probably from an older generation. They were born before the Second World War, around that time. What happens is that the revitalization in itself should concern, really, the language that used to be spoken, but these populations have other challenges: What will happen to Portuguese in Macau? And what will happen to Cantonese in Macau? It’s somehow a utopia to think that we would just revive a language that we don’t even need, when we have other languages that are more preoccupying, that are used in schools and by families at home. And that is why it wouldn’t be a priority to revive maquista, but maquista can be a bit a sort of symbol, pertaining to the maintenance of Cantonese and Portuguese altogether in the community, the Macanese community.
Are those challenges interchangeable? The idea of preserving Portuguese, Cantonese and Maquista can be of use to each other?
Well, maquista is a language, but in reality it doesn’t really work like a language. It is a set of practices. When we go to one of those events organized by the community, we see all that people and they are there because of maquista, because maquista brings people together but those events are not necessarily about maquista. They are a means for the community to achieve their goals or to reenact their own traditions, things like that. And yes, it is more like a symbolic aspect, but we need symbols to keep people together, to bring people together.
How did someone that grew up in Quebec, speaking French ended up studying maquista?
I was born in Macau, so that’s why I came back here. I met people in the community, even before I knew about the academic aspect of it. I was hanging out with some people and I was interested in culture in general and it came to me, naturally, that maybe I could do something about it. That’s, in a way, a different perspective, because it wouldn’t be someone from the community to study what they do and there are a few doing it, but I think that it is interesting to have someone that is not Portuguese – and I don’t consider myself necessarily to be Chinese – doing that. I was able to be here and to have that other point of view and when all those different perspectives are put together, maybe we have a better idea of what we have in front of us.
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