The Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole Manuscript is a significant record of the Sri Lankan Indo-Portuguese creole, as spoken in the 19th century among the Burgher and Kaffir communities. It a precious source for linguistic, literary, anthropological, and folkloric studies.
The manuscript was collected by Hugh Nevill in the period 1865–1897, and is now at the British Library.
The manuscript contains 1,049 quatrains, divided into three sections:
The story of Orson and Valentine was very popular in Europe. Variants of the story are found in 5th century Pali literature, and it is also an early play of Sinhalese theatre (Balasanta Nadagama).
The manuscript is written using a mix of Portuguese and Dutch orthography.
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This is a demography of the population of Sri Lanka including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have Portuguese as their substantial lexifier. The most widely-spoken creoles influenced by Portuguese are Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Creole and Papiamento.
Macanese patois, known as patuá to its speakers, is a Portuguese-based creole language with a substrate from Cantonese, Malay and Sinhala, which was originally spoken by the Macanese community of the Portuguese colony of Macau. It is now spoken by a few families in Macau and in the Macanese diaspora.
Baila is a form of music, popular in Sri Lanka and among Goan Catholics. The genre originated centuries ago among the Portuguese Burghers and Sri Lankan Kaffirs. Baila songs are played during parties and weddings in Sri Lanka, Goa, Mangalore and Portugal accompanied by dancing.
Burgher people, also known simply as Burghers, are a small Eurasian ethnic group in Sri Lanka descended from Portuguese, Dutch, British and other European men who settled in Ceylon and developed relationships with native Sri Lankan women. The Portuguese and Dutch had held some of the maritime provinces of the island for centuries before the advent of the British Empire. With the establishment of Ceylon as a crown colony at the end of the 18th century, most of those who retained close ties with the Netherlands departed. However, a significant community of Burghers remained and largely adopted the English language. During British rule, they occupied a highly important place in Sri Lankan social and economic life.
Sri Lanka Indo-Portuguese, Ceylonese Portuguese Creole or Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole (SLPC) is a language spoken in Sri Lanka. While the predominant languages of the island are Sinhala and Tamil, the interaction of the Portuguese and the Sri Lankans led to the evolution of a new language, Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole (SLPC), which flourished as a lingua franca on the island for over 350 years. SLPC continues to be spoken by an unknown number of Sri Lankans, estimated to be extremely small.
Indo-Portuguese creoles are the several Portuguese creoles spoken in the erstwhile Portuguese Indian settlements, Cochin Portuguese Creole, Fort Bassein, Goa and Damaon, Portuguese Ceylon etc, in present-day India and Sri Lanka. These creoles are now mostly extinct or endangered, the creoles have substantial European Portuguese words in their grammars or lexicons:
In Sri Lanka, the names Mestiços or Casados ("Married") referred to people of mixed Portuguese and Sri Lankan descent. The names can be traced back to the 16th century.
The Portuguese Burghers are an ethnic group in Sri Lanka, of mixed Portuguese and Sri Lankan descent. They are largely Roman Catholic and some still speak the Sri Lanka Indo-Portuguese language, a creole based on Portuguese mixed with Sinhalese. In modern times, English has become the common language while Sinhalese is taught in school as a second language. Portuguese Burghers sometimes mixed with but are to be distinguished from other Burgher people, such as Dutch Burghers.
The Sri Lankan Kaffirs are an ethnic group in Sri Lanka who are partially descended from 16th-century Portuguese traders and Bantu slaves who were brought by them to work as labourers and soldiers to fight against the Sinhala Kings. They are very similar to the Zanj-descended populations in Iraq and Kuwait, and are known in Pakistan as Sheedis and in India as Siddis. The Kaffirs spoke a distinctive creole based on Portuguese, and the "Sri Lankan Kaffir language". Their cultural heritage includes the dance styles Kaffringna and Manja and their popular form of dance music Baila.
Hugh L. Nevill was a British civil servant, best known for his scholarship and studies of the culture of Sri Lanka.
Several languages are spoken in Sri Lanka within the Indo-Aryan, Austronesian, and Dravidian families. Sri Lanka accords official status to Sinhala and Tamil, and English as a recognised language. The languages spoken on the island nation are deeply influenced by the various languages in India, Europe and Southeast Asia. Arab settlers and the colonial powers of Portugal, the Netherlands and Britain have also influenced the development of modern languages in Sri Lanka. See below for the most-spoken languages of Sri Lanka.
Vedda is an endangered language that is used by the indigenous Vedda people of Sri Lanka. Additionally, communities such as Coast Veddas and Anuradhapura Veddas who do not strictly identify as Veddas also use words from the Vedda language in part for communication during hunting and/or for religious chants, throughout the island.
African Sri Lankans, mainly the Sri Lanka Kaffirs, are a very small Ethnic group in Sri Lanka who are descendants of African mercenaries, musicians, and labourers taken to what is now Sri Lanka by Portuguese colonists during the period of Portuguese colonial rule on the island. There are currently around 1,000 African Sri Lankans. They live in pockets of communities along the island's coastal regions of Trincomalee, Batticaloa, and Negombo. The Portuguese colonists used them to fight the Ceylonese Kings.
Sellankandal is a village situated 10 km inland from coastal Puttalam city in the North Western Province of Sri Lanka. It is the primary settlement of people of Black African descent in Sri Lanka called Kaffirs who until the 1930s spoke a Creole version of Portuguese. Most villages speak Sinhala and are found throughout the country as well as in the Middle East. The Baila type of music, very popular in Sri Lanka since the 1980s, originated centuries ago among this 'kaffir' community. They however complain that they benefitted very little from the popularity of the Baila music.
Afro-Asians are African communities that have been living in the Indian Subcontinent for centuries and have settled in countries such as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
The Dutch Burghers are an ethnic group in Sri Lanka, of mixed Dutch, Portuguese Burghers and Sri Lankan descent. However, they are a different community when compared with Portuguese Burghers. Originally an entirely Protestant community, many Burghers today remain Christian but belong to a variety of denominations. The Dutch Burghers of Sri Lanka speak English and the local languages Sinhala and Tamil.
Luso-Asians are people whose ethnicity is partially or wholly Portuguese and ancestrally are based in or hail primarily from Portugal, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. They historically came under the cultural and multi-ethnic sway of the Portuguese Empire in the East and retain certain aspects of the Portuguese language, Roman Catholic faith, and Latin cultural practices, including internal and external architecture, art, and cuisine that reflect this contact. The term Luso comes from the Roman empire's province of Lusitania, it roughly corresponds to modern Portugal.
Portuguese–Sri Lankan relations refer to the official and bilateral tie between Portugal and Sri Lanka. While two countries do not have embassies in respective capitals, with Portugal only has an honorary consulate in Colombo, they share a long, close and historical relationship.