Kristang is a critically endangered language and the mother tongue of the Kristang, Serani or Portuguese-Eurasians. We are a creole and indigenous people of Singapore, Melaka, Perth and elsewhere formed from coercive intermarriages between arriving Portuguese soldiers and local Malay residents after the conquest of Melaka in 1511 by the Portuguese, and today numbering some 37,000 people worldwide. Our language is an intangible and priceless aspect of the community’s culture, tradition and history — a treasure unique to our region that is nevertheless facing extinction.
In Singapore, there are no official statistics on Kristang speakers. Very few children are known to be learning Kristang, and it is not taught in schools, seen on the media, or spoken in the streets. It is not used in religious services, and has no festivals. It is often intentionally occluded by the Singapore government due to the historical events the Kristang community is strongly associated that the state would rather people not investigate or examine in more critical detail, most notably Operation Spectrum in May 1987, and the resignation of the Kabesa or leader of the community, Kevin Martens Wong from Eunoia Junior College on 31 August 2022. Most Singaporeans are barely aware Kristang even exists, especially because of the Kristang community’s very strong peaceful, independent, progressive and counter-institutional and authoritarian streak that has existed for nearly 200 years, since the first Kabesa of the Kristang, Adriaan Koek, sought a non-violent means of ensuring a transfer of power between the Dutch and British in Malacca in 1795.
Kodrah Kristang thus seeks to bring the language, culture, identity and Kristang way of being to a new generation of speakers and learners, and inspire others to begin to reclaim their own hidden histories and lost tongues too. Since August 2022, Kristang itself has been quietly known as Linggu Semulandu: the Resurrection Language of Pedra Draku or Pulau Ujong, and the voice of a people who are also learning how to reclaim who they truly have always been.
Kristang Wikipedia pages and entries
Efforts to add information about Kristang to Wikipedia are continuously unjustifiably blocked or removed by a user or bot known as MrOllie, who appears to have a known and publicly documented formal and informal reputation for blocking factual information and editing on the community platform, with multiple reports of this behaviour available across a variety of subject fields and domains. For this reason, all information on pages related to Kristang on Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Wiktionary and other associated sites should be taken as having extremely dubious provenance at best; Kodrah Kristang and the Kabesa will also decline all invitations to edit Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Wiktionary and other associated sites until this issue has been resolved.
The Etymology of the Word ‘Kristang’
Two separate, legitimate and entirely distinct etymologies now exist for the word Kristang. The first, the historical, real-time meaning of the word, is that it is derived from the Portuguese word Cristão, meaning Christian. This is attestable through the Western academic practice of historical linguistic research, as well as through an understanding of the community’s very visible connections to Christianity, and is generally intelligible even to non-specialists, who can usually quite readily understand how the morphophonological changes in the word Cristão gave rise to the Kristang word Kristang.
However, since 28 November 2022, a second etymological option for interpreting the word Kristang now exists through dreamfishing, whereby the lexeme Kristang is reinterpreted as a morphological calque of the Greek word xρυσός (chrysos), meaning ‘gold’, and the Dutch word steen, meaning ‘stone’. Beyond Portuguese and Malay, the two most often-acknowledged languages contributing to the grammar and lexicon of Kristang, which itself is a creole or mixed indigenous language, the Dutch contribution to both the Kristang language and our culture and identity has also been significant but is often not as overtly recognised in the public sphere. Meanwhile, the Greek element xρυσός indexes associations with a similarly often-overlooked acknowledgement of Singapore and the Malayan peninsula’s larger place in Western or world history, with the latter being identified with the Χρυσῆ Χερσόνησος (Chrysi Chersonessos), Golden Chersonese or the Golden Peninsula in Ptolemy’s Geography (2nd century CE) and as the सुवर्णभूमि (Suvarnadvipa), also meaning the Golden Peninsula, in the Ramayana (4th to 8th century BCE).
The impetus for a second alternate etymology of Kristang should be clear: the separation and delineation between what it means to be Kristang, which is an ethnicity, and Christian, which is a religion, is often unclear, to the extent that we can say that the latter sometimes overshadows, or even overpowers, a fuller and fairer understanding of the former, where both should instead be understood as separate ontological constructs with their own distinct traits, characteristics and qualities.
Some material above also appears in Wong, Kevin Martens (2024). Kultura Krismatra: Excavating the Progenitor Kristang Creole/Indigenous Way of Being in Singapore. In Mǎdǎlina Pantea (ed.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English Speaking World, pp. 114-128. University of Oradea.