The Kristang, Portuguese-Eurasians or Serani are a Creole-Indigenous people of originating in the city of Melaka, on the island and in the modern city of Singapore, in the city of Perth in Australia and elsewhere in island Southeast Asia or the Nusantara formed from coercive intermarriages between arriving Portuguese soldiers and local Indigenous Malay residents after the conquest of Melaka in 1511 by the Portuguese, and today numbering some 37,000 people worldwide. The Kristang language or Lingguaza Kristang or Linggu Kristang is our critically endangered mother tongue: the foundation, centre and core of our culture, identity, philosophy and ways of being, and the source and vehicle of our traditions, practices, aesthetics and metaphysics — a treasure unique to our region that has been undergoing sustained, dramatic and reindigenising revitalisation through the work of Kodrah Kristang and other members of the community in Melaka, Singapore, Perth and elsewhere since February 2016.
The Kristang language has been spoken in both the city of Melaka and on the island of Singapore since the sixteenth century (Lopes, 2025, p. 267) and is Indigenous to both places; a third core Kristang city of Perth has emerged since the second half of the twentieth century due to sustained immigration there from Melaka and Singapore by Kristang people. However, in all three locations, 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 also 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, Tuan Raja Naga, Kevin Martens Wong Zhi Qiang, from the Singapore Civil Service 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 di Krisamar Nova: the Resurrection Language of New Sundaland, 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.