Creating a Corpus of Modern Sri Lankan Portuguese
The Portuguese-based creole of Sri Lanka, known as Sri Lanka Portuguese, is a linguistic product of the Portuguese colonial era. While mostly associated with the Burgher and Kaffir communities in Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Mannar, it is today an endangered language due to a significant contraction in domains of use, number of speakers, and transmission. A team of linguists at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, are engaged in preserving the Creole, by creating a large annotated corpus of the grammar and lexicon, while also focusing on Sri Lanka Portuguese music, song and dance.
Members of the team included Dr. Hugo C. Cardoso (Principal Investigator), Patrícia Costa, and Mahesh Radhakrishnan, all from the University of Lisbon, made a presentation on 22nd May 2018 on the progress of their documentation project, ongoing since 2017, at the invitation of the Department of English, during one of their field visits to Sri Lanka.
The Corpus of Sri Lanka Portuguese has been launched and is now available on ELAR (Endangered Languages Archive).
