Over four centuries, the Portuguese who settled in Macau evolved their own language, the Macau patuá, a dialect of Portuguese with infusions from the Malay peninsula, Sinhalese and Cantonese, with a smattering from English and even Dutch.  That so-called Creole language was discouraged in schools, being seen as  the language of the uneducated, but it nevertheless survived until the twentieth century.  It is now spoken by only a few elderly Macanese and is grave danger of extinction.   UNESCO has declared it to be an endangered language.

Fortunately researchers have documented it, and we have added audio to preserve its authentic pronunciation.  Here we include its lexicon (from the work of Miguel de Senna Fernandes and Alan Baxter) with audio recordings from Mariazinha Machado Marques, verses from  José “Adé” dos Santos Ferreira and Graciete Batalha, articles about the patuá and videos from a drama group Dóci Papiaçám di Macau.