Shihan De Silva Jayasuriya’s Wide-ranging Work on Portuguese Creole and the Kaffir

Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya of the University of London has been researching the Portuguese in the East for over twenty years and has generated a significant number of studies on Portuguese Creole peoples, their life-style ad  languages in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Her output of work has been as varied as commendable and I begin with a summary of one article dealing with “a nineteenth-century manuscript in Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole” because i am presently fashioning an article that refers to the work of Hugh Nevill on the Kāberi Hatana in order to ‘educate’ those who have touched on African slave labour at Galle without possessing any background information on the topic. This essay is in process and will appear soon….. Michael Roberts

Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya: “Indo-Portuguese Songs of Sri Lanka: The Nevill Manuscript,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 1996/1/1, pp. 253-267.

“Most Indo-Portuguese varieties of creole are unavailable for synchronic study. SLPC, however, though moribund in literary form, is still spoken (Jackson, 1990). Sri Lanka appears to preserve vestiges of a once more widespread Indo-Portuguese. SLPC is still used by the Burghers (Portuguese or Dutch descendants) in the east coast towns of Sri Lanka (Batticaloa and Trincomalee) for religious services and in both social and domestic contexts. It is also spoken in the west-coast town of Puttalam by descendants of the East Africans brought to Sri Lanka by the Portuguese. SLPC has contributed some words to the Sinhala lexicon, and vice versa, and it is related to other forms of Indo-Portuguese spoken on the Indian subcontinent. It thus offers important material for researchers investigating the processes of language contact and interaction.

The present paper is concerned with a nineteenth-century manuscript in Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole.”

A BIBLIOGRAPHY of SHIHAN’s WORK