Kaminyu di Kodramintu: A Revitalization Plan for an Endangered Language in Singapore

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2017-03-04
Authors
Wong, Kevin Martens
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Wong, Kevin Martens
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Kristang, or Malacca Creole Portuguese (iso 639-3:mcm), is a critically endangered Portuguese-Malay contact language spoken by less than 2,000 people in Malaysia and Singapore, and the heritage language of the Portuguese Eurasian community. This presentation describes the Kaminyu di Kodramintu (‘the Path of Awakening’), a 30-year revitalization plan for Kristang in Singapore, which was developed at the 2016 Institute for Collaborative Language Research (CoLang 2016) and now serves as the guiding document for the Kodrah Kristang (‘Awaken, Kristang’) multimodal revitalization initiative. I will begin with an outline of Kristang’s history and current status in Malaysia and Singapore, and explore the genesis of the Kodrah Kristang effort; I will then discuss the impetus for the Kodramintu plan, and how the plan was developed in consultation with community members and participants at CoLang 2016, and with reference to current Kodrah Kristang adult class learner profiles. I will then describe the Kodramintu plan in detail: the long-term vision and the five KAPAS long-term goals, and the five phases of the thirty-year project timeline, providing additional information about key decisions and the Singaporean context of the revitalization effort where necessary. I conclude with a discussion of the challenges and limitations involved in developing such a plan, especially the difficulty of responding consistently and fairly to all community expectations and desires, and explore possible future directions and transformations of the plan as the initiative continues to evolve. The Kodramintu is one of the few available documents for the revitalization of an endangered contact language, and for the revitalization of any language in the particular context of Southeast Asia. It is thus hoped that this presentation will contribute significant insights to other revitalization projects with similar characteristics and in similar contexts.
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