Korlai Creole Portuguese
Conjugate VerbsFacts
- Language: Korlai Creole Portuguese
- Alternate names: Creole Portuguese
- Language code: vkp
- Language family: Indo-European, Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Western Romance, Shifted Western Romance, Southwestern Shifted Romance, West Ibero-Romance, Galician Romance, Macro-Portuguese, Indo-Portuguesic, Northern Indo-Portuguesic
- Creole language
- Number of speakers: 750
- Script: Devanagari script. Latin script.
More information:
Introduction
Korlai Indo-Portuguese is a creole language based on Portuguese, spoken by less than 1,000 Luso-Indian Christians of Korlai in the Raigad District of the Konkan region, in Maharashtra, India. It is located between Goa and Damaon. It has vigorous use and it is also known as Kristi ("Christian"), Korlai Creole Portuguese, Korlai Portuguese, or as Nou Ling by the creole people of Korlai themselves, which literally means "our language".
The Korlai Creole Portuguese Verb
From Portuguese Korlai maintains the three formal verb classes (-a, -e, -i, as in kat-a ‘sing’, beb-e ‘drink’, and irg-i ‘get up’), and has added one more (-u, as in tep-u ‘heat up’), which is used to accommodate verbs borrowed from Marathi. Korlai has eight overt, preposed tense-aspect markers (tə (tɛ), ti, lə, tɛd, tid, ay, ater, (ja)), as well as three tense-aspect suffixes (-n, -d, -o (-w)). The preposed markers never combine with each other, but rather combine with the suffixes to express tense and aspect distinctions in Korlai. Zero-marking also plays a part in the Korlai verb system.