Tracing the African roots of Sri-Lanka Afro-Portuguese

Tracing the African roots of Sri-Lanka Afro-Portuguese

This is a workshop to discuss the origins of Sri Lanka Afro-Portuguese, a language currently extinct if it weren't for the manjas.

The purpose of this workshop is to discuss a critically endangered language—Sri Lanka Portuguese (SLP)—among Afrodescent communities in north-western Sri Lanka. With the help of experts on Creoles, Language Contact, Multilingualism and African Languages, we will present our documentation practices and our preliminary analyses of the manja, the only remaining linguistic and cultural expression of African heritage for these communities; in the words of the speakers themselves ‘Poverty is our plight and manja is our only inheritance’. We hope to give visibility to their only inheritance through careful documentation combining state-of-the- art theorising with the ethnographic method which has taken place as part of our UKRI-AHRC-funded project.

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Host or Publisher Professor Ioanna Sitaridou