Mardijker is an extinct

Portuguese-based creole Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have Portuguese as their substantial lexifier. The most widely-spoken creoles influenced by Portuguese are Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Creole and Papiamento. Origins Portuguese overseas exp ...

Jakarta Jakarta (; , bew, Jakarte), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta ( id, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coast of Java, the world's most populous island, Jakarta ...

. It was the native tongue of the

Mardijker people The Mardijker people refers to an ethnic community in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) made up of descendants of freed slaves. They could be found at all major trading posts in the East Indies. They were mostly Christian, of various ...

. The language was introduced with the Dutch settlement of

Batavia Batavia may refer to: Historical places * Batavia (region), a land inhabited by the Batavian people during the Roman Empire, today part of the Netherlands * Batavia, Dutch East Indies, present-day Jakarta, the former capital of the Dutch East In ...

(present-day Jakarta); the Dutch brought in slaves from the colonies they had recently acquired from the Portuguese, and the slaves' Portuguese creole became the

lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...

of the new city. The name is Dutch for "freeman", as the slaves were freed soon after their settlement. The language was replaced by Betawi creole Malay in Batavia by the end of the 18th century, as the Mardijker intermarried and lost their distinct identity. However, around 1670 a group of 150 were moved to what is now the village and suburb of Tugu, where they retained their language, there known as , until the 1940s. The earliest known record of the language is documented in a wordlist published in Batavia in 1780, the . The last competent speaker, Oma Mimi Abrahams, died in 2012, and the language survives only in the lyrics of old songs of the genre '' Keroncong Moresco (Keroncong Tugu)''.

References

Bibliography

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External links

*John Holm, 1989, ''Pidgins and Creoles: Volume 2, Reference Survey''
Batavia Creole by Maurer Philippe at apics-online.info
Portuguese-based pidgins and creoles Languages of Indonesia Languages extinct in the 2010s Portuguese language in Asia Languages attested from the 18th century Culture of Jakarta North Jakarta {{pidgincreole-lang-stub