Sri Lanka Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, also known historically as Ceylon, is an island country in South Asia. It lies in the Indian Ocean, southwest of the Bay of Bengal, separated from the Indian subcontinent, ...

, the names ''Mestiços'' ( Portuguese for "Mixed People") or ''Casados'' ("Married") referred to people of mixed Portuguese and Sri Lankan ( Sinhalese and Tamil) descent. The names can be traced back to the 16th century.

History

The first ''mestiços'' descended from Portuguese explorers, soldiers and merchants who reached Ceylon (an earlier name of Sri Lanka) after the pioneering voyage of

Vasco da Gama Vasco da Gama ( , ; – 24 December 1524), was a Portuguese explorer and nobleman who was the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to India, first European to reach India by sea. Da Gama's first voyage (1497–1499) was the first to link ...

. When the

Dutch East India Company The United East India Company ( ; VOC ), commonly known as the Dutch East India Company, was a chartered company, chartered trading company and one of the first joint-stock companies in the world. Established on 20 March 1602 by the States Ge ...

took over coastal Ceylon, the descendants of the ''mestiços'' took refuge in the central hills of Kingdom of Kandy under Sinhalese rule. By the middle of the 18th century, the descendants of the ''mestiços'' had partly merged with descendants of the Dutch, giving rise to a Eurasian community (a mixture of Portuguese, Dutch, Sinhalese and Tamil), known as the Burghers. Some of these people spoke Portuguese, others spoke Dutch. Later, the Burgher community developed into two different communities: the Dutch Burghers and the Portuguese Burghers. The Portuguese presence in Ceylon was extended to non-urban areas, there is a wide Portuguese heritage in Sri Lankan society, culture and administration. Lexicon of Portuguese origin can be found in the

Sinhala language Sinhala ( ; Sinhala: , , ), sometimes called Sinhalese ( ), is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka, who make up the largest ethnic group on the island, numbering about 16 million. It is also the first ...

(at least 1,000 words), there may be more but insufficient study has been carried out.

References

European diaspora in Sri Lanka Portuguese diaspora in Asia Portuguese people in Sri Lanka {{SriLanka-stub