Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

From a social point of view, the native-speaker community of Diu Indo-Portuguese is comparatively homogeneous. Still, one of the most obvious indicators of social prestige is fluency in Standard Portuguese. The corpus contains some examples of morphosyntactic variation organised along these lines. One of the domains in which this is most evident is verbal morphology. Let us take the example of imperfective marking. In Diu Indo-Portuguese, imperfectivity is marked with resort to a pre-verbal auxiliary, which inflects for tense, whereas the main verb occurs in its infinitival form:

(1)
med t-iŋ fik-a.
fear IPFV-PST become-INF
'[X] was afraid.'

On rare occasions, however, some speakers produced an inflected past imperfective form modelled on Standard Portuguese:

(2)
med fik-av.
fear become-IPFV.PST
'[X] was afraid.'

This type of variation is particularly evident when addressing a foreigner or someone perceived as highly educated in Standard Portuguese, and tends to be somewhat inconsistent. The extent to which such variation carries over to conversations among native speakers of Diu Indo-Portuguese, or which settings would trigger it, remain to be described.

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