Malaysian seeks to save language that's music to her ears

It takes a well-tuned ear these days, but if you listen carefully as you wander through the bazaars and backstreets of the historic Malaysian port town of Malacca, you can hear the sound of something that is 500 years old and slowly dying.

The chances are you'll only hear it in snippets - there are few people left who now use it in its purest form and most mix its lyrical words and phrases with Malay - but for the time being at least, it remains a living language.

Kristang is the creole born of Malaysia's distant colonial past when Malacca was the busiest port in Southeast Asia and a global trading crossroads that brought together Chinese, Indians, Malays, Dutch, Portuguese and British. A pidgin dialect grew up around the Portuguese of the 16th-century colonial power and laid the roots for a hybrid language, a creole, which quickly established itself as the colloquial parlance of the day. Kristang - literal meaning 'Christian' - is now one of only a handful of remaining Asian creoles and, in the words of Yale University linguistics expert K. David Jackson, 'probably the only surviving Portuguese creole of the east'.

Without ever being written down, the language outlived the Portuguese colonialists. It outlived the Dutch. It outlived the British. But although Kristang has survived and is still spoken to some degree by up to 20,000 Malaysians, it is more than ever a language on the brink - the linguistic equivalent of the Sumatran tiger.

It is a decline that 60-year-old former music teacher Joan Marbeck has spent the past 15 years trying to reverse. 'I grew up in Malacca and when I was a child, the British were here and we spoke English rather than Kristang,' says Marbeck, whose family came to Malacca generations ago. 'My parents and my grandparents used to say, 'If you want to get on in life, speak English'. But you listen to people speaking Kristang. Now and again you would say something to the servants in Kristang. I used to love going around the town and speaking to the children in English and they would respond in Kristang.'

Marbeck, a Eurasian with northern European and Malay roots, said when she saw government studies of the use of the language in the 1980s, it dawned on her that Kristang might not survive into the next generation. 'It was at that time that I got really interested in the subject and said, 'Oh my God - so many people know how to speak Kristang, but no one is writing it down'.