Makista (PCMac), the Portuguese-based Creole of Macao, came into existence in the wake of the settlement of the Portuguese in Macao in the mid-sixteenth century. As is common to Creole languages created in the sequence of the European maritime expansion, the raison d’être behind their formation lies in the sudden and often forced confluence and coexistence of speakers from diverse linguistic and ethnic backgrounds and, thus, the need for a common linguistic code. Given certain demographic, linguistic and historical constraints, such languages share in common the co-existence of lexical, morphologic and syntactic traits from the different contributing languages (specific to each Creole), in varying degrees. From the time Macao was occupied on a permanent basis by the Portuguese from 1557 onwards, the main linguistic contributor to the formation of Makista was Kristang (PCMal), the Portuguese-based Creole of Malacca, and thus considered this Creole's substrate. Besides Luso-Malay families, we find references to Malays in Macao by 1565 who would have spoken Kristang.

In the case of the formation of Creoles, the co-existence of several variants, from the different languages in contact for a common linguistic function, has been described as a “feature pool”. From this pool of joint features, some variants will be dropped and others selected, and many times modified by the speakers of the emerging language. In the case of PCMac, PCMal, as well as other Asian varieties of Portuguese-based pidgins and non-standard Portuguese, standard Portuguese, Cantonese and Hokkien came together in Macao and formed the “feature pool” of this Creole. The linguistic items ultimately selected and transposed to the emerging Creole may either retain their exact original functions, narrow or widen them.

This chapter takes a comparative look at the frequent aspectual marker in PCMac, ja. A marker shared in common with PCMal, albeit in the latter, as with the other two verbal markers they share in common (ta, logu), the use is much more restrictive.5 As our analysis shall reveal, apart from a much loser, non-obligatory use of ja in PCMac for the tense-aspect context it is associated with, its range of functions have been comparatively widened relative to its substrate font. Our research hypothesis is that these similarities and differences in Makista compared to Kristang are evidence of (a) continuities and discontinuities of those features, resulting from the accommodation of speakers6 of the various languages who came in contact with one another in early Macao; and (b) the competition/selection process of the features’ effect. For PCMac, analysis is based on an oral corpus, namely, recordings of eighteen elderly speakers made between 1984 and 2007. As for Kristang, we base our references on Baxter’s 1988 work.7