On the southern tip of the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat (India) and
commanding a strategic lookout over the Arabian sea, the small island of
Diu has aroused seemingly disproportionate colonial interests throughout
its history. Among the various effects of its long domination by faraway
Portugal (1535-1961) was the formation of a local variety of
Indo-Portuguese, a contact language resulting from the encounter of various
linguistic influences, chief among which Gujarati and Portuguese. Although
the Portuguese-lexified creoles of Asia have deserved scholarly attention
from the late 19th-century, the trend towards accurate linguistic
description of these languages is a recent one. This study provides a
linguistic account of present-day Diu Indo-Portuguese, duly embedded in its
reconstructed historical and sociodemographic context, with the intention
to contribute to our burgeoning understanding of the formation, development
and present vitality of the contact languages of (South) Asia and elsewhere.
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