The Indo-Portuguese creole languages that formed along the former Malabar Coast of southwestern India, currently seriously endangered, are arguably the oldest of all Asian-Portuguese creoles. Recent documentation efforts in Cannanore and the Cochin area have revealed a language that is strikingly similar to its substrate/adstrate Malayalam in several fundamental domains of grammar, often contradicting previous records from the late 19th-century and the input of its main lexifier, Portuguese. In this article, this is shown by comparing Malabar Indo-Portuguese with both Malayalam and Portuguese with respect to features in the domains of word order (head-final syntax and harmonic syntactic patterns) and case-marking (the distribution of the oblique case). Based on older records and certain synchronic linguistic features of the Malabar Creoles, this article proposes that the observed isomorphism between modern Malabar Indo-Portuguese and Malayalam has to be explained as the product of either a gradual process of convergence, or the resolution of historical competition between Dravidian-like and Portuguese-like features.

中文翻译：

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马拉巴尔的融合

沿印度西南部前马拉巴尔海岸形成的印度-葡萄牙克里奥尔语，目前已严重濒临灭绝，可以说是所有亚洲-葡萄牙克里奥尔语中最古老的语言。坎纳诺尔和科钦地区最近的文献工作揭示了一种语言在语法的几个基本领域与其母语/副语马拉雅拉姆语惊人相似，经常与 19 世纪后期的先前记录及其主要词法葡萄牙语的输入相矛盾。在本文中，通过比较马拉巴尔印度-葡萄牙语与马拉雅拉姆语和葡萄牙语在词序（词尾语法和谐波句法模式）和案例标记（倾斜案例的分布）领域的特征来展示这一点. 根据较早的记录和马拉巴尔克里奥尔语的某些共时语言特征，