Despite their ancestrality among the Asian-Portuguese creoles, those of Southeastern India are currently in an advanced state of decline. Collectively known as the Indo-Portuguese creoles of the Malabar, or Malabar Indo-Portuguese, there were once significant speech communities in many towns, but over the centuries, the communities shifted heavily towards English and Malayalam, the dominant language locally. Language documentation was carried out since 2006 with the assistance of the very last fluent speakers of Malabar Indo-Portuguese in Cannanore (6 speakers), Cochin (1 speaker), and Calicut (1 speaker), resulting in a corpus which offers a glimpse of the language at the tail end of a process of loss, when it is no longer used on a daily basis (with the exception of a single homestead) and, in the case of the most geographically isolated speakers, hardly ever spoken at all.
              Here, I explore certain instances of variation that can be identified in the corpora, especially with respect to functional morphemes. The specific present circumstance of Malabar Indo-Portuguese – a dwindling minority language, geographically diffuse, and used in highly multilingual settings – poses considerable challenges to a clear interpretation of such instances of variation. While certain cases – especially if they involve the observable interference of the speakers’ current dominant languages, English and Malayalam – may reasonably be interpreted either as cases of code-switching, as nonce borrowings, or as the product of language obsolescence, others appear to reflect subgroup preferences, including family-internal specificities and geographical variation, although the small number of informants does not entirely clarify this. In addition, some other instances of variation contradict the obsolescence scenario, such as e.g. the preference for a Malayalam-derived oblique case-marker over a Portuguese-derived one, which is in fact associated with the most fluent creole speakers, rather than those that show the clearest effects of language obsolescence. This is an exercise in the study of variation which simultaneously draws attention to the variability of creole languages (not only across relatively vast areas, but also in closely-knit communities) and highlights the specific challenges of conducting linguistic research among the last speakers of a particular language.

Keywords: Malabar, Indo-Portuguese, endangered languages, language documentation, variation, corpora