UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger classifies Patua as a "Critically Endangered" and places the number of speakers at 50 as of 2000[update].

Patuá arose in Macau[citation needed] after the territory was leased by Portugal in the mid-16th century and became a major hub of the Portuguese naval, commercial, and religious activities in East Asia.

Some linguists see a sharp distinction between the "archaic" Macanese, spoken until the early 19th century, and the "modern" form that was strongly influenced by Cantonese.

The modern version arose in the late 19th century, when Macanese men began marrying Chinese women from Macau and its hinterland in the Pearl River delta.

"Let's revive an almost lost memory," Fernandes said about efforts by Patuá aficionados to ensure the survival of Macau's "sweet language" that, after all, is part of its unique history.

Macanese continued to be spoken as the mother tongue of several thousand of people, in Macau, Hong Kong and elsewhere, through 19th and early 20th century.

A few writers, such as the late poet José dos Santos Ferreira ("Adé"), chose the "sweet language" as their creative medium.

Starting in the late 19th century, its role in the life of the colony was greatly diminished by the central government's drive to establish standard Portuguese throughout its territories.

High-society Macanese gradually stopped using it in the early 20th century, because of its perceived "low class" status as a "primitive Portuguese".

They argue that Macau's unique status as a 500-year-old bridge between Orient and the Occident justifies deliberate efforts to preserve the Macanese language.

[7] Macanese is the now nearly extinct native language of the so-called Macanese people, Macau's Eurasian minority, which presently comprises some 8,000 residents in Macau (about 2% of its population), and an estimated 20,000 emigrants and their descendants, especially in Hong Kong, Brazil, California, Canada, Peru, Costa Rica, Australia, Portugal and Paria peninsula of Venezuela.

Words of Malay origin include sapeca ("coin; money"), copo-copo ("butterfly"), and santám ("coconut milk").

There are also a few words in common Macanese use that are ultimately of Japanese origin, for example sutate ("soy sauce"), possibly derived from すったて (suttate), a regional dish from Shirakawa prepared by mixing stone-ground soybeans with a miso and soy-sauce-based broth.

Even the word for "money", sapeca, may be a semantic loan from Cantonese 錢, as the term used to only refer to coins with square holes in the middle (compare French cognate sapèque).

Note however that the syllable-initial N-L alternation as displayed by 「鬧」 in 「吵吵鬧鬧」 (naau6 → lau) is a regular allophonic phenomenon in Cantonese, rather than a specific effect arisen from the Macanese orthographic merging of aspirants and non-aspirants.

In addition to inherited terms from Indo-Portuguese, it is also speculated that Macanese has been influenced by Portuguese varieties and creoles spoken in Africa.

Words of Spanish origin came via a small number of Latinos who settled in the ports of Macau amidst the Manila Galleon trade.

The phonology of Macanese is relatively similar to European Portuguese, however there is a slightly tonal or sing-songy quality, possibly as an influence of Malay and/or Cantonese.

In some cases, this is due to Macanese inheriting a pre-Portuguese form; for example, nôm ("not") derived from Old Galician-Portuguese non (compare Galician non), becoming a doublet of nâm which comes from Portuguese não.

This phenomenon sometimes results in multiple forms of a word; for example, Portuguese obrigado ("thank you") manifests in Macanese both as obigado (with R-dropping) and brigado, with ⟨r⟩ retained but with the initial unstressed vowel dropped instead.

R-dropping in Macanese parallels Hong Kong English, where ⟨r⟩ is generally also not pronounced after a vowel, and sometimes realized as /w/ word-initially and after a consonant.

In some cases, two time particles can be used in the same clause, for example in the sentence "Lôgo iou tâ vai chuchumecâ co vôs" ("I'll be gossiping with you"), but this is relatively rare.

But in general, grammatical tense may not be indicated at all, and would require a listener or reader to infer from either context or time words such as onte ("yesterday") or amanhâm ("tomorrow").

Among the most common Macanese words, only two still use partial reduplication: nhunhum ("men") from nhum ("man"), and nhonhônha ("women") from nhonha ("woman").

There are also some other less significant grammatical constructions derived from Cantonese, for example the usage of verb-not-verb for asking yes-no questions, e.g. (vôs) quêro-nôm-quêro meaning "do you want".

In the de-facto standard orthography, the circumflex (â, ê, ô) or acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú) are used to indicate syllable stress and open-vowel pronunciation, especially in the case of monosyllabic words.

For example, the word meaning "bread" (which descends from Portuguese pão) is recommended to be written as pám, however other sources (including but not limited to certain parts in Maquista Chapado itself) may instead use pâm.

Etymological ⟨s⟩ pronounced as /z/ may be written either as ⟨s⟩ or ⟨z⟩, for example cuza ("what, which") and ancusa ("thing") both derive from dated Portuguese cousa, but are spelt differently.

This sometimes leads to inconsistencies between the most common spelling and actual pronunciation, for example hoze ("today", from Portuguese hoje) may be pronounced /ˈɔd͡ʒi/ by some speakers.

In addition to lexical contributions, Cantonese has also significantly influenced the grammar of modern Macanese; one example is the common usage of vai (lit.