[2] All speakers of SLPC are members of the Burgher community, who are descendants of the Portuguese and Dutch who founded families in Sri Lanka.
Portuguese influence has been so deeply absorbed into daily Sri Lankan life and behavior that these traditions will likely continue.
[2] In 1517, the Portuguese, attracted by the island's spices and strategic position (midway between their holdings on the west coast of India and Malacca), sent an expedition from Goa to establish a trading post at Colombo.
Using the unstable political situation on the island to their advantage, the Portuguese soon gained the position of guardians of the nominal monarch of southern Sri Lanka.
[3] Catholicism continued to spread, but the Portuguese did not train an indigenous clergy, so it was simply a microcosm of the church in Portugal.
A long period of conflict ensued, including the Dutch takeover of Batticaloa in 1638, and ending with the fall of Mannar and Jaffna in 1658.
The Dutch East India Company was primarily interested in commercial profits and resisted engaging in costly military operations against Kandy.
At this time, the Catholic Church may have disappeared completely in Sri Lanka had it not been for the work of Goan priests who came to the island to save Catholicism.
There is very little documented evidence of the linguistic situation at the time, however, it is clear that by the early 17th century a Portuguese-based pidgin was in use in the Portuguese controlled littoral, and was not unknown in the kingdom of Kandy because of its frequent dealings with outsiders.
The Portuguese brought a small number of Bantu slaves (Kaffirs) to Sri Lanka from the eastern African Great Lakes region.
Because they mainly served as domestic servants, they would have introduced the very young children of Casados (married men who had come with their Portuguese wives as settlers to Sri Lanka) to the pidgin/creole.
[6][7] Today, the language is spoken by descendants of Topazes and Mestiços, the Portuguese Burgher community, in the Eastern towns of Batticaloa (Koolavaddy, Mamangam, Uppodai, Dutch Bar, Akkaraipattu) and Trincomalee (Palayuttu).
Additionally, in the village of Wahakotte near Galewala, in central Sri Lanka, there is a small community of Catholics with partial Portuguese ancestry, where the language was spoken until two generations ago.
In the early part of the century most Burghers lived close to the center of the town, but more recently, many have moved to outlying areas.
Currently, decreasing competence can be observed over successive generations: the younger a Burgher, the less likely they are to know the creole, and if they can speak it, their speech exhibits more Tamil features than that of their parents.
Members of the burgher community are in constant interaction with Tamil speakers as they live, work, play, study, and worship together.
Throughout Sri Lanka many SLPC speakers have emigrated to other countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States and Europe.
An early sample of the language was collected by Hugh Nevill, a British civil servant stationed in Sri Lanka in the late 19th century.
The earliest analysis of the language comes from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but since the research was based purely on written data, it lacks insight on how speech was actually produced.
It can be assumed, unless otherwise indicated, that the phonological information about SLPC in the section on vowels and consonants is solely from his thesis, due to the lack of similar resources of a precise nature.
This is done by the suffix /-dor/, which requires an epenthetic /u/ when added to the stem /julɡ-/, because the potentially resulting consonant cluster of /lɡd/ does not regularly occur in the language.
Similarly, word /saːku/ (bag) can become [saːkku] which can be achieved by the simple rule: Like many creoles, SLPC is made up of lexical items from an array of different sources.
It was also most likely influenced by other creoles and varieties of Indo-Portuguese, as the island was visited frequently by traders from Goa and other Portuguese settlements like Daman, and Diu.