Kristang: Middle period
(1945 - 1960s) End of Japanese Occupation

The golden period of the Portuguese Eurasian community occurred during these years. They settled down and found jobs, intermarried with the natives. With the flourishing of their community and culture, their language Kristang also found its greatest support amongst the Portuguese Eurasians. The British Census at this time showed that the Portuguese Eurasian population had swelled from 74 in the year 1821 to 4120 in the year 1901.

Kristang formed such an integral  part of the community that it was spoken not only by the Portuguese Eurasian community, but also by Chinese shopkeepers as a second language. It was used also in church services at the Resident Committee level. During these years, the name Kristang  referred to, not only to the language (the Portuguese Creole) but also to the people and their religion as well. All this shows how widely accepted Kristang, as a language  was during this period.

Linguistically, the language evolved when it came in contact with other settlers who were in Singapore, the Malay fishermen, the Chinese shopkeepers and coolies. Kristang, or Christao, as the evolved form is now called, became a dialect marked by an mixture of old Portuguese, influenced by English and Malay as well as a variety of other languages, thus making it a very unique dialect. Despite the influence of a myriad of languages on its lexicon, and grammar, its grammatical structure resembled that of the Malay language most closely.

The apparent reason for the influence of so many languages on Kristang was due to the fact that the Portuguese Eurasians, were proficient in Malay and English as well as a number of Chinese Dialects. In speaking to other races or in different contexts, their ability to code switch between so many different languages and dialects, most probably affected their the way they spoke their creole. The creole also had no written form, but was instead passed down from generation to generation, in verbal form. The non-fixity of a unwritten and therefore uncodified form led to the apparent fluid structure of kristang, which borrowed and was influenced by its contact languages. Indeed, it may be suggested that its uncodified nature  was a primary reason why the language flourished during this period, due to its allowances and flexibility in accommodating other languages, yet it was also the factor that ultimately led to its downfall.

From the 1960s onwards, the language started declining due to the presence of government policies curtailing the diversity of language varieties being spoken in Singapore.  The onset of English and its new status as the lingua franca of the bureaucracy and civil service only served to accelerate the process of language attrition, resulting in the endangered status of the language today.