‘It runs in the family’

The reconstruction of the kinship terminology of the now-extinct Tugu Creole Portuguese (TCP) results from the triangulation between TCP’s available kinship terminology, the complete mapping for Malacca Creole Portuguese (MCP), and the terminology used currently by the Tugu community, which experienced a language shift towards Indonesian Malay and Betawi Malay. By examining the Tugu Village community in Jakarta, Indonesia, this paper adds more evidence for the existence of parallel kinship structures within one community and establishes linguistic and anthropological evidence for markers of inclusion and distinction among Jakarta’s ethnic groups. Thus, the Malay variety spoken in Tugu (TuM) possesses sociohistorical and linguistic elements that distinguish the community from other local communities, together with elements that bind the community to other Asian-Portuguese creole communities.