Abstract This paper presents and discusses the instances of synchronic variation attested in the personal pronoun paradigm of modern Sri Lanka Portuguese, an endangered Portuguese-based creole spoken by relatively small communities scattered across Eastern and Northern Sri Lanka. Although Sri Lanka Portuguese has a long history of documentation dating from, at least, the beginning of the 19th century, only a few studies have explicitly reported cases of synchronic variation. This study aims, therefore, to fill that gap, by contributing to the description and explanation of patterns of variation relating to the personal pronoun paradigm as encountered in documentary data collected between 2015 and 2020, over several field trips to the districts of Ampara, Batticaloa, Jaffna, and Trincomalee. The nature of the variation observed in the data ranges from phonetic alternations to strategies of paradigm regularization and stylistic shrinkage, often revealing the effects of diachronic processes of variant competition and substitution. Combining the observed patterns of variation with surveyed linguistic trends of language shift, we propose that obsolescence may be responsible for some of the variability encountered in modern SLP personal pronouns, especially that associated with certain socially- or geographically-defined subsets of the speech community (viz. the younger generations and the speakers from Jaffna) characterized by advanced language loss.

中文翻译：

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斯里兰卡葡萄牙语人称代词的同步变化

摘要 本文介绍并讨论了现代斯里兰卡葡萄牙语的人称代词范式中所证实的同步变化实例，这是一种濒临灭绝的葡萄牙克里奥尔语，由散布在斯里兰卡东部和北部的相对较小的社区使用。尽管斯里兰卡葡萄牙语的文献记录至少可以追溯到 19 世纪初，但只有少数研究明确报告了同步变异的案例。因此，本研究旨在通过帮助描述和解释与 2015 年至 2020 年期间在拜蒂克洛安帕拉地区进行的几次实地考察中收集的文献数据中遇到的与人称代词范式相关的变异模式来填补这一空白、贾夫纳和亭可马里。在数据中观察到的变化的性质范围从语音交替到范式正则化和文体收缩的策略，通常揭示了变体竞争和替代的历时过程的影响。将观察到的变异模式与调查的语言转变趋势相结合，我们提出，过时可能是现代 SLP 人称代词中遇到的一些变异性的原因，尤其是与某些社会或地理定义的语音社区子集相关的变异。即年轻一代和来自贾夫纳的演讲者）以高级语言损失为特征。