This paper provides a preliminary notice of Baxter (2026), a forthcoming study of the sociolinguistic history of Malacca Creole Portuguese (MCP) in the Portuguese, Dutch and early British colonial periods. It highlights topics from the study. Discussing first the sociodemographic factors that shaped linguistic interactions in the Portuguese period, it considers aspects of the feature pool from which MCP emerged, and the settings for its transmission. Next, shifting to the Dutch period, it examines factors supporting the survival of the MCP speech community and further evolution of its language. Insights are drawn regarding the characteristics of MCP in the 17th and 18th centuries, based on comparative data from Javanese Pidgin and Creole Portuguese, while also noting that a higher register approximating Portuguese persisted at the end of the 18^th century. Examination of the British period highlights a continuation of the MCP community's profile established during the Dutch period. It also discusses the earliest linguistic records of MCP, particularly materials collected by Hugo Schuchardt in 1883-1884. These form the basis of a discussion of prime features of 19th-century MCP grammar, aimed at evaluating its relationship with earlier forms and its connections to contemporary regional varieties, and to Modern MCP.