Linguistic prejudice in Brazil
From: Me acordei faceiro (birigui_at_terra.com)
Date: 08/06/04
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Date: 5 Aug 2004 22:54:01 -0700
''Undergraduate Brazilian students' discussions about language control
and socio-political authority on language
Author(s): Inês Signorini
The debate about legitimacy of language control and linguistic
expertise in the public sphere has recently been increased in Brazil,
especially since 1999, when linguists from various universities
decided to confront institutional authorities and the representatives
of the regional and national media. At that time, the social and
political hegemony of conservative discourses about language and
language policy became greatly visible in the media, in both
electronic and written form, and in the widespread favorable
repercussions of a proposal of a national law for language control,
submitted to the Brazilian Congress that year.
The aim of this paper is to examine the resonances and evaluations of
the public confrontation between linguists and non linguists in the
oral discussions and written accounts of academic and non academic
works on linguistic variation, linguistic prejudice and language
control, carried out by undergraduated students studying the
Portuguese language and Applied Linguistics at a public university in
the state of São Paulo during the first semester of 2001.
Focusing on the centrality of conflicting social epistemologies in
language use and conceptualization, this study draws on
discourse-analytic work centering on the relationships between
language, culture and a changing society and their relation to other
investigations into linguistic ideology and political theory. By
showing how the students engage in the wider debate about linguistic
control and linguistic expertise in the public sphere, it will be
shown that the existing sociolinguistic order and its legitimating
basis in common sense linguistic ideologies have been almost
reinforced by the emergence of a well disseminated attitude of
resistance to the anti-control discourse of the linguist and his/her
assumed role as the "official" language expert to be heard. It will be
argued that, in spite of the great familiarity of the students with
linguistic theories and methodologies and of the supposed
institutional engagement in the dissemination of non-traditional
attitudes and values in dealing with linguistic questions, they are
more sensitive to the political component of the debate. In fact, they
raise the question of the "quality" of the speaker as the main
question to be considered, since this determines the language to be
counted, that is to say, the language to be considered legitimate. By
focusing on the "quality" of the speaker, the students shift the
debate from language as the object of expertise of the linguist to
that of language as the speaker's moral and political capital.''
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Language policy in Brazil: monolingualism and linguistic prejudice
Gladis Massini-Cagliari
Departamento de Lingüística, Faculdade de Ciê7ncias e Letras,
Universidade Estadual Paulista – UNESP, Campus de Araraquara, Brazil
(E-mail: gladis@fclar.unesp.br; gladismc@lexxa.com.br)
Abstract The purpose of this article is to analyse the linguistic
situation in Brazil and to discuss the relationship between Portuguese
and the 200 other languages, about 170 indigenous, spoken in the
country. It focuses on three points: the historical process of
language unification, recent official language policy initiatives, and
linguistic prejudice. I examine two manifestations of linguistic
prejudice, one against external elements and the other against
supposedly inferior internal elements, pointing out to a common
origin: the myth that the Portuguese language in Brazil is
characterised by an astonishing unity.
Keywords
Brazil, Brazilian Portuguese, language policy in Brazil, language
unification, linguistic ideology, linguistic prejudice, monolingualism
Article ID: 5264549
source: http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=5264549&PDF=1
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