УДК 325.3
DOI: 10.28995/2658-7041-2019-2-96-107
Multilingualism and languages policies in Brazil
Gilvan Müller de Oliveira
Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil
For citation: Müller de Oliveira, G. (2019) “Multilingualism and languages policies in Brazil”, Issues of Ethnopolitics, no. 1, pp. DOI: 10.28995/2658-70412019-2-96-107
Многоязычие и языковая политика в Бразилии
Жилван Мюллер де Оливейра
Федеральный университет штата Санта Катарина, Флорианополис, Бразилия
Аннотация. В статье приведен обзор этноязыковой ситуации на территории Бразилии с XVI в. по настоящее время. Дана оценка глоттоцида − репрессивной языковой политики, направленной на замещение автохтонных языков единым имперским (португальским) языком. Проанализировано два сценария языковой политики, основанной на насилии: меры португальской колониальной администрации XVIII в. по отношению к коренному населению Амазонии и репрессии периода диктатуры 1930–1940-х гг. по отношению к немецкоязычному меньшинству в южных штатах Бразилии. Дан позитивный прогноз ревитализации угасающих автохтонных языков и языков мигрантов при условии проведения политики, направленной на поощрение этнокультурного многообразия.
Ключевые слова: Бразилия, колониализм, языковая политика, ассимиляция, автохтонные языки, языки мигрантов, многоязычие, поликультурность
© Müller de Oliveira G., 2019
Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world with a territorial area of 8.5 million km2 and also the fifth in population with 213 million inhabitants in 2019. Brazil was part of the Portuguese Empire from the arrival of the first Lusitanian expedition in 1500 until the separation of the United Kingdom from Portugal Brazil and Algarves occurred in 1822, when the country became independent.
The cultural formation of Brazil included the confrontation of Portuguese colonialism with the approximately 4 to 5 million indigenous people who lived in the territory of the sixteenth century onwards; included the largest slave process in human history, mostly through the capture and transport of 4 to 5 million Africans of various languages and nationalities from the 16th century to the end of the 19th century by the Portuguese and later Brazilian slave fleets. It also included, especially in the eighteenth century, a massive immigration of Portuguese attracted by the gold cycle of Minas Gerais and, finally, an intense immigration flow of 3,5 million Europeans (Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Germans, Poles, Russians) and later Syrian-Lebanese and Japanese, between 1824 and 1935 [Holanda, 2003].
The majority of Brazilians believe, however, that only Portuguese is spoken in Brazil. The dominant conception is that being Brazilian and speaking Portuguese are synonyms. Is it a kind of prejudice, ignorance of reality or expression of a political project – intentional, therefore – to build a monolingual country?
At some level all these three possibilites go together. It is not by chance that some things are known and others are unknown: knowledge and ignorance are produced actively, based on specific ideological interests, historically constructed. In that case, the “knowledge” that Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, and the “lack of knowledge” that many other languages have been and are also spoken. The fact that people accept, without arguing – as if it were a ‘natural fact’ – that ‘Portuguese is the language of Brazil’ was and is fundamental to obtain consensus among the majorities for policies of repression of other languages, today minority languages.
To understand the question we need some data: in Brazil today are spoken around 240 languages, including Portuguese. The indigenous nations speak about 180 autochthonous languages, the communities of descendants of immigrants at least 58 immigration languages and the deaf communities of Brazil at least two sign languages, the Brazilian Sign Language – Libras – and the Urubu-Kaapór indigenous sign language. Brazil is, therefore, a multilingual country l ike most countries in the world, but with a very dominant official and national language – Portuguese – a language in which more than 98% of Brazilians are monolingual. At most 1,5% of Brazilians – about 3 million – speak the other 239 languages of the country.
If we look at the past, we see that Brazil was much more multilingual than today: when the Portuguese arrived in South America 500 years ago, about 1,078 indigenous languages were spoken in the territory [Rodrigues, A., 1993], a situation of plurilingualism even more striking than that of present-day India with 391 languages, or Indonesia with 663 languages.
The Portuguese State, and after independence, the Brazilian State, had for almost the whole history imposed Portuguese as the only legitimate language, considering it “companion of the Empire” in the conception of Fernão de Oliveira (1536), the author of the first grammar of the Portuguese language.[1]
The State’s language policy has always focused in reducing the number of languages, in a process of glotocide (murder of languages) through linguistic displacement, that is, of their replacement by Portuguese.
The linguistic history of Brazil could be resumed as a sucessful sequence of homogenizing and repressive language policies that achieved their goals: only in the first half of the 20. century, according to Darcy Ribeiro, 67 indigenous languages disappeared in Brazil – more than one per year, therefore [Rodrigues, A., 1993, 23]. Of the 1,078 languages spoken in the year 1500, we had about 180[2] in 2010 (only 15% of the total) and several of these 180 are already dying, spoken by tiny populations and with little chance of resisting the advance of the dominant language.