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Language Policy in Brazil: Monolingualism and Linguistic Prejudice

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Language Policy in Brazil: Monolingualism and Linguistic Prejudice GLADIS MASSINI-CAGLIARI LANGUAGE POLICY IN BRAZIL: MONOLINGUALISM AND LINGUISTIC PREJUDICE (Received 12 May 2003; accepted in revised form 30 November 2003) 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. KEY WORDS: Brazil, Brazilian Portuguese, language policy in Brazil, language unifica- tion, linguistic ideology, linguistic prejudice, monolingualism IS THERE REALLY A LINGUISTIC QUESTION CONCERNING BRAZIL? Brazil is an astonishing country in several ways. It is the only Portuguese- speaking country in America and is surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries. The fifth largest country in the world, with a population of 175 million inhabitants, Brazil is and was almost always viewed, both by foreign observers but also by its own population, as an enormous, linguisti- cally homogeneous giant. Generally, Brazilians assume that everybody in Brazil speaks a unique variety of the Portuguese language. According to this language perception, Brazil is a country without any linguistic problems. This language perception by Brazilians can be considered correct only in the sense that almost everyone can communicate through Portuguese everywhere within the Brazilian territory. And it is also correct if we compare Brazil to countries where there is official bilingualism or multi- lingualism and two or more languages are considered official languages of the nation and where a relevant part of the population is made of active speakers of more than one language. Indeed, in Brazil, almost the total population is constituted of monolingual Portuguese speakers, and the vast majority of them will never learn a second language. But this perception of the Brazilian linguistic world can be also considered wrong if we recall that Portuguese is not in fact the only Language Policy 3: 3–23, 2004. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 4 GLADIS MASSINI-CAGLIARI language of Brazil. Although it is true that the vast majority of Brazilians are monolingual, it is not true that Brazil as a whole is a monolingual country. Following a recent estimate, there are about 200 different languages that are spoken within the Brazilian territory, of which approxi- mately 170 are indigenous languages, while the others are mainly of European or Asian origin. Therefore, Brazil is a multilingual nation, like 94% of the countries in the world (Oliveira, 2002: 83–84). Certainly, these other languages are spoken by marginalised minorities without a significant economic power, that is by indigenous groups and immigrants. Moreover, they have never been recognised as legitimate or even as existing by the media. It is also true that the major TV channels always consider the viewpoint of the majority in their programming. In this respect, the populations of non-Portuguese speakers in Brazil are ‘statisti- cally non-significant’ for them. Their choice is not only economic, but also ideological. The media (including TV, radio and newspapers) have always embraced the idea of Brazil being a linguistically homogeneous giant. Searching for the reasons for the “invisibility” of the real Brazilian linguistic scenario, Oliveira (2002: 83) points to three possibilities: ignor- ance of the truth, overlooking the truth as a result of a political policy that intentionally projects a convenient idea of a monolingual country, or simply pure linguistic prejudice.1 For several levels, all these reasons stand together. The acceptance without discussion of the fact that Portuguese is Brazil’s unique language, felt as a natural phenomenon, has been in the past and is still now fundamental to obtaining nation wide consensus to the repressive policies towards the languages of Brazilian minorities (Oliveira, 2002: 83). Analysing the Brazilian linguistic scenario from another point of view, the three reasons pointed out by Oliveira (2002) can also be correlated to the invisibility of the Portuguese varieties spoken in Brazil. The wide- spread belief that the language spoken in Brazil is highly homogeneous is due probably to a twofold reason: firstly because there are no apparent problems of mutual intelligibility in everyday communication between speakers of different varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, when compared with what happens to different varieties of other languages, like Italian, Chinese and English; secondly, and more probable, because the intelli- gibility is not jeopardised by phonological, morphological and syntactic 1 From the perspective of their results, the first two possibilities pointed by Oliveira can be considered one and the same; however, they are different in intentionality: in the first one, the ignorance of the truth is non-intentional; in the second one, it is a result of a political project. LANGUAGE POLICY IN BRAZIL 5 variations. This fact gives the false impression that the language is totally homogeneous. Again, the image that Brazilians have of their own language is not in complete correspondence to reality. Historically, Brazilian Portuguese is a relatively recent variety of Portuguese. Because of this, there has not been enough time for the emergence of distinct dialects due to geographic or social isolation. In addition to this historical linguistic fact, the socio- linguistic effect of TV Globo (the most important national TV network), beaming its signal all over the national territory and making the country a perfect ‘global village’, has enormous importance into setting a presti- gious variety of the language as a standard for everyone in the country.2 Even with that powerful influence upon the life of the population, it would surprise a linguist if a huge country like Brazil did not show any significant linguistic variation, considering the evidently striking social and economical differences. Although there is no clear definition of what would be the standard Brazilian Portuguese, individuals tend to identify it with the variety adopted by important TV news programmes, especially Jornal Nacional, the most important TV news programme on TV Globo. In this programme, the hosts speak a pasteurised linguistic variety, made up of ‘neutral’ features from the two most important urban varieties: from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The final result is a mixture of features that make a good impression upon educated people, with a clear effort to suppress any characteristic that would identify with only one of those varieties. In other words, the standard Brazilian Portuguese promoted by the TV news is not a natural variety of the language. On the contrary, it is an artificial variety 2 Fischer (2001: 174) notes that, after the Second World War, the intrusion of television increased dialect levelling; because of that, “contamination and superimposition have since been documented among large populations of viewers”. In his opinion, “at this moment, television is perhaps the single greatest cause of universal dialect levelling” – referring to the use of standard American English, that is increasing at a rapid rate in those English- speaking countries that broadcast American programmes without ‘dubbing’. But Fischer (2001: 182) also notes that “in a contrasting process, the recent ‘modernization’ of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has essentially eliminated what had come to be called ‘BBC English’, an easily recognizable received pronunciation of the English language that had long been held in high regard. Now, older listeners, be they in Britain or New Zealand, register alarm at hearing in BBC broadcasts what they register as ‘lower- class pronunciation’; they feel this not only ‘lower standards’ but also demonstrates ‘a beastly lack of good taste’. However, such protestations are meaningless in the larger saga of living languages. ‘Superior’ dialects are only a chimera, as special dialects themselves very soon mutate and/or lose what made them special.” 6 GLADIS MASSINI-CAGLIARI and a convenient way to manipulate the language problems in a huge and heterogeneous country like Brazil.3 When a ‘non-Globo variety’ is needed, it is never the voice of the ‘official’ news. Non-stigmatised regional varieties are accepted only as a ‘secondary’ source of information. And the stigmatised social varieties only appear in this context as the voice of very poor people, when they are presented as victims of violence or natural disasters, or as the voice of criminals. It is interesting to notice that the non-news TV programmes, mainly the soap-operas (novelas), usually show some characters who speak with a caricatured variety, by emphasising regional or social accents to the maximum, instead of using an artist that is a native user of those regional or social accents. For this kind of programme, it seems unthinkable to give higher status on TV to regional or social varieties of less importance, because this would be an ‘official’ recognition that those varieties actually exist in the society. This is good evidence that the social stereotypes in relation to language in Brazil are carefully built and strongly
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