A diferenciação da língua portuguesa no Brasil e o contato entre línguas

Abstract

Today, the great majority of Portuguese speakers are not found in the territory where the language developed but in Brazil, an important colony of Portugal until the beginning of the 19th century. Spread around the globe through colonial expansion, Portuguese came into massive contact with hundreds of other languages, generating a considerable number of creole languages. During the period of Brazil’s colonization there were contexts favourable to creolization, yet there are no historical records of creolized varieties of Portuguese in Brazil. This does not mean that language contact was not a fundamental cause of the substantial differentiation of the Portuguese language in Brazil from its counterpart in Portugal. Taking as its point of departure the sociolinguistic polarization that currently typifies the linguistic situation in Brazil, this article seeks to explain the formation of popular varieties of Brazilian Portuguese in terms of the concept of irregular linguistic transmission of a “light” kind. Contact between Portuguese and indigenous and African languages in Brazil was insufficient to generate creole languages, yet it sufficed to give rise to extensive morphological erosion in the variety of Portuguese adopted by the descendents of Amerindians and Africans. This account of the formation of varieties of Brazilian Portuguese based on the socio-historical contexts of language contact contradicts the traditional immanentist explanation which relies on the notion of tendencies internal to the linguistic system. The results of sociolinguistic analyses of aspects of the morphosyntax of Brazilian Portuguese are presented as empirical support for the theoretical perspective here proposed.