Rosa Virgínia Mattos e Silva e a história social linguística do Brasil

• Main Author: Tânia Lobo
• Format: Article
• Language: Catalan
• Published: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela 2015-01-01
• Series: Estudos de Linguistica Galega
• Online Access: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=305641135005

In the second half of the twentieth century, Rosa Virgínia Mattos e Silva represented acute and provocative thinking concerning the linguistic social history of Brazil. In this paper, I pay homage to this eminent linguist, discussing five of her key proposals on the subject, namely: 1) The linguistic history of Brazil is not restricted to the history of the Portuguese language in Brazil, or the history of Brazilian Portuguese. 2) Brazilian Portuguese emerged in a multilingual context: language contact is therefore a constitutive element in its development. 3) On the linguistic stage of colonial Brazil, three principal actors stand out: European Portuguese, the indigenous linguas francas (línguas gerais) and general Brazilian Portuguese. 4) Africans and Afro-descendants were the major disseminators of the Portuguese language in Brazil and the key «formatters» (formatadores) of Brazilian Portuguese in its main social variety - popular Brazilian Portuguese. 5) The socio-historical and linguistic past of Brazil must be interpreted in order to understand the «variable, heterogeneous, plural and polarized» Brazilian Portuguese of today.