Ideologias linguísticas na história do conhecimento sobre a língua portuguesa no Brasil e desafios contemporâneos.

Abstract

Today, in the Western world, one lives a war of narratives that is perhaps unprecedented in the history of humanity: right, left, liberals, communists, progressives, conservatives, centreprogressives, centre-liberals, postmoderns, Marxists, decolonials, anarchists. anarchcapitalists, etc. swarm in our time. With the increasing universalization of access to education and the advent of journalistic and social media, etc., contemporaneity gives voice and audience to different ideas. And Linguistics, the science that focuses on the complexity of human language and, more specifically, natural languages, does not bypass that. Indeed, also in this area of knowledge, there are countless speeches being produced, defended, consumed. These speeches, at least in Brazil - consciously or not, intentionally or not -, are sometimes identified with the speeches and, consequently, with the behaviour and being in the world inherited from Portuguese colonization, conceiving the Portuguese language as a language that needs to be defended by its speakers in order to supposedly avoid misrepresentation; sometimes, whether from empirical evidence and from a certain theoretical perspective that conceives language as the internal grammar of its speakers or from a discursive look at the functioning of the meaning of and in languages, they argue that the Portuguese language, once transplanted into Brazil, became another language; sometimes they believe in the disruptive possibility of untying the last knots that would unite a supposed Lusophone space, creating technologies for the teaching of a genuinely Brazilian language; sometimes, in the name of globalization, they seek to optimize external public policies for the internationalization of the Portuguese language – defending, at the same time, as paradoxical as it may seem, the need to keep linguistic diversity alive and the need to internationalize an alleged transnational Portuguese language, since languages would be, in the globalized market, true commodities. In the midst of this discursive battlefield (and a discursive battle inevitably succumbs to the play of power of societies), is the Portuguese language teacher (recently)under graduated in Portuguese Language – who is not infrequently given the mission of reforming teaching- learning their language, however, unfortunately, many of them arrive in the job market quite unprepared for this herculean task. This thesis, written by a teacher of Basic Education and a researcher in the field of Historical Linguistics, will follow the paths of scientific discourse in his field of activity, trying to analyse it as objectively as possible, with the aim of understanding what are the glotopolitical challenges that linguists must face. Now, it seems to me unprofessional to believe in the possibility of reforming the teaching and learning of the Portuguese language in Brazil, when even scientists in this area say very different and sometimes conflicting things. Thus, this thesis proposes reading keys for the various linguistic ideologies – understood here as sets of values and beliefs from which a scientist says something about language – that crossed and have been crossing scientific discourses about the sociopolitical-linguistic history of Brazil, not with the objective of determining which one is the most valid, but, rather, to reveal the logic inherent to each of these sets of visions, analysing their contributions and their challenges for the proposition, if appropriate, of a language teaching-learning process(es) in Brazil adjusted to the democratic agendas of the 21st century. Here, I not only analysing the aforementioned plurality of linguistic ideas, but, from the position of a teacher of Portuguese in Basic Education, I propose paths - initial and dependent on future refinements, as it could not be otherwise - to try to solve what I consider the main glotopolitical challenge of contemporary Brazil: to reconcile, as much as possible, the conflicts of interests and visions that cross Linguistics and, consequently, linguistic policies.