One of the most important linguists in Brazil, a professor at UnB, says that in academia, politics is done all the time and is a militant in the cause of the national language
On Wednesday, June 10th, the Portuguese Language Day was celebrated. The date marks the death of Luiz de Camões, in 1580, considered the greatest writer in the history of Portugal. Depending on Professor Marcos Bagno, perhaps this date could change to September 29 — the date of Machado de Assis' death, in 1908. The author of “Linguistic prejudice: what is, how it is done” is also an assumed militant academic. And with a definite cause: fight for the officialization of a new language, Brazilian Portuguese. “It is necessary to say, with all the words, out loud: Brazilian Portuguese is one language and European Portuguese is another. Very related, very familiar, but different”, he sums up.
For him, there is already another linguistic system that is totally different from Portuguese Portuguese in the Portuguese spoken today in Brazil. And Bagno, in the lectures he gives at congresses and seminars throughout Brazil, takes, in slides and notes, the scientific evidence of what he claims. But the success of the undertaking is not based on science: “The scientist has to assume a political and ideological stance. He has to explicitly state his beliefs and his values. There is no such thing as neutral science. There is nothing that is done in society that is not political”, he declares.
PhD in Philology and Portuguese Language from the University of São Paulo (USP), Marcos Bagno is a professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation at the University of Brasília (UnB). In 2012, her novel “As Memórias de Eugênia” won the Jabuti Prize, considered the greatest in Brazilian literature. He also writes a column about Portuguese language in the magazine “Caros Amigos”.
Why Mr. defend a Brazilian grammar?
Due to the need that we have been detecting, for a long time, that we have in Brazil descriptive instruments, and even normative ones, that present, in the most honest and real way possible, our language: Brazilian Portuguese. Even prestigious urban varieties are very different from the standard norm conveyed by the grammatical tradition of the language. I quote a Portuguese linguist, Professor Ivo Castro [from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon, with a PhD in Portuguese Linguistics]. He says the following (reading): “My opinion that the structural separation between the language of Portugal and that of Brazil is a slow and deep-water phenomenon, which is easy and, for many, desirable not to observe, is based on the conviction that the fracture of the linguistic system exists, but it is not apparent to all observers nor is it pleasant to all nostalgic people.”
Often when we Brazilians talk about the need to recognize Brazilian Portuguese as an autonomous language and with its own linguistic system, we hear that this is nationalism, madness or the madness of “left-wing people”. But here I bring the word of a Portuguese specialist who recognizes that, in fact, there is already a “fracture”, as he says, that separates the two languages. They are very close languages, of course, related. But already with very evident characteristics that allow us, in fact, to make a more specific description of Brazilian Portuguese — including using that name.
But what about the proposal for a linguistic union between the so-called Lusophone countries?
This idea that there is something called “lusofonia”, with several Portuguese-speaking countries, is nonsense. It is an absolutely neo-colonial position that has nothing to do with reality. It is nothing more than a deeply Portuguese project. Here in Brazil, when it comes to Lusophony, people don't even know what it is. We are, in Brazil, 90% of Portuguese speakers in the world. So, if anyone has to rule the language, it's us, although the Portuguese think that's terrible (laughs). They don't have the smallest numerical importance in the world, comparing them to Brazil, but they still have that imperial nostalgia of wanting to rule the language. But the thing is different.
And from which Mr. do you say that we already have Brazilian Portuguese as a language?
All the examples I bring are drawn from the writing of the most monitored genres. Because? Because, when linguistic innovations reach this extreme [of being apparent in more formal texts, such as newspapers and scientific journals], it means that the linguistic change has already been completed and is then constituted a rule of language grammar. Professor Marcuschi [Luiz Antonio Marcuschi, linguist, full professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco and with a doctorate at the Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg (Friedrich-Alexander), Germany], who I had the honor of being a student in Recife, established, already for some time, this continuum of genres, from the most spoken to the most written, showing that there is no such rigid separation that people believe exists for 2,500 years. In fact, we have only one language and two usage modes [speech and writing] with a continuum of genres.
Linguistic change occurs in the most spontaneously spoken language. As these linguistic innovations are adopted by more speakers, they progress towards achieving more monitored writing.
But then we, Brazilians and Portuguese, don't basically write in the same formal Portuguese?
I will cite examples of phenomena that already characterize the grammar of Brazilian Portuguese in its most monitored written manifestations. That talk that “oh, it's okay to speak, but nobody does it in writing” is a lie. And the idea that at least in writing the language unites us with the Portuguese is a fallacy. The “zune” language doesn't unite (laughs), because there's a lot of noise in this story. Perhaps at a legal literary extreme this might even make sense, but in everyday written language this is not the case.
I will deal with a single phenomenon to prove my point, which is the question of word order. In Brazilian Portuguese, the order SVO [subject–verb–object] — or SVC [subject–verb–complement], as I prefer, because not every complement is an object — has become grammaticalized and crystallized, to the point of reorganizing cognitive processing we make of the syntax of the language. With this, several reanalysis took place, which today characterize Brazilian Portuguese in an exclusive way, differentiating it not only from European Portuguese, but also from other Romance languages. Brazilian Portuguese is a language in which the syntactic role of the subject, the semantic role of the agent and the pragmatic role of the topic are of paramount importance.
And is there a lot of research that proves the emergence of this new language?
Researchers have carried out interesting investigations showing that several phenomena in Brazilian Portuguese, in our grammar, are due to the linguistic contact that took place in Brazil, for over 300 years, with African languages. Professor Charlotte Galves, from Unicamp [State University of Campinas], for example, has published a lot about this and in a very convincing way, as have specialists from other countries. However, I do not want to deal with this issue of contact, but with what actually exists today.
We, as speakers, all the time reprocess the information we receive. Over time, this reprocessing changes our interpretation of statements. This is fantastic, our grammar machine in the head is absolutely brilliant.
On the issue of verbal agreement, the stiffening of the SVC order led to the reanalysis of the entire constituent after the verb as a complement. Thus, when the subject-verb inversion into the subject-verb occurs, the subject is reanalyzed as a complement, which does not require agreement, as the verb is considered as unipersonal.
So, in Brazilian Portuguese, everything that comes after the verb is a complement, there is no other chance. Some examples: “The capital grew and with development came the problems of the big city”, in a text published in “Correio do Povo”, in Campinas; “in this context, we can say that the Portuguese Language teacher has only three paths to follow”, published with an article in a linguistics magazine; “there is a lack of census takers to collect data”, published in the newspaper “O Globo”. In other words, when we see this phenomenon already installed in this monitored writing, it is because in speech this is already a practically categorical rule. If we record the spontaneous speech of Brazilians in their daily lives, we will find 85% of non-agreement of the verb when the subject is postponed to the verb. That's why you say, with the greatest joy, "Wow, the vacation is here!" or, at the bookstore, “Have the books I ordered arrived?”. This is what happens and this is already part of the grammar of Brazilian Portuguese. Other examples: “Every one minute four things sell” — what do they sell?; “the tyre is flat” — flat what? For a Portuguese this phrase would seem absurd, but for us it is not. And these are just some of the examples among the phenomena with which we can prove this change in language. Anyone who wants to play from the 15th floor is welcome, but the language has changed, and it has changed that way.
And then can we say that we actually have two different languages?
Yes. It must be stressed that linguistics does not make decisions. It's us linguists who take it. It is up to us to say, with all the words, out loud: Brazilian Portuguese is one language and European Portuguese is another. Very related, very familiar (with a Portuguese accent), but different. I repeat: it is not a problem “of” linguistics, but of linguists. We are the ones who will have to decide whether Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese are two different languages or not. It is useless to expect the answer to come in a scientific format, because the scientific, as something above suspicion, is a chimera. The scientist has to take a political and ideological stance. He has to explicitly state his beliefs and his values. There is no such thing as neutral science. There is nothing that is done in society that is not politically. We have to take an ideological stance, because that's how it happens.
So, ideologically, as happened in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, wouldn't it be more interesting to refer to our language as “Brazilian”, instead of “Brazilian Portuguese”?
The name of languages is a very complicated issue, because it depends on social, political, historical, etc. issues. The former Yugoslavia was fragmented into six small countries and the language that was then considered one, Serbo-Croatian, is now called Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin… But for these names to appear, there was a horrible war, many deaths , a terrible thing. The name issue for us is not that important these days. Much more important is to affirm the autonomy of Brazilian Portuguese. In Brazil, we researchers are always speaking “Brazilian Portuguese”. Maybe in a few years, let's erase the “Portuguese” and just stay the “Brazilian”. But this is an eminently political issue.
In the 30's, there was even a proposal for a law in the Chamber of Deputies so that our language would be called Brazilian. But then there was the revolution, Getúlio Vargas took power and that proposal was forgotten. For us, professors and researchers, the important thing is to affirm this distinction, this autonomy of the language.
“Caetano Veloso says that in the US black is black and white is white and the mulatto “is not the same”, because there is no such thing as a mulatto. It's very different from Brazil"
Saisi replies: Definition of “MOLATTO” a person of mixed white and black ancestry, especially a person with one white and one black parent.
Wouldn't our differentiation between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese be like the difference between American and British English?
Each country has its history. The history of economic, social and linguistic formation in Brazil is very different from the history of the United States and Quebec [the largest province in Canada], for example. People ask “why are you saying that Brazilian Portuguese exists? Does Argentine Spanish exist? Is there Mexican Spanish? Is there American English?”. Yes there is. But the historical circumstances of the formation of Brazilian Portuguese are very different from the formation of American English, for example. It is enough to remember that until 1960, marriage between black and white people was prohibited by law in the United States. In Brazil, since when the Portuguese came here, they had the party with the Indians and the slaves, too. So the ethnic background of our population is very different from the ethnic makeup of the United States.
That's why Caetano Veloso [Brazilian singer and composer] says that in the US black is black and white is white and the mulatto woman “is not the one”, because there is no mulatto there. It is very rare to find a person in the US who is a mixed race of white with black or black with white, because until “yesterday”, in 1960, this was prohibited by law. The miscegenation in Brazil was much more intense and, evidently, the linguistic miscegenation as well. Portuguese was a minority language in Brazil throughout the colonial period. Tupi was spoken as the general language and our population, until the time of independence, was 75% mestizo.
Portuguese has only very recently become the hegemonic language in Brazil. These linguistic contacts between Portuguese and African and indigenous languages are what configures Brazilian Portuguese, unlike what happened in the United States and Québec. Our colonial period begins in 1500; in Québec after 1600, therefore, they are a hundred and something years apart. The Portuguese came here to explore, while the British went to the US, fleeing religious persecution. So, it was another type of colonization, other stories.
What mr. Do you think about the treatment of this conflict between Portuguese from Portugal and Brazilian Portuguese at school? When a student says he doesn't know Portuguese, he is actually saying that he doesn't know the grammar rules of the Portuguese taught at school.
He could talk about it for about three hours. In our linguistic culture, Portuguese is this nebulous thing, this grammatical nomenclature. A person who says he doesn't know Portuguese is because he thinks that knowing Portuguese is knowing what a subordinate clause is direct objective direct noun reduced complete complete, etc. (laughs). So, as no one knows that — I memorized it, because I don't know either (laughs) —, one thinks that knowing Portuguese is this esoteric knowledge. This is a linguistic culture transmitted by the school, no doubt. On the day that our language education abandons this type of work and concentrates on the most important thing, which is to get people to read and write for a day, who knows, in high school, to discover that language can be analyzed in parts called "noun" and "subject", then yes, it is interesting.
We know that 75% of the Brazilian population is functionally illiterate. There are 150 million people and, among them, are our Portuguese language teachers. Let's not kid ourselves: I've already done work collecting written texts from Portuguese teachers in the Federal District, the Federation unit with the highest per capita income, and I've seen that people write terribly poorly. They are trained Portuguese teachers and have been active for a long time. So, we have a great imbroglio to resolve, teacher training. It's no use trying to solve what happens at school, without first solving the issues involving the training of teachers, and of course, people's working conditions, so that they are not beaten up in the public square, as happened recently in Paraná .
Couldn't Brazil, where so many African and indigenous base languages were spoken, have a language other than Portuguese today? Why didn't this happen here, as it happened in other Latin American countries that are now bilingual?
There was, during the colonial period, the so-called general Brazilian language, which was Tupi-based and is also called Nhemgatu and which is now spoken there in São Gabriel da Cachoeira. But nobody proposed that it become the national language, except Policarpo Quaresma [character of writer Lima Barreto] (laughs). Policarpo Quaresma, when he was having sex, when he reached the peak, he would say "catupiry, catupiry!" (laughs), which means "excellent!" in Tupi.
He cannot impose a language overnight on a people. The language standard in Brazil should be the language spoken by the majority of the contemporary Brazilian population, which is Brazilian Portuguese — if you want to define a more urban, literate use, that's fine, but it has to be Brazilian Portuguese.
The Brazilian general language, as you know, was banned in Brazil in the 18th century by the Marquis of Pombal [leader of Portugal during the reign of José I]. If that hadn't happened, perhaps today we would be like the Paraguayans, who speak Spanish and Guarani — this also an invention of the Jesuit priests as a general language, very similar to the general Brazilian language, based on Tupi. Due to an authoritarian, repressive policy, it was forbidden to teach and speak anything in Brazil that was not Portuguese. From then on, the general language was being abandoned and Portuguese ended up becoming hegemonic.
There is militancy in the academy, there is no doubt about it. But this position is clearly expressed, as Mr. does it bring you difficulties in the scientific field?
Many, to the point that I'm thinking of opening an inn in Pirenópolis (laughs) and getting out of academia. As anywhere, in any environment, especially in an environment that claims to be intellectual, there are ideological disputes. There are linguists who think they are doing pure science, inventing a language, and examining that language exclusively. Other people focus on social reality, on language in society and try to analyze conflicts, interests, issues of power, prejudice, oppression, which are made from the use of language. We have some sociolinguists, not others, we have groups that work with Discourse Analysis, those that do Critical Applied Linguistics — just today, to come here, I missed a lecture by Professor Kanavillil Rajagopalan [semantics and pragmatics professor at State University of Campinas (Unicamp)] at UnB, which is there, talking exactly about critical applied linguistics.
Of course, things vary a lot. Some people tell me to my face, others from behind, others publish speaking badly. Then, I also publish speaking ill, because I speak ill with the greatest ease (laughs), in the sense of taking a critical and ideological position. All in terms of political positioning in the academy in the area of language.
How is the issue of the orthographic agreement between Portuguese-speaking countries?
I prefer to talk about “spelling disagreement”. This question was very interesting to show precisely the dominant positions in Portugal. It was a catalytic process that brought to the surface the whole issue of linguistic ideology in Portuguese culture. For the Portuguese, in the agreement, it would be necessary to change 1% of the vocabulary of the language; for us Brazilians, only 0.5%. That difference is enough to blow up the world over and over again. The Portuguese say they are going to Brazilianize the language, make a total scandal and oppose the spelling agreement.
I also think this deal is a big problem. The best solution would have been for the two forms of writing to be equally valid. That's because, for better or for worse, they end up reflecting linguistic, phonetic issues. For example, in Portugal, when we write certain letters that we consider mute, this in European Portuguese means that the vowel is open. When we write “director”, we pronounce “director”; the Portuguese write “director” and say “director”, if the is open, that c must be there.
Portuguese phonetics is extremely complicated. Those who think they can imitate Portuguese cannot, because their phonetics is much more complicated, has more vowels, more consonant phenomena than Brazilian Portuguese, which is more conservative in this respect. The spelling for the Portuguese still has a lot of pronunciation indications. So when some things disappear with the renovation, it becomes more complicated for them.
Anyway, it is a question that is there to be resolved or not. In Brazil, the agreement had already been officially implemented in 2010, but now the senators — who have nothing to do, because this country has no problems (ironic) — decided to postpone it, ask for a postponement so that it takes effect. Here come some idiots who really want to reformulate the language, to put everything with an “x”, with two “s”, with a “z”, with a series of questions that have nothing to do, without any theoretical foundation to support them. There is the problem. We are writing many articles and dissertations about this, because it will pay off.
“Normative grammar? Zero importance”
But is Portugal ceding more and Brazil ceding less in this agreement?
I meant that, under the new spelling rules, only half a percent of the words written in Brazilian Portuguese will change; in Portugal, it will be 1%. That's the difference.
For the Portuguese, the phonetic difference is considerable. Isn't it easier for Brazilians to make concessions?
It's not about making concessions. Given the words that already exist and are written in the language, there are very few changes, if we apply the agreement. We who work with publishers, for example, when we have to re-release a book that was released before the deal, we have to move the text to the new deal. Remove the accent from “idea”, remove the umlaut. It's so little that the rules of the new agreement fit on one page, apart from the hyphenation about the hyphen — because it's a joke, legislating about the hyphen is nothing to do, let us write it as we like: with a hyphen, no hyphen; one word, two words. What nonsense! But that's not unique to our spelling agreement. I recently translated a book by Florian Coulmas, a very famous German sociolinguist, called “Escrita e Sociedade”, released by Parabola at the end of last year. The book has a chapter just on spelling reforms. He deals with German, French and English, but it seems he's talking about Brazil, because it's the same thing. In Germany, they decided to make a tiny, tiny spelling overhaul. That was enough for the newspapers to be filled with letters from readers, associations in defense of the German language were created.
The language issue is part of our identity; writing too, as it is a long, painful learning process, it takes a long time to master it. So with any kind of change, people feel hurt inwardly. “Oh, let's take the umlaut out of linguistics”—I myself think it's awful to write linguistics without an umlaut. I was used to it, I think it's so cute (laughs). And for those of us who teach, there is something that needs to be very clear: what matters is the educational policy of a country, the writing system is of little interest. For example, there is no more chaotic spelling in the universe than that of the English language; however, countries that have English as their official mother tongue have an illiteracy rate of 0.000001%. If you get to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, you won't see illiterates. And the language that is written is that crazy thing. Same thing in French.
Spanish, whose writing and speech is very close, is almost ideal. In Cuba, 100% of people are literate in Spanish; in Guatemala, 40% are illiterate. Similar sized population and the same language. What's the difference? Educational politics. So, whether we're going to write with or without an accent, whether it's “director” or “director”, that doesn't matter. It's not that the new spelling will be easier, this has nothing to do with ease: learning to write is about teacher education and educational policy. That's why in China, which has 1.5 billion people, whose language is written in that absolutely crazy way, where you have to know little pictures — it must take eternity to learn them — 99% of the population is literate. Ideographic writing is extremely complex and yet people there know how to read and write. Because? Real educational policy. While politics in Brazil is an ornament, while the government's motto is “Educating homeland” — “Homeland” is a word that gives me the creeps, because it reminds me of dictatorship, and “education” is also on everyone's lips, but at the time to invest, no one invests — as long as that is the case, it doesn't work. So, it doesn't matter if you write like this or like that, if you're going to write everything with x because it's easier… nonsense. In French, a circumflex is placed to say that in the 12th century there was an s after the letter. “Île” [“island” in French] has a useless accent and everyone there knows how to read and write well.
This issue of the use of language and the power that is demonstrated by the use of the cultured norm in relation to others, we see this being used even in a directly political way. For example, what is said about former president Lula. A classic thing is the “menas”, which is attributed to him. I don't even know if he's like that yet, but because he came from a humble family and spoke one day, at the beginning of his career, he is credited with poorly spoken Portuguese. And Lula also uses this attribute to say himself closer to the people. It is an action and a reaction, perhaps, in relation to the same use. What direction will we take from what happens until today we have this cultured dominance, including the Portuguese from Goiás, which we speak, and the norms to which we are linked or distanced?
First, I want to make a declaration of love, because Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the man of my life. I consider myself privileged to live at the same time as him. Secondly, this question of the language used as power is very curious. At the time Lula was first elected, even before taking office, several journalists — and I was going to say “reactionary journalists”, but this is almost redundant in Brazil — started saying that in schools children would have to learn to speak like President Lula, without rules of agreement, etc. The funniest thing was that one of the journalists who wrote about it, Dora Kramer, in talking about it also made a mistake from the standpoint of normative grammar. So, I wrote an entire book just about that, called “The Hidden Norm”, from 2003, talking about exactly this manipulation of language issues. The person already at the top of the “food chain” thinks he can talk any way he wants, but the person down there can't. For those at the top, it's “poetic licence”, down here it's really a mistake. Therefore, when there was a dispute between Lula and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ruth Escobar [actress] wrote a text called “The plumber and the sociologist”, showing that Fernando Henrique's mistakes were attributed to this poetic license: “He knows as much as he can err". And with Lula, no: “It's really a mistake”, because he is ignorant, northeastern, worker. This is the famous principle of Getúlio Vargas: “For friends everything, for enemies, the law”.
The attribution of the label of “right” and “wrong” depends a lot on who puts that label on and on what place in the social hierarchy that person is. Much of what is considered wrong is starting to rise through the social hierarchy and being used by highly literate people. For example, if the former dean of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Carlos Lessa, who was president of the BNDES [National Bank for Economic and Social Development], says “facts became possible” it is because this has already become a rule. If in a little while — it's a test I keep doing — we present these constructions to students of Letters and Portuguese teachers, for them it will be 100% correct, as it is already rooted in Portuguese grammar. Therefore, the notion of right and wrong varies over time and also has to do with the processes of change.
What is your understanding of the importance of normative grammar today and how mr. Do you think it should be teaching Portuguese to Brazilians?
Importance of normative grammar: zero. How should teaching be? Well, people who are dedicated to the pedagogical issues of language teaching have been saying more and more that the most important thing is to teach reading and writing. If we manage to teach people to read and write, we will make a cultural revolution in Brazil. How do you teach reading and writing? Here's a big discovery: reading and writing. Wow! (laughs)
What was the traditional teaching based on normative grammar like? First, you have to learn all that confusing, chaotic and contradictory nomenclature, so that one day, who knows, you can start reading and writing. So, the child is barely literate and already in the first year begins to learn about digraph, syllabic separation, oxytone, paroxytone and everything else. For what? For nothing. Therefore, the right thing would be, at least in the first nine years of school, to have reading and writing, reading and writing and —– because it is inevitable —– reflection on the language. It is impossible to work with reading and writing without making the person reflect on what is happening.
It is possible to make the student aware of linguistic phenomena without clogging his head with traditional grammatical theory. If we take the didactic collection of Magda Soares, which is called “Portuguese, a Proposal for Literacy”, which is all based on reading, writing and reflection on the language, there is nothing about grammatical nomenclature there, but everything about grammar. For example, she says: “See, to express contradictory ideas we have the following possibilities: 'although', 'although', 'however' etc.” So, instead of breaking up the language into grammar classes, Magda works with the resources that the language offers. For, if we just start with grammatical class, we cannot show that “although/despite/however” and other constructions serve to express opposition of ideas. We have to start from these issues of language use for the person to become aware and use it. My favorite example is the subordinate clause direct objective noun reduced to infinitive. What is that? It goes like this: “Vânia said she likes cinema more than theater / Vânia says she likes cinema more than theater”. So, for this “what she likes” and this “like”, the simplest thing is to make a person reflect on this transformation, from “she said she likes” to “she said she likes”. To do this, you give examples and show how this syntactic change takes place, without having to memorize that this is a subordinate clause direct objective noun reduced to infinitive. That's the difference. It is impossible to teach reading and writing without teaching grammar; however, there is no need for this grammar in this traditional sense, of cutting up ridiculous phrases out of pocket and making classifications. It is to reflect on the language in use, based on authentic texts and, for that, no normative grammar is useful - mainly because, if it is a normative grammar, it is based on European Portuguese, written in the 19th century. .
The education of the Literature teacher is increasingly restricted. They speak in “hard” linguistics and “soft” linguistics. This seems to undermine this training.
That's why I say that my way out is to open an inn in Pirenópolis (laughs). I wrote a text called “Course of Letters, Why?”, because the thing already starts with the name: “Letters”, in 2015? This idea of Letters is very much from the 19th century, from Belas Letras, when French and classical literature were learned — contemporary literature never. This notion of letters is very outdated. We should talk about “language science”. Another problem is that in Brazil, as there is in neighboring Argentina — which traditionally has a much better education than ours — language teachers should graduate from language teacher training schools. Afterwards, if he wants to, he will study Language at the university. This story of training a professor at the university is what doesn't work, because they are part of the university's package, taking courses
Here in Goiás we usually say that we speak Goiás, a mixture of Minas Gerais with, perhaps, a part of Bahia. We had in Geraldinho Nogueira, an authentic hillbilly who for years advertised for Caixego [Caixa Econômica do Estado de Goiás, bank liquidated in 1990], a representative of that particular “language”. Many people who come from abroad do not understand “Goianes”. Are there in Brazil today regions that are really more distant from the “average” Brazilian Portuguese, shall we put it this way?
There is a sociolinguistic postulate that every language is a bundle of varieties. Therefore, the word language, contrary to what common sense thinks, does not refer to a homogeneous block. Language is a collective noun. It's like a herd, and when you think of a herd, you think of 50,000 cows. With the tongue it's the same thing. Imagine 200 million Brazilian speakers, each of these with their own language — what we call idiolect — each with the language of their family, their community, their region, their city, their state. Therefore, the language varies in all respects; by age, by sex, by gender, by sexual orientation, by ethnicity, by level of education, whether you live in the city or in the countryside, by the person's universe. Of course, within each region and within each region, there are variations. In a city like São Paulo — which is not a city, it's a monster — there are 20 million inhabitants, twice the population of Portugal (and, opening parentheses, that's why I think: why submit to Portugal, if only in São Paulo do we have twice the population there?). More Portuguese is spoken in São Paulo than in the whole of Europe. In each neighborhood of São Paulo, you find peculiarities in speech. On the periphery it is one way, in the traditional neighborhoods of Italian colonization, another way. And it's the same thing in Goiás. There isn't one “Goianês”, there are several. For example, in the region closest to the Triângulo Mineiro, which was once Goiás, there is a cultural, culinary and linguistic similarity between the Triângulo and southern Goiás. In the West of Goiás, closer to Bahia, in Posse, for example, it's already quite different. Well, the language varies according to society and according to the climate, the ecology, what people eat, a big package. It is also very curious that, despite this, there is in Brazil a certain unity in various traits, and in vocabulary as well. It's very funny because, in certain places, people bring me, for example, the dictionary of Alagoas, the dictionary of Sergipe, but in the end only 25% is typical of that region. There are things you can find in Rio Grande do Sul and Amapá. But as people from Rio Grande do Sul never go to Amapá, because it's far away, it's on the other side of the country, they have no idea that they say “snap it” there too, for example. This sort of thing requires research; therefore, we now have a linguistic atlas for Brazil. Since the end of the 19th century, there has been a discipline called dialectology and today it has become geolinguistics, which precisely studies the variation of language according to place. This is done through mapping. When it comes to language, we always have two things in conflict: common sense and well-founded research. By common sense, the people from Goiás speak very differently from the people of Pernambuco. But he doesn't speak, just the occasional prosodic or phonetic feature. In grammar, in lexicon, everything is much more similar than what we think.
Is your vision of having Brazilian Portuguese sufficient from a cultural point of view or is it a purely ideological issue? Is there a cultural basis for making this “independence”?
From a grammatical point of view it is proven that it is. Even if a Portuguese understands a Brazilian, there are differences in interpretation. An example like “my shorts are washing” would never happen in Portugal, it is not part of the grammar of their language. It's a minimal example, I brought only one phenomenon here, which is the question of word order. But there are others, such as verbal conjugation, terms of pronouns, verbal rules. There are several other phenomena that clearly distinguish European from Brazilian Portuguese, although, in appearance, in writing, we think it's the same thing.
In speech, we already know that they are very different languages. They understand us, because we speak in a slower, more leisurely way, we have a syllabic rhythm. European Portuguese is classified as a language with accentuated rhythm: several words are taken and all are added together, as if it were just one. It's another language even from the point of view of phonetic structure, they have vowels that we don't. They have vowels that are not part of Brazilian Portuguese, which is very clear in words like “revolution” or “people”. They say "cheesy", not "at seven o'clock". If we take the speech of a Portuguese speaking spontaneously, something is understood, but others are also lost. Many Brazilians say they understand Spanish better than European Portuguese. So I spoke from the point of view of structure.
Professor Marcos Bagno speaks to editors Marcos Nunes Carreiro and Elder Dias: “Lingua is a collective noun”
Due to the Brazilian economic rise in recent years, there is an interest from many outsiders to learn Brazilian Portuguese. How is it then, for example, in East Timor, where there are Portuguese and Brazilian teachers teaching the Portuguese language at the same time. What kind of Portuguese language is being created outside Brazil?
This is an issue we call language policy. Brazil has not traditionally had a language policy. The diffusion of Brazilian Portuguese abroad occurs almost by inertia, more because of the importance that Brazil has assumed geographically, geopolitically and economically. Portugal, on the contrary, has a linguistic policy, it has the Instituto Camões, with more than a thousand professors spread all over the world, while Brazil has 40 readers. A difference is created there.
In Mexico, they are more interested in Brazilian Portuguese, but there is more presence of Portuguese teachers than Brazilians.
Exactly. The National Autonomous University of Mexico is the place where most people are studying Portuguese in the world. But the Brazilian government hardly invests there, sends only one reader. Meanwhile, Instituto Camões has an entire floor there. They send textbooks, they send teachers, they give scholarships for Mexican students to go to Portugal. Europeans are not wrong, they are absolutely right. We, who had to have a more aggressive linguistic policy, but we have a colonized position, that if Portugal is already there, we don't need to go. We do, yes. We are 90% Portuguese-speaking in the world and we are the 7th largest economy in the world. Portugal, on the contrary, is at rock bottom, with this horrible crisis happening there. We who have to invest and fight for our space, because people really want to take advantage of the opportunities we offer.
Isn't it a shame that Brazil doesn't occupy this linguistic space in Latin America?
It is true. But so does Spanish. In Brazil, there is the Instituto Cervantes, which is from Spain. The grammar is done in Spain, everything comes from there. And we don't have a linguistic institute of big Latin American countries like Peru, Argentina, Colombia or Mexico. These big Spanish-speaking countries could invest more in this direction.
Mr. do you agree that, if Machado de Assis had been born in a country whose language had greater importance, surely he would be on another world plane?
If it had been Spanish, it would certainly have been much more widespread. When foreigners discover Machado de Assis, they don't believe it. They say it's not possible to be that fantastic. He is a unique writer.
Is Portuguese in Europe considered a second-level language, below English, French, German and Spanish?
Portuguese in the European Community is really a secondary language. Portugal has the same population as Hungary. So, Hungarian and Portuguese have the same status as Greek. They are the official languages of the community, but English, French and German are really in charge — English even more so.
There are political positions on this in Europe. Catalonia, for example, adopts a strong speech in terms of its language. Brazilian journalists who go to Barcelona to cover football from there are practically forced to learn Catalan. Why doesn't it “stick” in Brazil?
It's a question of the colonized. Even colonized countries like the United States have a very different position on language. They created, shortly after their independence, the expression “American English”, and created a dictionary with the linguistic habits there, which already existed. This, in Brazil, has not happened so far. When you talk in Brazilian Portuguese people react, they call it “asshole nationalism”. These are the differences of historical formation: there, they took up arms and put the English on the run. Not here, it was the Prince Regent himself who had a hysterical fit and declared independence. The population has never had an active participation in the great moments of our history. The release of slaves was decreed from the top down; likewise, the proclamation of the Republic and independence, too. This continued until the end of the military dictatorship, everything worked out from the top down. That's why there's this whole revolt when a government tries to make a centre-left administration. Our slave elite don’t support this idea.
Leaves SAISI perplexed!
Saisi
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