Indigenous language revitalization through digitalized colonial documents: a comment on Dzubukuá language revival by Tuxá people from Bahia, Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Durazzo, Leandro
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por; eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/diffractions.2022.10224

Brazil, due to its hegemonically Portuguese colonization, has had Portuguese as its official language since the 18th century, despite the existence of hundreds of indigenous languages. Given this, indigenous communities historically forced to assume Portuguese as their first language today are trying to revitalize their ancestral languages. One of their strategies is the use of bilingual colonial texts that keep some record of ancient indigenous languages. Thanks to digitization, these bilingual documents, previously restricted to just a few libraries around the world, can now be consulted by anyone with access to digital equipment and the internet. From a ethnological, cosmopolitical, transformational and semiotic perspective, I discuss how an 18th-century bilingual Capuchin catechism written in Portuguese and Dzubukuá is playing a role in the process of revitalizing this language by the Tuxá people of northern Bahia.