"How and when do we start speaking Portuguese?" The history of linguistic displacement in the Amazon

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Bárbara Heliodora Lemos de Pinheiro
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Costa Neto, José de Rezende
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista da ABRALIN (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revista.abralin.org/index.php/abralin/article/view/1567
• topic: Línguas indígenas; Língua Geral Amazônica; História Social da Linguagem; Indigenous languages; Língua Geral Amazônica; Social History of Language

José Ribamar Bessa Freire visits indigenous languages that have already been lost, through the history of the Língua Geral Amazônica (LGA), from the documentary testimony of historical collections. Electing the theoretical field of the Social History of Language, Bessa Freire investigates the external aspects that promoted the hegemony of the Portuguese language and the decline of hundreds of indigenous languages. Of the 1,300 languages spoken in Brazil before the arrival of Europeans, there are 274 self-declared languages listed by IBGE in 2010, but if submitted to linguistic criteria, there would remain less than 180 languages. The pandemic situation provided by Covid-19 sounds the alarm, as indigenous people have lost their lives, especially the elders with invaluable knowledge.