Ponto de encontro? um estudo sobre a norma em um mecanismo de política linguística para a difusão do “português global”

Abstract

Ponto de encontro: Portuguese as a world language is a Portuguese textbook published in United States of America for English speakers with two editions, the first in 2007 and the second in 2013. As the name suggests, this book intends to teach a Portuguese considered as “world”. That being said, we tried to investigate the linguistic ideologies built from the selected norms to compose the “world Portuguese”. For that we elaborated specific objectives: analyze the regular and normative norms of the Portuguese selected to compose the “world Portuguese” on the textbook; and characterize the textbook ideologies about “world Portuguese”. We have adopted a larger view of linguistic politic which includes the analyze of linguistic politics mechanisms (SHOHAMY, 2006). We also adopted the notion of linguistic norm (REY, 2001; ALEÓNG, 2001) and related this concept to the language teaching (FARACO; ZILLES, 2017), as well as we adopted the notion of pluricentric language (CLYNE, 1992). We used Nova gramática do português brasileiro, by Castilho (2010) as well, to analyze the allusions to Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Gramática da língua portuguesa, by Mateus et al. (2003), to analyze the allusions to European Portuguese (EP). In addition, we used Michaelis Moderno Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, from BP and InfopédiaI from EP. Methodologically it is about a qualitative-interpretivist research (LIN, 2015) with documental feature.We sectioned the analysis in pre-textual dimensions: i) title; and ii) preface; and post-textual dimensions: i) syntax; ii) lexicon; and iii) pragmatic. The conclusions point to the conception that “world Portuguese” is a point of meeting of the Portuguese variations, which reveals the ideology of anonymity. However, that ideology is contradicted when the authors show that “world Portuguese” is the integration of the variants of Portuguese spoken both in Brazil and in Portugal. The linguistic politic mechanism of “world Portuguese” considers the Portuguese variations spoken both in Brazil and in Portugal approaching, sometimes, other nations norms which have that language as official. We observed that the authors bring English language knowledges from the apprentice to teach Portuguese. That is maken in all Ponto de Encontro, since the book “translates” to English every time it brings examples in Portuguese, as well as presents explanations about Portuguese in English. Thus, learning “world Portuguese” implies knowing the English Language. From this research, we stand out the need of production of didactical content to diffusion of Portuguese that tries to represent the other linguistic norms of the nations that have that Language as official, not only Brazil’s and Portugal’s.