BEYOND LINGUISTIC PREJUDICE: THE SILENCING ATTEMPT OF AFRICANITY’S INFLUENCES TOWARDS VARIETIES OF RESISTANCE

Abstract

Considering all the agendas discussed nowadays, it is possible to notice that little attention has been paid to some aspects related to language, mainly when these aspects are attached to discriminatory attitudes towards certain ways of speaking and towards those cultures that have always been a target of prejudice and silencing. Thus, in the present work, we aim to understand what is behind the marginalization towards dialects with African influences, such as the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and some varieties of the nonstandard Portuguese spoken in Brazil that is very often viewed negatively. Furthermore, we also seek to reflect on the pedagogical implications of this debate in the Brazilian English teaching setting. To do so, it was used a qualitative and bibliographic research in order to learn about the features, the history, and the issues concerning these varieties of resistance, which are discussed in light of the concepts of linguistic attitudes, linguistic prejudice, and linguistic racism. To construct our theoretical framework and our analysis for this research we used as our references the works of Labov (1972), Pullum (1999) Rickford and Rickford (2000), Bagno (2015), Peterson (2019), among others. From the analysis, we could conclude that the discrimination and prejudice towards some varieties transcend the linguistic plane and it is attached to sociocultural, political, and ideological factors.