Five hundred years of Brazil’s social-linguistic history: a retrospective

Abstract

In this article, we traced the five hundred years of Brazil’s social-linguistic history, commenting and criticizing moments that we considered crucial along the way. Hence, we began in the 16^th century, with the arrival of the Portuguese colonizers, dealing with aspects such as the adoption of Tupinambá as the language for the initial contact, together with its consequences. Later in the same century, we approached the arrival of Africans and the linguistic consequences that this important demographic fact would bring to the linguistic contact scene in the following centuries. Finally, we dealt with the Post-Independence Brazilian linguistic situation, emphasizing the remaining indigenous languages, the European and Asiatic immigration languages, which arrived during the 19^th century, and the current frame of the Portuguese language in Brazil.