Official policies and planning for the maintenance of the colonial linguistic ideology of deficit

Abstract

Brazilian Portuguese is a linguistic construction in the/of the diversity in interaction, like any language, except those whose peoples are still found in isolation. Despite that, the studies about policies of linguistic contact employ as an analysis tool, principally, the interferences between the languages, in general, deficit pointers. One of those tools is the ideological notion of interlanguage, the basis of the understanding of what are creole languages, for example. As a pressuposition, the interlanguage has been employed in the teaching of languages in situation of asymmetric contact between languages, since the colonization of Brazil. With this discussion, we propose a critical reflection on the impacts of the theoretical conception of interlanguage in the linguistic analysis of the expressed written practices in Portuguese by deaf people in the maintenance of the colonial ideology of deficit, by force of the official homogenizing monolingual policies and linguistic planning. In relation to the process of acquisition/learning of written Portuguese by the deaf person, the emerging language, in this text called interportuguese of the deaf person, is considered deficitary, once the interference of Libras in Portuguese distances the emerging interlinguistic system from the language model determined for everyone. Ideologically, the conception of interportuguese sustains the coloniality of language through the conception of “mistakes”, discursively softened with euphemisms like “omission”, “inadequacy”, “failure”, “deviations,” “trades”, etc., maintained in the teaching practices, generating epistemic violences. From the perspective of Decolonial Sociolinguistics, we consider urgent the need to problematize linguistic conceptions that sustain epistemic violences through teaching, especially in contexts of languages and peoples historically subalternized.