Social history, contact and the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese as L2

Abstract

This article re-interprets results of contrastive analyses of European and Brazilian theatre plays written across the 19th and the 20th centuries taking into account information about almost four centuries of colonization in Brazil, when the presence of slaved Africans and their descendants, always outnumbering the Portuguese, and the contact among them was intense. As a consequence of the activities in the sugar mills, in the mines of gold and diamonds, and in the coffee farming, among others, there was great mobility from the north-east to the south-east and to the center of the country. This would contribute to miscigenation and the propagation of the Portuguese acquired by the large contingent, constituted mostly by illiterate speakers, not only slaves and Portuguese workers but landlords and their families as well. Literate people constituted a tiny part of the population, who studied in Coimbra or had accesss to a few schools available to a privileged elite. Besides the drift of Old Portuguese, a consequence of such contact was the emergence of a variety of Portuguese with significant African contribution, many times ignored, because the writing practiced in Brazil by few would not give space to the grammar acquired here as L2. The slow process of access to school, from the turn of the 19th century on, following the European model, still present in school books and grammars, would give rise to a diglossy between speech and writing in Brazil. Empirical evidence of these two grammars are shown in the similarity between the Portuguese and the Brazilian writing attested in the 1800s and almost half of the 1900s, when finally Brazilian grammar begins to show its face. Only since the development of linguistic investigations of recorded speech from the 1970s on could we confirm that the same features characteristic of urban Brazilian syntax, regardless of the level of formal education, are the same attested in the plays of the last quarter of the 20th century.