Portuguese as a glocal language: socio-historic and linguistic aspects of its conformity

Abstract

If it is assumed that there is not an original linguistic genesis, but continuous, and consequently historical constitution processes, all mixed by the social, economic, and political contingencies which, by any chance, may interact with one another, it is plausible to say that the Portuguese language could not have remained untouched by the plural effects which socio-history is used to imprinting on all natural tongues. At the start of its history, departing from the effective implementation of the overseas exploratory enterprise, in the XV century, and mainly, during the XVI century, a new feature began to be delineated through which it would be possible in the history of the present to recognize the old language registered by Camões in 1572: a language of a transcultural, transnational, and so to speak, glocal face, such as the one “which has perpetual youth in its face”, with the licence to paraphrase the poet. Spoken in different spaces, in different continents of the terrestrial globe, Portuguese, in the various facets in which its “linguistic face” and its “youth” acquired, paradoxically, identifying itself, has been turned into a multicultural and multispatial vehicle of expression, being spoken in the diverse colonization scenarios where it operated, becoming today a vehicle at both local and global levels, that is, intra, trans and internationally, embracing pluralities and mediating distinctive levels of cultural and identitarian representations, no matter which new formats it has acquired. Taking into consideration such premises, this paper aims at presenting a reflection about the linguistic and socio-historical aspects which have contributed for Portuguese to be able to recognize itself, in the current times, as what has been conventionally called a glocal language in the sense of glocalization coined by Robertson (1995), whose conceptual bases have been referred to above. It is also intended especially to discuss the historical trajectory of the constitution of the Brazilian Portuguese variety, the linguistic and cultural contacts, the processes of change verified, relating them to those occurred in other national spaces in which Portuguese has remained one and still does so, no matter its diversity, referring, whenever possible, to the very complex discussion of ideas of unity, diversity, and unity in diversity. The work will above all draw on theoretical bases of Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, and pluridimensional Dialectology, aiming at establishing a dialogue with other interdisciplinary works founded on theoretical perspectives that operate over the processes of post, de-colonisation and globalization. With such a strategy, it is expected to contribute to the reversion of voices in the linguistic and cultural history of modern Ontology