Alencar e a formação do pensamento crítico sobre o português do Brasil

Abstract

This article aims to study, within the linguistic historiography, the metalanguage of José de Alencar produced in the period of 1865 and 1870. Despite the fact that Alencar’s speech is still the founding speech of criticism of the Brazilian Portuguese variety, the text reveals that his linguistic thought was unclear and his objective, beyond fighting for the “Brazilian language” autonomy and independency in opposition to the European variety, was to justify and defend his own literary language.